OER And Faculty Development

We are somewhat of a different breed of Carrier pigeon here at Clover Park Technical College where I work as Instructional Designer. One example might be my title in relation to the hats I actually wear. There's the Instructional Design hat, which I never have enough time for. The Angel Admin hat which is two sizes too large, but I hope to someday grow into. The Angel support hat which seems to be some sort of micro black hole that keeps sucking time from my other hats, and my faculty development hat which is a very challenging bit of avant garde noggin apparel. It is this last hat that I will talk about today.

At CPTC, professional development is a hard act to sell tickets for, and for a variety of reasons that are unimportant here. After a few quarters of offering f2f workshops at a variety of obsene times and unreachable locations with minimal attendance, we next experimented with facilitated elearning-based workshops. The results were also rather dismal. We then switched to creating a series of self-directed, self-paced online workshops primarily created using Softchalk and housing them in very stripped down Angel shells with but two tabs and a automated Certificate of Completion. In this form, the workshops are open to enrollment 24/7/365 and the faculty can complete them at their leisure (Later, Dude! Much later!). This approach appears to be very promising in its first quarter of availability.

Now most of you may be wondering just what the heck this has to do with OER? I was myself wondering the same thing somewhere in the middle of that very long-winded preamble.

What this has to do with OER is that the content for these workshops are open-access, the Softchalk lessons are licensed with CC BY and so are the Angel workshops. These offerings, of undoubtedly questionable value, are available for anyone to use in any way they want (if any use could ever be found for such tripe), any time they like. The catalog currently includes:

• Curriculum Theory, Development & Evaluation



• Lesson Planning



• Understanding and Creating Learning Objectives



• Classroom Assessment



• Online Accessibility



• Rubrics



• Student Veterans Adjustment to College

By Summer Quarter we will also be offering an Advanced Angel Assessments workshop.

Some of these are now available in a sharable DropBox folder, the rest to be added soon. I will also be dumping them into Connexions when I somehow find the time. So if anyone is interested, feel free to contact me at your convenience.

Kelley