News

HCC INSPIRE science faculty to crowdsource the creation of a searchable open educational resource database

Jan 21, 2015

Imagine this: you are teaching (or taking) CHEM 1411, and you’d like to find a high-quality Open Educational Resource (OER) that will explain ionic bonding accurately, engagingly, in simple terms, and in 5 minutes or less. Oh, and it would be great if you could view it on your Android phone and if it would also include some practice quiz questions. Weeding through all the junk on the internet for such a resource would take hours on your own. Alternatively, you might find yourself going through other people’s outdated links lists, looking for buried treasure. There has got to be a better way.

Enter the larger HCC INSPIRE community and Angela Secrest, Director of Library Services. To make life easier for both faculty and students, HCC faculty will be able to submit vetted OERs into a Survey Monkey website. From there, the professor-approved OER information will be entered into a database to be posted on LibGuides in the HCC online library. Database entries will be searchable by OER title, Applicable HCC course, keywords, applicable textbook chapter topic, student level (beginner, intermediate, advanced), type of resource (animation, video, game, tutorial, etc.), viewing platform, and time commitment. Separate star rating systems by faculty and student users will further guide the selection of OER search results.

Many hands make light work, and we will need all hands on deck to build a robust OER database for each of our courses. HCC INSPIRE staff has already compiled a list of 109 potentially useful OERs that are ready for review by volunteer biology, physics, and chemistry faculty (you). Interested faculty please contact Lyssa Wilson at melissa.wilson3@hccs.edu for three reviewable OERs at a time. Alternatively, faculty may go directly to the Survey Monkey website to submit their own favorites for inclusion in the database:  (Beware you will have to close the browser in between reviews for multiple entries. Also, reviewing some entries may require a download, in which case you might want to review on a home computer). Either way, let’s get to work.