Chris Craig from the MSU College of Education and Tracy Stout from the MSU Libraries made an excellent presentation yesterday about Open Educational Resources (OER) at the annual MSU Showcase on Teaching and Learning. Approximately 20 people attended.

Craig and Stout addressed some of the basic questions related to the OER movement, such as definitions and measures of the quality of educational resources, accessibility, and affordability. 

They emphasized that the OER movement is not asking classroom instructors to change their instructional goals. OER is a university, local, and national movement to rethink the entire educational resources space while reducing costs and increasing quality and accessibility. 

The American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) Institute on OER is a year-long effort at MSU to raise awareness and use of OER materials at MSU. The local team consists of five faculty members and several bookstore employees. 

Institute events are being planned for December 2023 and June 2024. One output of this process will be a detailed action plan. Texas, always a major player in the textbook market, already has a statewide OER initiative. 

One recommendation from this session was that the MSU Libraries create an archive of locally-created OER digital objects, perhaps in BearWorks, MSU’s institutional repository.

An online subject guide about OER is available at https://guides.library.missouristate.edu/OER.