Texas Learn OER is a set of openly licensed, self-paced modules for faculty, staff, and administrators adapted from ACC Learn OER by Carrie Gits at Austin Community College for the Digital Higher Education Consortium of Texas (DigiTex). (Gits created ACC Learn OER in 2018 for her capstone project for the SPARC Open Education Leadership Program.) Released in August 2020, Texas Learn OER serves primarily as an introduction to OER, including such topics as understanding, licensing, finding and evaluating, and adapting and sharing OER, and there is an opportunity to earn a certificate of completion. The modules have been peer-reviewed by both state and national OER experts and are regularly updated, and continuous improvement plans include annual releases of more significant revisions to ensure the content is relevant and up-to-date.
Because it is licensed CC BY, Texas Learn OER can be adapted for any local context; for example, shortly after it was launched, Rice University in Houston remixed it to create “Owls Learn OER.” We are even prouder that the impact of the training, in less than a year, has extended beyond Texas’ borders. These adaptations have included (but are not limited to) the “OER Starter Kit for Faculty” at Northern Virginia Community College, “Open Educational Resources: Basics and Beyond” by the Online Consortium of Oklahoma, and a soon-to-be released remix from the Michigan Academic Library Association’s OER Interest Group.
We at DigiTex, along with Gits, believe that Texas Learn OER and its adaptations are exemplary examples of Open Education collaboration and community, as well as of how the CC BY license benefits the field and higher education in general.
