 This week's video is going to talk about how you can integrate Open Educational Resources, or OER, into your teaching. Open Educational Resources provide a great opportunity for saving students money in the classroom, but a blog post from earlier this year talks about the importance of OER in a different way. It reads, When faculty use OER, we aren't just saving students money on textbooks. We are directly impacting that student's ability to enroll in, persist through, and successfully complete a course. But why? Because when you use OER or open textbooks in place of a traditional textbook in your class, every student is able to afford and access that resource from day one. Now here's the big question. How does using that resource change what you do in class? Or put another way, how will the open aspect of OER impact the way you teach? You don't have to change your methods or incorporate the openness of your resources into your assignments or course planning if you really don't want to. However, if you choose to ignore these aspects of your open resources, what's the point of including them in your class? It'll save students money, but there's so much more you can do. Instead, consider challenging yourself. Consider asking yourself, how will I edit these resources or my teaching to accommodate the open resources to my course objectives? The Open Education Consortium has listed seven steps that you can take to integrate open educational resources into your teaching. To keep things simple, I'm going to summarize five of those here. First, articulate expectations, goals, and learning outcomes for your course. Explaining how your resources relate to what you teach and what you expect your class to learn can be useful for you, your students, and if you're creating a resource to release online, it can provide context for future instructors who use your work as well. Second, allow active engagement with your resources. Develop activities where students can evaluate or revise OER in your subject area. Encourage students to seek out material online or engage with websites like Wikipedia where you can update or critique material that has been submitted openly. Teach your students to evaluate their resources and to engage with the material in a new way, not just absorb it as they go along. Third, encourage students to have enjoyable and meaningful experiences with your course. Using open educational resources means that much of your course materials will be available online, and that you can continue to develop the course content over time as well. You might get your students involved in creating resources you can use in future classes, like video summaries of textbook chapters or infographics to explain complicated ideas. The students can get credit for their work and have homework that persists and can be used by instructors after they've completed the class. This can help students to see the impact and importance of their work and encourage them to make sure they understand the material better over time. Fourth, provide opportunities for useful reflection on what users have learned. Allow students to reflect on their experiences with your new resources, to comment on what they liked and didn't, and how it impacted their learning. OER are openly licensed, so if there's something small that just doesn't work for your students, you can edit that out for the next course you teach. And finally, link learning with students' own circumstances. Because OER allow for more freedom both in how and what you present to your class, you have the ability to give the material a more local context. That might mean you bring in information specific to Iowa in an agronomy or agriculture lesson plan, or it might mean that you use language that your students are more familiar with. If you're sharing an open educational resource online, other instructors might translate your work into their language, or provide examples that relate to how they and their students live in their country, state, or even county. You have a lot of options for making an open resource your own, and making it relatable and attractive for your students. Think about that and what that could mean for your teaching. Open educational resources aren't just analogues for the materials you already use in your courses. That is one way you can use them, but ideally they should be dynamic, learner-oriented, based and rooted in your course objectives, and open to change. By reviewing your materials, what you want from them, and what they can do for your class, you can more effectively integrate OER into your classroom. Thanks for watching, and as always, contact your librarian or check out our library guides if you have any questions.