Initial Publication Date: July 26, 2020

Finding Open Educational Resources for Teaching

Compiled by Gretchen Miller, Wake Technical Community College, and Carol Ormand, SERC, for the 2020 workshop for Early Career Faculty in the Geosciences, with additional resources suggested by Ben Laabs, North Dakota State University

Open Educational Resources (OERs) for college-level geoscience classes are becoming increasingly abundant and have numerous advantages for students and faculty. OERs include open textbooks, open online classes, instructional videos, and a variety of teaching and learning activities. This session discusses the value of OERs in terms of pedagogy, customization, and ease of integration, and provides time to explore how OERs may be used in your own courses. The Science Education Resource Center (SERC) website hosts a vast array of OERs for geoscience teaching and more. The page below provides a brief tour of OERs, as well as a few strategies for searching the SERC collections.

OER textbooks and courseware

LibreTexts has a collection of OER geoscience courses and textbooks
MIT Open Courseware: search the educator portal for teaching materials on Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, including online textbooks
Coursera has course materials -- and online certificate programs -- on Environmental Science and Sustainability

If you are new to online teaching

Many faculty across the US (and the world) made a rapid transition to online teaching earlier this year. SERC put together a set of web resources to support geoscience faculty making that transition:

For introductory geoscience courses

GeoScience Videos is a collection of short instructional videos for introductory geology courses, developed using effective multimedia design principles
Teaching Introductory Geoscience Courses

On teaching a concept or skill across multiple courses

The Math You Need, When You Need It is a set of math tutorials for students in introductory geoscience courses.
The InTeGrate project is all about teaching about sustainability across the curriculum, and includes information on how to teach sustainability as well as modules and courses that you can adopt or adapt for your classroom.
The Spatial Thinking Workbook is a collection of teaching activities designed to strengthen geoscience students' penetrative thinking skills: the ability to visualize spatial relations inside an object.

Of special interest for early career faculty

The early career geoscience faculty website has a set of pages about efficient, effective teaching: how to teach well, without it taking over your life
Designing Effective and Innovative Courses
The On the Cutting Edge project, of which this workshop is a part, has modules on a wide range of geoscience courses and topics

Ideas Compiled During This Session

PBS shorts on earth science topics
LinkedIn Learning
EDDIE modules
Ezsnips
Global Weirding Series (Katherine Hayhoe)
Google Spreadsheet with more ideas

On teaching methods

Expanding Your Teaching Toolkit is a page of resources to make your courses more interactive. If you're not sure where to begin, in terms of incorporating active learning pedagogies into your teaching, start here.
Pedagogy in Action aims to help faculty put into practice in the classroom what we've learned from research on learning. It includes detailed descriptions of the what, why and how of various teaching methods and has a collection of examples of teaching activities using each method. If you're ready to dive in, these pages are for you.