Waching daily Nov 29 2017

Michelle Reed: This is the fourth video in our Textbook Hero Series.

In the first we spoke to students about how they are impacted by the high cost of commercial,

educational, resources.

The next two videos highlighted stories of how educators at UTA have reduced financial

barriers to student success through the adoption of Open Educational Resources.

The cost savings realized through these efforts can have a profound impact on students, but

what I find even more exciting is how rethinking our approach to course resources can also

help us consider opportunities for making our classrooms more active, more engaging,

and more collaborative.

This video demonstrates how copyrighted content made freely available to the university community

does just that.

Bonnie Boardman: My name is Bonnie Boardman, I'm a faculty member in the industrial manufacturing

and systems engineering department.

I'm also the undergraduate advisor, so I'm very interested in how we can design our curriculum

to work the best for our students.

For one of my classes, I teach an introduction to industrial engineering class.

It was costing the students between $90-$100 for the text, and that was again a customized

one.

It was not even bound.

It was, ya know, it had holes punched in it so that they could put it in a notebook.

They couldn't get anything back from it and nobody else could buy a used copy, and I just

thought "that's too much."

I spent this summer looking at Lynda.com, which UTA now offers to faculty and staff

and students.

And I have flipped that programming class using Lynda.com videos.

Michelle: Lynda offers thousands of high-quality video tutorials for a range of expertise levels

covering subjects from designing in AutoCad, and using software for 3D painting, to soft

skills like "Giving and Receiving Feedback" and working effectively in teams.

Dr. Boardman: Students watch videos, I do a discussion board on Blackboard so that they

can ask questions about what they've watched, and then in class I don't lecture at all.

We just work together on programming, and that's completely free to the students.

These are really professionally made videos that come with practice files and all kinds

of things that they can work on outside of class.

It's made my classes much more interactive.

I've always tried to have active classes anyway in the past, but this has given me a way to

interact more.

Programming problems that I used to give as homework I don't give as homework anymore;

now those are done in class where we're there to help them, so I think it's kind of relieved

some of the frustration.

So we can be productively interactive with each other, which I think has helped everybody

a lot.

Michelle: Are you a Textbook Hero?

Or do you know someone who has adopted open or affordable resources?

Share your story for a chance to be featured in our series.