Why Should You be Using Open Educational Resources (OER)?

Have you checked out the price of textbooks lately? I remember being shocked at spending over $400 on textbooks for four classes my first semester of college and that was in the early 2000s. Now, depending on their major students would be lucky to pay only that much. Some say that renting, buying used, or skipping textbooks altogether is the way to go. But what if there was another option? 

Open Educational Resources (OER) has been a growing trend of late. You may have heard the term in passing, but what are OER exactly? George Mason University, one of the leading organizations in "the creation, curation, and use of Open Educational Resources (OER)" defines them as "freely-accessible teaching, educational, and research materials that either exist in the public domain or are available to users via an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing."

While freely-accessible sounds great, there are usually a lot of questions about the quality of these materials. There are several excellent repositories of these types of resources including OER Commons and George Mason University's Mason OER Metafinder (MOM) that searches through over twenty different OER sources to find resources that match your search. By starting with resources from reputable repositories, individual institutions, programs, and instructors can then choose a quality textbook in much the same way they choose a new "traditional" textbook--by reading and evaluating the options available. 

Instructors can also create their own OER textbooks by attending a March 6th workshop at the Earl Center. More information about this workshop can be found by perusing the workshop informational flier. Emporia State University also provides grants to help aid in this process. Recipients of this grant can take part in workshops provided by the Learning Technologies department where they can learn about Creative Commons licensing, how to use Pressbooks to assemble their own OER textbook, or how to find the best already-existing resources to supplement their courses. 

To sign up for the workshop or learn more about the OER grants, contact Learning Technologies! 

Canvas Automatic Grade Sync with Banner

There's a new Canvas tool that will help make your grading process that much easier. Canvas Automatic Grade Sync with Banner lets instructors push grades from Canvas directly into Banner, rather than entering each grade into Banner individually. 

To use this new feature, you'll first need to choose a Grade Scheme in Canvas. Your department may have a common grading scheme that you can use or you can create your own. Once you've selected a Grade Scheme and completed your grading, you're ready to sync the grades to Banner (the Student Information System). 

When grades are synced, Canvas will immediately initiate the grade transfer but it may take a few minutes before grades appear in Banner. Once the sync has successfully completed, you will see an on-screen confirmation and receive an email confirmation. This process should only take a few minutes. Once you receive confirmation, make sure to verify students received the correct grade and check for any sync errors (these will be found in your email receipt).

Canvas Automatic Grade Sync is a great tool but it's not completely hands-off. If you have a student who withdrew from your course, earned an F, or is receiving an Incomplete, you must manually enter these grades into Banner.

For step-by-step instructions, check out this tutorial on Grade Sync from Learning Technologies.