Wheaton College and panOpen Partner to Deliver Open Educational Resources Campus-wide
Partnership provides Wheaton with features critical for successful OER implementation, including peer-reviewed OER libraries, a framework for cross-institutional collaboration, tools to adapt content and support student learning, LMS integration, and models for financial sustainability.
NEW YORK, N.Y. and NORTON, Mass., Sept. 11, 2018 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Wheaton College and panOpen, a learning platform that supports institutional use of Open Educational Resources (OER), announced a partnership today to provide Wheaton faculty and students with the tools and support to use OER in the classroom successfully.
OER are now broadly in use in colleges and universities across the country. According to an annual survey at Babson College, OER accounts for more than 16% of introductory courses and about 10% of all higher education course materials, reducing costs to students and improving content flexibility and faculty freedom.
While OER use continues to increase rapidly, there is a growing recognition that tools and features specific to open content are needed to address critical areas, such as OER discovery, adaptation, cross-institutional collaboration, and financial sustainability. There is also a need to make available for OER the kinds of technology that commercially produced content typically enjoys, such as self-grading assessments, analytics, LMS integration, and student study and communication tools.
"Wheaton College is a big proponent of OER in the classroom, to reduce costs, to help ensure that students have course materials on the first day of class, and to improve faculty choice and control over educational materials," noted Lauren Slingluff, Associate Dean, Library Services, Wheaton College. "With panOpen, we're able to combine the benefits of OER with first-rate digital learning tools that were specifically designed to work with open content. It's a partnership that's a triple win for the college--students, faculty, and staff--and we're thrilled to be a part of it."
Wheaton will now have its own OER collections, initially curated by panOpen and faculty elsewhere in its network, and organized by department and discipline. Faculty will have access to a broad range of tools for remixing, editing, and collaborating around OER with colleagues at Wheaton and beyond, and they will have dozens of questions types for the assessments that are embedded in the content. Students will enjoy low cost and perpetual access to all of the content for their OER-based courses, and realize the benefits of a truly interactive and immersive learning experience.
"We are now seeing the next phase of OER," commented panOpen founder and CEO Brian Jacobs, "in which open content moves from centralized production, like commercial publishers, to a truly distributed framework that realizes the true power of the open model. Now institutions and faculty participants can collaborate cross institutionally, forming communities around content that would be unthinkable with commercially copyrighted and locked down materials. Wheaton College is at the forefront of this exciting development and we are delighted to support them."
About Wheaton College, MA:
Wheaton College is a private, liberal arts college in Norton, Mass., that emphasizes the combination of rigorous academic study with internships and other experiential learning opportunities for every student. Wheaton students enjoy exceptional outcomes after graduation; 98 percent find success in gaining employment, pursuing graduate or professional studies or earning a post-graduation fellowship within six months of graduation. The Princeton Review named Wheaton to its list of "Colleges That Pay You Back." The college also has been named a top 50 Liberal Arts College by Times Higher Education and the Wall Street Journal for two consecutive years.
About panOpen
Designed by educators, panOpen is a learning platform that realizes the promise of OER by providing all of the components required for its widespread use. panOpen offers complete peer-reviewed content, customization tools, assessments, analytics, LMS integration, and a means of financially sustaining campus-based OER efforts. With panOpen, faculty adopt enhanced interactive OER as they would a commercial textbook, with confidence in the quality and reliability of the content. panOpen preserves the virtues of OER—radically reducing textbook costs and freeing faculty from the constraints of commercial copyright—while delivering the quality, features, and ease-of-use faculty expect from their learning materials. The result has enormous implications for pedagogical practices, changing the relationships of instructors and students to their educational content.
SOURCE panOpen
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