Morgan State University Partners With panOpen to Deliver Next Generation Open Educational Resources

NEW YORK, June 11, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Morgan State University and panOpen, a learning platform that supports institutional use of Open Educational Resources (OER), announced a partnership today that will allow faculty across the university to easily and quickly adopt open content that is peer-reviewed, embedded with interactive ancillaries, and fully supported. Through this partnership, faculty will also have the ability to collaborate cross-institutionally by subject area, in order to benefit from the work of their colleagues at other institutions. To facilitate rapid OER adoption, MSU Provost Anna McPhatter is offering faculty grants to support summer implementation, with the first student use of the platform scheduled for the fall term. This initiative has the full backing of Morgan State University President, David Wilson, demonstrating its importance to the University as a whole.

"By drawing on the disciplinary expertise here at Morgan and elsewhere, and powerful learning technologies specifically designed to support OER collaboration, we seek to lower costs, improve outcomes for our students, and better prepare them for their post-graduate professional lives," noted Dr. Solomon Alao, MSU's, Assistant Vice President of Assessment and Operations, "We are therefore excited to work with panOpen to help achieve these goals and engage our entire academic community in its innovative OER-based learning platform."

MSU faculty have begun training on the platform and will continue through the summer, including through panOpen-led educational workshops, preparing courses for use in the fall term. As with all usage of the platform, MSU's faculty contributions to the platform will carry a Creative Commons license. The default CC license in panOpen is CC-BY, the most open and flexible license available.

"The Morgan State community includes a large percentage of first-generation students who benefit most from lower cost course materials that are also interactive and immersive learning experiences," commented Dr. Brian Jacobs, panOpen's Founder and CEO, "MSU's embrace of OER-based solutions to support their students is part of a longstanding history of leadership and dedication to improving student success. We are thrilled and honored to work with MSU to advance this."

Along with providing the infrastructure necessary for faculty course collaboration, students will see significant benefits through the partnership. MSU students will benefit from studying experiences that allow them to read and take quizzes on any device, communicate with faculty and fellow students through the application and automatically build their own study guides as they move through the materials. This enables students to have an accessible, optimized, and achievable learning experience setting them up for success with high-quality content and effective courseware.

About MSU
Morgan State University, founded in 1867, is a Carnegie-classified doctoral research institution providing instruction to a multiethnic, multiracial, multinational student body and offering more than 100 academic programs leading to degrees from the baccalaureate to the doctorate. As Maryland's Preeminent Public Urban Research University, Morgan fulfills its mission to address the needs and challenges of the modern urban environment through intense community-level study and pioneering solutions.

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. To learn more, visit http://www.panopen.com

SOURCE panOpen