Facilitating Faculty Collaboration Through the Creation of an Online OER Collection

Abstract

Since the summer of 2016, a group of English 302 instructors have been working to create a collection of creative commons licensed, classroom-tested, course goal-aligned, peer-reviewed assignments for use in the one course that nearly every Mason student takes: English 302.  Our goal is to strengthen and to some extent regularize an existing culture of collaboration among the 60+-member English 302 instructor community.  The initial collection, supported by grants from GMU 4-VA and the CHSS Term Faculty Development Fund, went live on a Blackboard organization site in Fall 2016, and has seen steady use.  During a second phase of work in Spring and Summer 2018, we are designing a public-facing collection site built on Mason publishingâs iteration of the Online Journals System (OJS), transitioning the existing collection to that site, and adding additional items developed in 2016-1017 Composition Program learning communities.  We hope to continue building the collection on the new site using a submission and review process similar to that of an academic journal. The poster presents the new collection (some items in which may be useful to instructors in other disciplines) and describes our process (including challenges encountered and addresses) which could be adapted for OER collections in other disciplines.