Monroe Community College

Judy Dean

December 18, 2018

CC0

As I understand it, the MCC Math Department has a completed Calculus III OER, a Calculus II OER in the making, a Calculus I OER in use, with continued development. There is a PreCalculus OER which has been simply use of a PDF of the Open Stax Pre-Calculus text. The Calculus OERs are electronic versions of the Open Stax texts, remixed and with some additions. Possible in development items are: an electronic Pre-Calculus (Open Stax) and Math for Elementary Education Teachers (compiled resources).

My piece is the Calculus I OER course. I used this last semester and will use it next semester. I want to do a lot more with this course. This content needs more customization and does not need to be built from scratch. However a few topics really need to be built up. I skimmed over the start due to time pressure. I want to spend more time on the topics at the end that need some additional exercises, and possibly text to align better with our course objectives.

• I have a set of questions I hope to answer with one of our librarians who I plan to meet with and hopefully also from other OER interested members of our department.
• Copyright questions
• Options of embedding my text into Blackboard
• Print Options (and I’d like to get a printed copy for myself when I feel it is somewhat complete – or should I just get one soon, and work from there?)
• A pedagogic question: I could cut out some of the exercises that I do not use to make my text very customized or is it better to leave them all since other teachers may want to use them, or students may want to look at them? Perhaps I could put the “extra exercises” that I am not using at all at the end of the section.

A longer view of what I need to do to customize and integrate OER into my learning and teaching is not well-formed in my mind. However, I will continue to be open to workshops on OER and collaborating with (learning from) my colleague who is several leaps ahead of me. Immediately on my plate is to improve my Calculus I course and share my OER experience with my not yet initiated colleagues.