View open resources for math used at Scottsdale CC including txtbks, lessons, examples, hwrk. Discuss how similar items can be adapted for your own courses.
In a time when more students are attending college, costs of attending college are rising, and an economy is trying to recover from a recession, as educators we need to look to cost effective resources for our students. For many years we have been bound to publishers for materials, content, and homework assignments and during this time publishers have made a fortune while college students are having money taken from their pockets. In today's age we have the ability to move away from the publishers and use materials that not only will save our students money, but also offer us as educators more flexibility to mold courses to fit our own pedagogical styles.
We have begun making this transition at Scottsdale Community College. We plan to have on display several of the open resources we have began employing. These resources vary from an open text book created by authors from another school, to an online assessment system created by another educator that we have adapted to fit our own courses, to worked out examples created by our own faculty that can be viewed via the internet by all students, to online lessons that accompany the textbooks that students can use all free of charge.
We would like to demonstrate how we have created resources to accompany the open College Algebra text offered by Stitz and Ziegler in order to create a free learning environment for our students that caters to multiple learning styles. This includes online lessons created by SCC faculty using Softchalk Lessonbuilder (www.softchalk.com) that go along with the book that allow students to interact with the lessons online. Also, to help students see how particular problems are solved, LiveScribe (www.livescribe.com) lessons are used so students can have free access anytime anywhere to worked out examples.
In addition to these materials, we have also adapted the Washington Mathematics Assessment and Placement (WAMAP) resources created by David Lippman to fit several of our own courses (and continue to align it with our remaining courses). This resource allows us to give online homework assignments to our students and does not carry the fee that the online homework systems created by publishers do. We have found its functionality to rival, and in some cases exceed that of the publishers so we lose no advantage while we shed the costs to our students.
We see this Open Science Fair as an opportunity for us at SCC to share what we are doing with other educators interested in employing these types of open resources. This presentation will also present us with an opportunity to gain feedback to see how we can improve these resources or combine them with other resources out there at no additional cost to our students.