An article by Barton Director of Innovation & Compliance Lee Miller was recently published in Innovation Abstracts magazine by the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development. NISOD is a membership organization committed to promoting and celebrating excellence in teaching, learning, and leadership at community and technical colleges.

Miller’s article, “The Skeletons In Our Closets: Creating New Bones for Open Educational Resources (OER) Development,” focuses on the transition from traditional methods of educational content delivery to a focus on OER, which is a new philosophy focused on the idea that knowledge should be accessible to everyone and cost and availability should not be obstacles. It also focuses on more instructor input in not only content, but curriculum, class design and engaging their students in as many ways as possible.

“I wanted to address the big challenges that instructors were facing with moving to OER and to find a way to break it down and make it easier,” she said. “How do we explain and encourage faculty to start the transition, and how do we make that transition as easy as possible.”

Miller said the transition will take increased training and focus on instruction methods but will ultimately benefit the students and teachers.

“I am very excited this was published,” she said. “However, with this new initiative we still have a lot of work to do. I’m very thankful and appreciate all of the amazing instructors that have stepped forward to start tackling this challenge. We currently have more than 20 faculty who are working on moving their classes to the OER format both online and from different campuses.”

Vice President of Instruction Elaine Simmons said it is important to her that Barton is always on the cutting edge of education and seeking paradigm shifts. 

“We couldn’t be prouder of Lee and we are hopeful others will be published in the future,” she said.