Posted on by James Paradiso

Nicole Lapeyrouse [Champion of Open – Chemistry]

Nicole Lapeyrouse – Department of Chemistry

Describe your open educational resources and/or practices:

Being in academia and having talked with students, I know they do not always buy the textbooks and instead use outside resources. With this in mind, I have adopted an OER textbook for both my geology (GLY1030) and chemistry (CHM2045) courses. I give students the option for my Chemistry Fundamentals course of either purchasing the required text or using the OER textbook that follows the same format. In addition, I have crafted my own educational resources in the form of novel multimedia to help better relate to students and to offer them free resources that I have curated. I did this because most publisher content comes with prerecorded videos and worked out problems and I wanted students to have those resources as well.

Describe the impact open educational resources and/or practices has had on your teaching and/or students’ learning: 

Using an OER or other low-cost resources has shown to make learning more affordable and accessible to students. As an educator, I am always trying to help my students in any way possible. An added benefit to using an OER is that you can customize the content to better fit your course. This has given me the option to explore, add, and create different resources that is specific to the way that I teach. Most important of all, students appreciate the effort that I made to make the course more affordable for them. This is reflected in the feedback that I have received from students in various parts of the semester.

What is one piece of advice for other faculty interested in OER/P?

Take a moment to look at OER/P that are being used in your discipline and talk to your colleagues to see how you can adopt them to your course.

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