Postsecondary presidents and administrators are concerned about the rising cost of textbooks, with 85% of leaders supporting the use of OER’s (Lederman, 2019, March 13). Many education faculty members are increasingly looking to make use of OERs to customize their teaching resources to ensure that they are a good fit for the courses they are teaching. This is especially true for instructors engaged in teaching interdisciplinary courses in educational administration, policy, and leadership where there is no currently available open or online textbook.

At this year’s Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education Conference, which will be held May 31-June 2, 2020 at Western University in London, Ontario, I will be joined by two of my University of Windsor colleagues (Mark Lubrick and Carson Babich) as cochairs for the panel, “Connecting Today’s Postsecondary Classroom to the Open Future: Open Education Resources (OER’s) Empower the Teaching of Educational Administration, Policy, and Leadership,” which will focus on the use of OER’s to teach interdisciplinary courses through the exploration of new pedagogical approaches.

This panel will focus on two main research questions. How are postsecondary faculty making use of OER’s to teach interdisciplinary courses in educational administration, policy, and leadership with a particular focus on learning organizations? What specific factors should be considered when using OER’s to teach interdisciplinary courses?

Consider submitting a proposal. Some possible topics that you may want to consider could include: accessibility, class discussions, connection from one discipline to another, epistemology, equity, ethics evaluating/choosing a resource, experiential learning, flipped teaching, online collaborative teaching (OCT), pedagogical innovation, and research done around OER use in interdisciplinary courses

For more information contact me at Clayton.Smith@uwindsor.ca.

-Clayton Smith