Joy McMurrin ENGL 1010D: Introduction to Writing OER Project

Description:

• Open English @ SLCC
• CUNY Academic Commons
• Wikibooks page on Rhetoric and Composition/Argument (but I don’t think I’ll use this again)
• Grammarly tutorials for punctuation, grammar, and usage (like this one for apostrophes)
• The Visual Communication Guy (I pay a one-time small fee—a few bucks per product—to use his products in class free to my students; see Logical Fallacies links in my Canvas shell, for example)
• Handouts and slide decks I've created

Curricular changes: 

I honestly have not made substantial curricular changes since the concepts I teach are largely the same. AI is new-ish, so I’ve added some readings and discussions related to AI, but that was not necessarily OER-driven. My adoption of OER has been incremental rather than abrupt, especially for ENGL 1010 and ENGL 1010D, so I’ve been transitioning portions of my class since 2020, starting with creating my own tutorials for teaching MLA, with several slide decks dedicated to teaching citation by source types. The students tend to learn best when I introduce the citation rules and examples, then have them practice collectively, then individually. Those decks are in my OER Canvas course. For Fall 2024, I focused on transitioning away from using big-publisher content available online but not meant as OER material, like genre checklists published by Norton. Instead, I’ve relied on a combination of OER content (i.e., Open English at SLCC; CUNY Academic Commons) for genre instruction, Grammarly tutorials for writing mechanics instruction, everyday websites (i.e., Buzzfeed, Time, CyberScoop) for current writing samples and discussion prompts, and other handouts and slide decks that I’ve borrowed or created over the years to support knowledge acquisition and application.   

Teaching and learning impacts: 

I have not observed a noticeable difference in overall performance, but students are more likely to click a link and read a short excerpt related to what we’re learning than to read a 30+ chapter of a textbook, so I’ve noticed students acquire important terms and concepts more readily, which builds their confidence to participate in discussions. I believe I get fewer questions from students about organizing and developing content for certain assignments, but I haven’t quantified that.

OER Adoption Process:

My primary motivation for adopting OER materials is to improve access to education by lowering costs. Adopting OER also gives me more freedom to deliver content beyond a pre-determined selection of writing principles and examples bound in a single textbook.

Student feedback about using OER:

 Students seem genuinely appreciative of the cost-reducing implications OER has for them. Otherwise, I don’t think students really pay much attention to the difference between having a textbook or having embedded OER materials. It isn’t that they are indifferent to the materials but the materials become sort of invisible as long as they help students achieve stated outcomes. Students rarely praise course materials, but they will readily complain if the materials are confusing or complicate their learning process. Since I didn’t get any complaints, I think the OER materials did the job.

Instructor Name: Joy McMurrin

Professor Joy McMurrin has been teaching composition courses since 2007 and has specialized in professional and technical writing courses since 2013. She is the Coordinator for the Technical Writing & Digital Rhetoric graduate program. She enjoys the teaching a range of courses from developmental composition and technical writing to critical theories and user-centered design.