Getting the Lay of the Land: Reviewing OER and Course Outcomes

The Lay of the Land

If you followed our Itinerary, you likely performed a gap analysis of existing OER with considerations of the best fit for your course and your students. This survey of the metaphorical “land” through which you plan to create your OER helped you begin to identify some of the parameters, constraints, and missing pieces, such as adequate DEIA content.

You can’t shape a good trail until you’ve walked the land, studying what is already there, noticing natural paths and marking places worth returning to.

Why This Matters

Taking time to design the OER surfaces constraints early prevents overdesign (adding more content, tools, or structure than your learners need) and unrealistic expectations. Research on cognitive load shows that when instructional design ignores practical constraints, it can place unnecessary mental demands on learners and instructors, reducing clarity and effectiveness rather than supporting learning.^[1]

Start With the Outcome(s) in Mind

The first stage of Backward Design^[2] is to identify what you want your students to be able to do by the end. Before you decide what content your OER will need to include, you will need to find and identify the outcomes of the course(s) in which it will be used. Whether you are creating this OER for use in one course or several different courses, start by finding a list of the course outcomes.

Introducing the Map

Just as a trail architect uses maps and blueprints for designing the system of trails, OER architects need a visual tool to map out their many-layered plan of their OER. To help you map your route with purpose, we’ve created a customizable OERFSJ Mapping Spreadsheet [Website](with optional Word doc versions) to guide your planning. The chapters following this provide in-depth rationale, examples, and practice of mapping the design of your own OER, and the spreadsheet itself also contains concise versions of the guidance.

Select the arrow to view the parts of the OERFSJ Mapping Spreadsheet.

There are four tabs in the OERFSJ Mapping Spreadsheet [Website].

 

OER for Social Justice Faculty Team Highlight

 

The Bach Team designed their Human Physiology OER following the guidance in this part. An additional benefit was how easily the OER text was to implement in their classroom: 

“Using the OER did not require significant changes to our teaching practices or course design, as it was intentionally aligned with the structure and pedagogy already in place.”  -Bach Team

 

Organizing Your OER

Now that you have discovered topics and perhaps themes that will help you to cluster those topics into logical groups and sequences, we’ll begin to map the organization of your OER. Just as a trail architect divides the park land into sections based on its terrain, you will divide your OER into logical sections.

While we tend to create traditional textbooks in chapters with several pages, in Pressbooks, these are called different names. In a Pressbook, each Part can hold several chapters, and each Chapter is one scrollable page. For example, if you select this Pressbook’s Table of Contents, you’ll see this chapter (Getting the Lay of the Land: Reviewing OER and Course Outcomes) is one of several chapters in a Part called Charting Your Route: Mapping and Planning. This series of Parts and Chapters will become your Table of Contents.

As you map your OER Table of Contents, you’ll be focusing mainly on chapters and potential chapter sections, so don’t worry too much right now about the Pressbooks structure. Just know that later on you may group some of your chapters into larger Parts within your own Pressbooks.

Your Turn: Dividing Your Land into Sections

 

Open your downloaded OERFSJ Mapping Spreadsheet to the OER Content and Assessment Map tab. You’ll use the first two columns (in green) to map out your OER’s Table of Contents. There are two options for completing your Table of Contents.

Option A

If you already know the sequence of the topics of your OER, start with Option A, Step 1 and Step 2.

Step 1

In column A, order your chapters by title – one per spreadsheet cell in column A. Keep in mind that, typically, instruction moves from the simple to the more complex (foundations, theories, and background first, moving to examples, application, etc.). When creating the Table of Contents, you will want to answer the following question: In what order do I want to guide my students through the content?

Step 2

In column B, list the main topics that will be covered in this chapter. These will become your chapter’s sections and eventually the heading titles you’ll use in your chapter to break up the content.

Keep in mind that this is the design stage, and you can always remove, rearrange, and rename these items later.

Option B

If you aren’t sure yet what the exact organization of your OER will be, start with the learning objectives (Option B – Start here) and move on to the next chapter on creating measurable learning objectives to get started.

Now that you have the lay of the land, it’s time to choose the “destinations for your students by setting measurable, student-centered objectives.