OER Toolkit for Trades Instructors

Course pack: Moira has a few significant concerns about her course pack of photocopied readings.

1. Several students have told Moira that they chose not to buy the course pack. Some explained that their decision was based on their own budget restraints, while others gave her a variety of reasons why they have difficulty using it (e.g. font size is too small, or the quality of the photocopies is too poor to read, or the course pack is heavy and too cumbersome to be easily portable to bring to-and-from campus).
2. After attending a workshop at her college, Moira is now also concerned that she may have been unintentionally violating copyright laws by creating copies of some articles and textbook chapters and republishing them without permission in the course pack.
3. There have been times when Moira has felt like she is constantly photocopying readings and working with the college’s printing services to prepare yet another version of the course pack. This is a time-consuming task and Moira is frustrated that after all the time she spends on it, the course pack still isn’t the resource her students really need.

In-class lectures and demonstrations: Moira also has a couple of concerns with the in-class lecture time she has with her students.

1. The in-class, practical demonstrations give students a chance to see how the concepts they learn in class are applied in the shop. However, there is no way for students to review demonstrations again, and if students miss a class, they miss the demonstration altogether.
2. After what she learned at the copyright workshop, Moira also has concerns about all of the images and photos she has downloaded. She does not want to inadvertently infringe on copyright and she has not kept track of the source sites she collected them from.

Quizzes (& Grade Management): Moira does not feel that her current practice of giving students the “self-assessment” quizzes via paper-handouts in class is sustainable for her or even particularly helpful for her students.

1. Moira is concerned that between tracking which student is ready to move on to the hands-on time in the shop and scheduling time for students to re-take a quiz in order to achieve the passing score, she is wasting opportunities to spend meaningful contact time with her students. Similarly, Moira worries that in her rush to mark the quizzes and help get students into the shop more quickly, she is missing opportunities to give the students more meaningful feedback and specific guidance on course concepts they may be struggling with.
2. Further to these concerns, since many of her students have acknowledged they don’t have the course pack, Moira realizes that many of her students must also be completing the self-assessment quizzes without having read the foundational materials. Moira is concerned that they are missing out on learning opportunities and are just trying to achieve the minimum score they need in order to get into the shop.

After discussing these concerns with some of her teaching colleagues, Moira feels encouraged to make some significant revisions to her face-to-face course. However, she does not have a lot of time to spare on these revisions; not only will she teach this course again in 3 months but Moira is currently teaching another course and will not have release time to complete her course revisions.