Morgan State University Partners with panOpen to Support Faculty Use of OER
At Morgan State University in Maryland, a partnership with panOpen is making it easier for faculty to implement open educational resources in their courses. Designed to enable adoption of OER at an institutional level, the panOpen learning platform provides peer-reviewed open content to serve as an alternative to commercial textbooks, as well as tools for customization, assessment and analytics.
Student benefits of the platform include the ability to read and take quizzes on any device, communicate with faculty and peers, and automatically build study guides based on course materials.
"By drawing on the disciplinary expertise here at Morgan and elsewhere, and powerful learning technologies specifically designed to support OER collaboration, we seek to lower costs, improve outcomes for our students, and better prepare them for their post-graduate professional lives," said Solomon Alao, MSU's assistant vice president of assessment and operations, in a statement. "We are therefore excited to work with panOpen to help achieve these goals and engage our entire academic community in its innovative OER-based learning platform."
The university is offering faculty grants to support the rapid adoption of OER. This summer, faculty are receiving training, including workshops led by panOpen, to help prepare courses to use the platform. Faculty will also be able to collaborate by subject area with colleagues at other institutions, to benefit from each other's work. All faculty contributions to the panOpen platform will carry a Creative Commons license.
The first student use of the platform is scheduled for the fall term.