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Session Description

Free ticketed event
The workshop will provide interactive exercises to perfect the skills required to successfully construct
customized OER instructional material that is both engaging and flexible. Today’s increasing demand
on faculty to lower the cost for textbooks is not a trivial task, especially for advanced engineering
courses. In cases where appropriate materials are lacking or suboptimal, faculty need tools that make it
as simple as possible to find, customize, and build new resources, while also prioritizing ease of use for
students. This workshop will explore OER availability, open licensing and accessibility for engineering
and related STEM disciplines as well as and provide an introduction to building and editing OER
textbooks and instructional material.

By the end of this workshop participants will have been introduced to

-The distinguishing features of Open Educational Resources
-Creative Commons licenses and how the licenses broaden copyright protection
-Features of OER books that enhance engineering instruction
-How to locate appropriate OER for their courses and materials that can be used directly or modified to
meet their requirements
-How to create custom OER books for their courses to engage their students to develop a deeper
understanding of the material

Participants will apply the knowledge acquired during this workshop to produce a short yet functional
Introduction to Engineering textbook that effectively illustrates the methods and procedures presented
here. Participants will be encouraged to collaborate in the project with oversight from the workshop
instructors.

Division Collaboration

Educational Research and Methods Division is the primary while the Computers in Education
Division, and the New Engineering Educators Division would also find the workshop relevant as would
the Electrical and Computer Engineering Division, Engineering Libraries Division, Software
Engineering Division.

The workshop is sponsored by LibreTexts a nonprofit whose mission is to unite students, faculty, and
scholars to cooperatively build, customize, and disseminate OER

Speakers

1. Dr. Joshua Halpern

   Prince George's Community College

   Josh Halpern is Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at Howard University and Chief Operating Officer of Libretexts, a major online source of open textbooks and other open educational resources. Currently as an adjunct at PGCC he helps develop new STEM curricula using OER to improve retention and articulation. Halpern was the founding director of the DC Space Grant Consortium. He administered NASA GSFC Faculty Fellowship Programs in collaboration with ASEE. He was PI and Director of the NSF funded Partnership for Research and Education in Materials at Howard which brought together Johns Hopkins and Prince Georges Community College (PGCC), and later Gallaudet and Cornell University. During his career he collaborated with a diverse range of faculty and students at institutions ranging from community colleges, research universities, minority serving institutions including HBCUs, those for the hearing disabled and primarily undergraduate institutions.

2. Dr. Edward Carl Greco Jr.

   Arkansas Tech University

   Dr. E. Carl Greco is past Chair of the ASEE Midwest section and has served as the secretary/ treasurer for the Arkansas River Valley Section of the IEEE. He has presented papers on engineering education at ASEE regional and national meetings focusing on methods to improve laboratory learning. Dr. Greco is the author of online OER textbooks on Discrete Signal Processing and Engineering Modeling and Analysis with Python He received his Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from Louisiana Tech and his Masters and Doctorate in Electrical Engineering from Rice University. Dr. Greco currently holds the position of Professor of Electrical Engineering at Arkansas Tech University where he has been a member of the Faculty Senate.