2026 Colorado OER Conference

Many educators have searched for course materials only to find they don’t exist. The next question is often, could I write the textbook? The answer is yes and this session will show you how. This presentation shares practical strategies for starting and managing a large-scale OER textbook. Participants will explore common barriers, tips for planning and organizing content, and strategies to sustain momentum. Attendees will also consider potential collaborators and stakeholders who can support the process. Recognizing that no two textbooks are the same, the presenters will encourage participants to share their own insights and ideas to enrich the discussion. At the end of the presentation, everyone will leave with a personalized blueprint to guide their next OER textbook project.

How do we move beyond lecturing about motivation to actually fostering it? This session explores the journey of the Calvin Project, an initiative designed to transform educational psychology through the marriage of Project-Based Learning (PBL) and Open Educational Resources (OER).

We will trace the project’s evolution from a pilot experiment into a sustainable, student-directed experience. Attendees will see how shifting from traditional textbooks and lectures to OER and PBL empowered students to build their own understanding of motivation by engaging in an authentic problem space that requires translating abstract theories into actional strategies, while publishing their work in accessible, interactive formats. By analyzing the Calvin Project’s framework, we will illustrate how to build a PBL structure that provides intentional scaffolding while preserving student ownership and discovery As we share our experience with the Calvin Project, we’ll demonstrate how OER and PBL work hand in hand to meet the changing needs of our students.

Whether you are looking to refresh a single unit or overhaul a full course, this session provides a roadmap for creating learning experiences that draw students in and transform the way they see the world around them.

Many traditional science textbooks from major publishers are prohibitively expensive and contain more material than many instructors can cover. OERs lower the cost of student participation in science and allow for customization by other educators who want to use them in their own classroom. Botany is one such area of the life sciences with few OERs developed. We aimed to create a new OER (Biology of Plants Coloring Textbook) specific to botany that was customized to the unique block plan structure of Colorado College, with a curriculum covered in 3.5 weeks of concentrated study. This project offered a unique collaboration between a faculty author and student illustrator.  Colorado College promoted the creation of the OER with grants to the professor and the student illustrator, and provided professional networking opportunities. The OER is a hybrid of a condensed textbook, laboratory exercises including slide and living specimen observations and experiments, and interactive worksheets and coloring images featuring 30+ original botanical line drawings. We will discuss our collaborative process developing the project, discuss licensing choices, and showcase our work, focusing on the beautiful illustrations. Our published OER is being utilized by multiple instructors at Colorado College and many other instructors at different institutions have shown interest in it, especially those who teach college-level introductory botany in shorter timeframes like summer or January terms.

This presentation introduces a collection of open education resources developed by faculty at the University of Northern Colorado through the COOLER (Community Collaboration and Learning for Climate Resilience) program, aimed at building a learning ecosystem around climate change resilience in Northern Colorado. This initiative addresses the urgent need for instructor preparation and equitable student access to climate change education, including climate change impacts, mitigation strategies, and solutions. Through a funded (2024-2025) Colorado Department of Higher Education (CDHE) Colorado Open Educational Resources (OER) Grant, COOLER faculty created and published climate-change related curricular pieces across disciplines, ranging from the arts to climate science. These resources are housed in UNCOpen and OER Commons under Creative Commons licenses. To ensure high quality and accessibility, faculty collaborated with our Instructional Design and Development (IDD) team, applying Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and OER best practices.

Our collection showcases the intersection of climate resilience with diverse fields, including:
-Psychology
-Environmental Earth Science
-Biochemistry
-Fire and Drought in Watershed Management
-Exercise Science
-Media Literacy Through Science
-The Music Industry
-Craftivism
-Ski Industry (A Business Perspective)
-Data Science and Statistics
-Qualitative Anthropology and Cultural Change
-Urban Heat
-Climate Resilience and Your Career

We will highlight specific materials from the collection, demonstrating how interdisciplinary OER can support education for climate resilience.

I will present my experience writing OER textbooks on Spanish and Latin American culture, Civilización hispanoamericana and Civilización española (work in progress), currently used in the civilization courses that I have taught almost every semester since 2001. The presentation will include some of the ways that the SUNY System has suppported the development and adoption of OER materials. The presentation will emphasize that the web-based format of an OER book allows frequent revisions, meaning that it facilitates continuous improvement of the instructor's pedagogy as well as fine-tuning the content and level of the book to meet the needs of our changing populations of students. Part of the pedagogical improvement derived from creating these OER materials has included integrating more interactive elements, which encourages the students to explore the material further and go beyond just memorizing facts. The presentation will describe how I came to write these OER textbooks and how I have been revising them; I will demonstrate the features of my textbook and will also lead attendees through a series of thought experiments and interactions to see how they can integrate this approach to OER in their own educational practice.

Specialized catheters are critical life-saving tools that allow clinicians to monitor heart performance and blood flow. While clinicians are not often called upon to utilize pulmonary artery catheters (Swan-Ganz catheter) or hemodialysis catheters, they must be able to deploy them both with speed and precision when needed. A Swan-Ganz catheter is utilized when the heart’s left side pressure needs to be measured from its right side. A hemodialysis catheter allows for dialysis to filter a patient’s blood when other methods cannot be used or when dialysis is only needed temporarily. Simulators can help clinicians prepare for life-or-death circumstances where every second counts and there is little to no tolerance for mistakes.

Pulmonary artery catheter simulators do exist but are difficult to acquire and can range from $1,732 to $14,990 in price. Simulators for hemodialysis do not currently exist.

In keeping with this year’s themes of adaptation and resilience, UC Health nurses and CU Anschutz researchers have collaborated to create innovative simulators which are built/3D printed from open access resources and will be posted on the CU Anschutz OER Anatomy Hub under Creative Commons licenses. These simulators will be used in UC Health to train clinicians on proper procedures for using these catheters. Other organizations will be able to 3D print and build them using a provided material list with step-by-step instructions. Attendees will gain understanding of the Swan-Ganz catheter and hemodialysis simulators, where to find their assembly files and instructions, and how they can implement them in their respective departments.

Students inspired by their experiences in OER classrooms created the MSU Denver OER Club in Fall 2025 to advocate for the use of OER by students, gain insight into students’ perception of OER, create events that highlight the benefits of OER, and reflect their appreciate for instructors utilizing OER in their courses, departments, and colleges.
OER Club officers Levi Chee, President; Mallory Reiswig, Vice President; Julia Ragan, Treasurer, and Alana Henley, Secretary, will provide their perspectives on the impacts their collaborative efforts have across the institution. They will describe the strategies they employ to increase student awareness for OER in MSU Denver courses through student-centered events that raise awareness of what OER is, identify ways to find course markings, and share student-specific strategies to advocate for OER use. They will share experiences on how student-to-student interactions influence choices of instructor, class, and course materials. Brian Healy will speak about the role of building and maintaining students’ enthusiastic interest in club events and activities.

Come learn about a recent Colorado OER Grant project that represents a collaborative partnership between Metropolitan State University of Denver and Denver Public Schools. We will start by sharing lessons learned in establishing and maintaining a formal partnership agreement between a university and K-12 school district. The bulk of this presentation shares the outcome of our partnership: an OER video collection that highlights concrete examples of what translanguaging can look like in K-12 science classrooms. Translanguaging is a term that refers to the natural, dynamic languaging practices of multilingual individuals (García et al., 2017). Translanguaging pedagogies are teaching moves and materials that center translanguaging as a normal learning practice (Parra & Proctor, 2023) and explicitly welcome students to make sense of science using their full linguistic and multimodal repertoire, including home languages (Fine et al., 2023). Instructional videos portray 2nd - 6th grade classroom teachers planning for, enacting, and reflecting on translanguaging pedagogies during science lessons. The collection is useful for university teacher educators, in-service professional learning providers, and university and K-12 educators who are interested in expanding how they support teachers and linguistically diverse students. Attendees will learn about establishing a collaborative partnership between a university and K-12 district and discuss how they may establish their own partnerships with K-12 districts. Attendees will also understand translanguaging theory and pedagogies, watch and reflect on an instructional video, and plan how to use the OER video collection in their contexts.

The University of Northern Colorado (UNC), like many institutions, relies on instructors to report on which learning materials they plan to use in their courses, whether those materials are Open Education Resources (OER), other Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) materials, or cost-bearing commercial resources. This information ensures the institution is meeting federal and state mandates for cost transparency, supports students as they plan for the upcoming semester, helps in assessing the use of OER/ZTC at an institution, and aids in planning open education outreach and advocacy. Yet getting faculty to report their course materials in a timely manner (or at all) can be difficult, leading to incomplete data with downstream consequences for multiple stakeholders.

 In the context of these challenges, UNC’s Textbook Affordability Librarian and Affordable & OER Student Assistant developed an innovative publicity campaign in advance of the Spring 2026 semester to encourage faculty to report their course materials and to explain the importance of doing so. This presentation will detail why accurate data about course materials is necessary, discuss the barriers faculty might face in reporting their course materials in a timely way, highlight the publicity campaign implemented at UNC prior to the Spring 2026 semester, explore the promising results of this one-semester pilot, and solicit ideas from attendees to further improve the process of collecting course materials data. Together, these efforts underscore how intentional communication and collaboration can meaningfully improve course materials reporting and advance textbook affordability initiatives.

Our interdisciplinary team from Metropolitan State University’s Master of Social Work (MSW) program—two faculty members, an instructional designer, a graduate assistant, and a librarian—leveraged the MSU Denver state OER grant to join the Rebus program, which mentors teams through open educational resource (OER) development. Guided by a shared vision to make the MSW a “Z‑degree,” we produced two OER materials:

• A curated book of case studies that captures real‑world social‑work scenarios and accompanying pedagogical notes.

• A comprehensive textbook on social‑work practice, integrating theory, methods, and ethical considerations.

Our experience illustrates a replicable pathway for other disciplines seeking to expand open scholarly ecosystems. Key takeaways include:

• Social‑science‑specific workflows that streamline content creation while preserving disciplinary rigor
• AI‑enhanced authoring, balanced with human editing, where generative tools assisted literature synthesis and formatting, yet remained under expert human oversight.
• Faculty voice preservation, in which our discipline experts’ voices and lenses of practice color the work, yet colleagues with a range of perspectives can easily adapt the materials.

The session will walk participants through: project goals, team roles, the Rebus framework, a detailed timeline, our blended AI‑human workflow, and practical lessons learned. Attendees will leave equipped to design OER collections that support accessibility, foster collaborative scholarship, and empower educators across the social sciences. dr

The intersection of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Generative AI has transformed the Humanities classroom, especially online, into a what author David Epstein calls a "wicked domain"—an unstable environment where the rules for success are constantly shifting. While OER provides tremendous opportunities to move away from static textbooks toward curated, open resources, the rise of "agentic browsers" like Comet and Google Lens has made digital assessments in Canvas increasingly vulnerable to cheating.  I urge faculty and librarians to join me in exploring how to leverage OER to teach essential interpretive skills while guiding students through the ethical and strategic challenges of an AI-saturated world.

The core problem is that while AI excels at pattern recognition and synthesizing academic-sounding text from OER resources, it lacks judgment—the uniquely human capacity to arbitrate among competing values and account for the human dynamics found in original sources. Drawing on Epstein’s concept of Range, this presentation argues that the most durable advantage for 21st-century students is becoming a generalist with judgment who can navigate ambiguity in this AI environment rather than simply recall information. I will demonstrate models for using AI as a "co-researcher" in Humanities classes to locate OER sources, while simultaneously training students to evaluate those outputs against curated, high-integrity human sources.

By emphasizing the human-in-the-loop, instructors can ensure that OER remains a tool for deep critical thinking, preparing graduates to be adaptable problem-solvers who own their decisions in an unpredictable workforce.

1. A Brave Choice: ZTC at CCA, Allyson Perry-Turner, Community College of Aurora
2. If You Give an Educator a Cookie… My OER Journey from Nothing to Something, Teresa Connolly, University of Colorado
3. Seeing Engineering: open interactive visualizations for Statics, Dynamics, and Mechanics of Materials, Macarena Lange, Colorado State University

The rapid growth of Colorado’s aerospace industry has increased the demand for a skilled and diverse workforce, while access to introductory aerospace education remains uneven across K-12 and early-college pathways. This presentation describes a collaborative initiative that addresses this gap. The OER resource Principles of Aerospace Engineering is being developed through a collaboration among two local K-12 schools, Pikes Peak State College, and the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS). The final product will be a modular, openly licensed textbook and activity suite designed for high school and early college learners.

The project is funded by a grant from the Colorado Department of Higher Education. It brings together faculty, instructional designers, and students to co-create a shared curricular resource aligned across K-12 and higher education. Rather than treating OER as a single course artifact, this initiative provides open content as a connective infrastructure that supports curriculum development, reduces duplication of effort, and strengthens transitions across K-12 audience and into post-secondary STEM programs. This session highlights strategies for cross-institutional collaboration, student involvement, and alignment with workforce-relevant learning outcomes. It also addresses practical considerations such as licensing sustainability, and faculty adaptation.

This interactive session will engage attendees through guided reflection and discussion focused on identifying transferable collaboration models and implementation strategies. Participants will leave with concrete ideas for leveraging OER to build resilient, innovative, and collaborative learning opportunities that expand access and opportunity across educational systems.

In this session we present our ongoing, grant supported OER work for introductory level statistics courses. With the goal of increasing student engagement, and through the use of PreTeXt and the Runestone platform, we are creating fully interactive textbooks with built-in homework systems that will be linked to our LMS. Interactive components include embedded applets, videos, and concept check questions with instant feedback. All data analysis can be completed inside the textbook through code blocks and the embedded applets. We will showcase the textbook’s functionality through a hands-on activity that utilizes data collected in Colorado.

By incorporating culturally relevant examples and teaching methods, we expect our new course materials to enhance student satisfaction and perceived relevance of the subject matter. We will share our materials and our process for seeking and incorporating student feedback and collaboration (from our intro level students and our statistics majors). As part of our presentation, we will share the results of a survey on how our students use their current [non-OER] course materials. The survey includes questions on student use of generative AI for learning statistics. We welcome discussion on this topic and encourage others to share what they are experiencing.