2026 Colorado OER Conference

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.

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.

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