Beth Cummins is the Flexible Learning Coordinator at Southwest Wisconsin Technical College in Fennimore, WI. Her role in the Innovative and Alternative Learning Department is to support faculty through instructional design, including finding, adopting, and creating OER resources. She is currently co-chairing the collegewide Open Educational Resources Project Team, which is charged with developing College Policies and Procedures regarding OER implementation and adoption and creating resources for faculty to implement and create OERs.
She holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and has worked in Higher Education for over 20 years. Beth strives to raise awareness around open education and how it can make textbooks more affordable for our students.
For her SPARC capstone project, Beth led the college OER workgroup in finding best practices and developing resources to support faculty in adopting OER. These best practices and resources were organized into a course in Southwest Tech’s learning management system, Schoology. In the course, faculty can learn what OER is, why they should use it, where to find it, and how to evaluate it. The OER evaluation checklist used in the course was remixed from the BCOER checklist. A quality checklist Beth uses as part of the OER adoption process is included as a community resource in addition to the course cartridge that can be loaded into any Learning Management System. These resources are intended for faculty looking to find and evaluate OER.
The second part of Beth’s capstone project was to create campus acceptance of OER. She led presentations to other campus stakeholders. Materials developed include the presentation files and a flyer created to share student cost savings for courses adopting OER. The materials are intended for those looking to promote OER to other stakeholders on campus.