My OER project
Life Stories of Older Adults: Digital Storybook for Gerontology Students, created with Elena Neiterman.
What prompted you to become involved in OER?
As instructors, Elena Neiterman and Catherine Tong are always looking for ways to enable their students to have educational materials that are relevant and accessible. OER is an excellent way to develop learning materials that can be accessible to a diverse group of students, both within UW and beyond. They are also drawn to OER because of its interactive nature.
What excites you most about your OER project?
This OER grant will allow them to create a digital storybook of the lives of diverse older adults. As gerontology and aging instructors, they believe in the power of storytelling, and have consistently heard from their students their desire to hear directly from older adults, not just read about older adults in textbooks and manuscripts. Using a digital format will allow them to tell these stories of aging for years to come, in an accessible manner.
A lot of instructors are hesitant about OER. Do you share those hesitations? How do you address them?
They are quite interested in trying OER. What they envision is a tool that should be in the public space, and we want it to be accessible to all students. This is our first attempt at developing OER and we are eager to try it.
Can other instructors interested in OER reach out to you?
Yes, at catherine.tong@uwaterloo.ca.
