The Power of OER with Profs. Mary Rowe and Elizabeth Siler

Chalk Radio

Many instructors in recent years have turned to open educational resources (OER) so that their students don’t have to pay for an expensive textbook. And that is indeed one of the foremost benefits of OER. But Professor Elizabeth Siler, who teaches at Worcester State University, has found that using OER offers advantages to instructors too: doing so allows you to teach the material you think your students need to learn, and to teach that material the way you think your students need to learn it, rather than being tied to a prepackaged sequence of material. Professor Siler enjoys being able to select and adapt material for her courses from publicly-available sources. One source that she’s used successfully in teaching negotiation at WSU is the OpenCourseWare version of a course originally taught at MIT by Professor Mary Rowe. In this episode, we talk with both Professor Siler and Professor Rowe about why instructors might decide to share, reuse, and remix course materials, and how that decision plays out in teaching actual courses like their own courses in negotiation.

Relevant Resources:

MIT OpenCourseWare

The OCW Educator Portal

Mary Rowe’s MIT faculty page

Elizabeth Siler’s Worcester State University faculty page

15.667 Negotiation and Conflict Management on OCW

Dealing with an Aggressive Competitive Negotiator case study [PDF]

Guidelines for writing a Perceived Injurious Experience letter [PDF]

Other negotiation courses on OCW

Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman