The Midland College Honors Program provides an enhanced creative and supportive learning environment and special recognition for talented students.

Currently the Honors Program has over 100 students, each of whom are working under the guidance of MC faculty toward project completion.

Delivery Format: The program is in-person only.

Program Scale: Medium-Scale (reaches between 10 and 25 percent of its target population)

Department(s) Overseeing Program: Honors Program

Contact for More Info: Terri Gilmour, Ph.D. at tgilmour@midland.edu, (432) 685-6816

This is an assignment/project for an introductory-level OER Professional Development course for faculty, staff, and student workers at a two-year community college. The course consists of four in-person class meetings, each about 2 hours in length. Meetings include an overview of OER, including major OER platforms (OERTX and OER Commons), copyright, remixing, assessment, and authoring. Guest speakers are also incorporated to address applying for grants, authoring/revising resources, and engaging in professional training outside the college. The project involves 3 - 5 hours of work outside of class. Participants create and share a resource (course assignment, slides, podcast, training document, etc.) in the OERTX or OER Commons platforms, which must include an appropriate Copyright license (ideally CC BY) and a permalink.Image from Wikimedia Commons (CC BY)

The Faculty Quick Start Guide is an outcome of a project by ISKME, supported by a grant from the Michelson 20MM Foundation, to conduct a study and develop a set of resources to accelerate OER use for distance education, especially the urgent shift to remote learning during the pandemic in 2020. The Guide, created in collaboration with a selection of OER and online education champions across California community colleges (CCC), contains:

- Models and approaches to online learning, and to emergency remote learning in the context of COVID-19;
- How and to what extent OER fits into these models, and local and state-level supports needed for its integration and sustainability;
- Design considerations for integrating OER in online learning, including pedagogical and platform considerations;
- Curatorial practices, such as using OER curation tools and aligning curated OER to learning outcomes; and,
- Starting points and tips for colleges and faculty who want to initiate OER integration into distance education.

Tailored to faculty and campus administrators both in California and beyond, the Guide has the aim is to enable system-wide shifts to meet postsecondary institutions’ long term goals for distance learning, and faculty’s emergency plans for remote learning in response to the COVID-19 and potential future crises.

The Guide is also available as a PDF for download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/17AXs30dZeLOrGeNBQ-ISc_OJXIxE9xtB/view?usp=sharing.

See the companion guide for administrators at: https://www.oercommons.org/courses/iskme-michelson-20mm-oer-campus-administrator-quick-start-guide-public/edit

Minneapolis College, the most selected higher education destination of students from all Minneapolis Public High Schools, is located downtown, nestled between the hustle of Hennepin Avenue and the green spaces of Loring Park. As a part of the Minnesota State system of colleges and universities, Minneapolis College most serves those students who are least likely to go to college. With three-quarters of the student body composed of those underrepresented in higher education, the hallways are filled with recent immigrants, those seeking to learn English, members of communities with the highest unemployment and incarceration rates in the state, veterans, those of low socioeconomic status, seekers of diversity, and those who wish to serve them. Collected here are their stories, stories of overcoming, coming up, perseverance, pride, and power in the face of depressed opportunity and systemic oppression.