ePortfolios for Affordable Learning Solutions Programs

Open Educational Practices and Affordable Learning: MERLOT and SkillsCommons has been instrumental in a number of Affordable Learning programs that reduce the costs of course materials for students by providing access to over 7,000 free and open etextbooks and simultaneously searching over 70 additional open libraries. Sharing open educational practices of how faculty migrated from print textbooks and how they teach with OER is a critical strategy for changing faculty and campus culture to implement Affordable Learning Solutions programs.

Capturing OEP in ePortfolios: MERLOT customized ePortfolio templates within its Content Builder application for faculty to share their adoption of free and open educational resources with the support of scaffolding questions about:

• The OER adopted for their courses.
• The courses they are teaching, including sharing their course syllabus and sample learning assignments. Most courses are general education courses common across higher education.
• The reasons why they changed to OER and low cost course materials; sometimes surveys of students' reactions to the OER are included.

Explore over 100 open teaching ePortfolios by faculty (mostly California and MERLOT partners) adopting OER.  Here's an example from our catalog of open teaching ePorfolios.  Click on "Learn how I used this open textbook in my course" blue box to get details.

Select a discipline area to begin:

You can browse by discipline and find colleagues' stories of how, what, and why they changed to more affordable learning solutions for their students.

 

---

Capturing OEP in Institutional Portals: MERLOT customized institutional templates with the Bootstrap application for higher ed institutions to provide their faculty a convenient and branded foundation of OER resources and practices that they can use to create their own affordable learning solutions in their own courses. The Institutional Portals include:

• Search and browse service to find etextbooks, open courseware, learning modules, open access journals and more.
• Collections of free and open etextbooks for general education courses. The etextbooks also have peer reviews by faculty and accessibility evaluations.
• Collections of open courseware for career and technical education courses organized by Standard Occupational Classification codes.
• Collections of teaching ePortfolios for using free and open etextbooks that capture individual faculty's open educational practices.
• Information about the institution's Affordable Learning Program such as events, planning committees, strategic plans and program, and more.

Explore Institutional AL$ Portals: MERLOT and SkillsCommons developed a template institutional AL$ portal that we've customized for over a dozen higher ed institutions. We have also served Historically Black Colleges and Universities with an AL$ Community Portal where you can explore HBCU-branded and open AL$ Institutional portals and programs.

Learn More About:

• Using MERLOT Content Builder to create ePortfolios
• Affordable Learning Solutions library by SkillsCommons and MERLOT
• Examples of Affordable Learning Solutions programs conducted by HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities)