Find, Author, and Share Open Textbooks

1. What was the best thing about the Find, Author, Share course?
Hearing from people around the world about their use of OER experiences. Potential future collaborators.

2. What did you learn that you can apply going forward? Though I knew most of the basics, the course did push me to consider the authoring aspect for the first time.

3. How could this course be enhanced to make it better logistically? The p2pu platform is a rather limited course management system. I wish it had been built on Moodle or something similar.

4. What OER topics or issues do you feel were missing or insufficiently covered? I think having find, author & share as overall goals is too much. Each could be its own course. Just finding a textbook to evaluate for adoption is a major achievement for most people.
Authoring is overwhelming and impossible in 5 weeks, but a course on that alone might get someone started with resources and might help facilitate collaboration.

Una - thanks for donating your time and resources in promoting open textbooks.
I still know (too) many people in education who don't understand why anyone would teach a course for free, and why anyone would take one for no "credit."

For me, the best part was sharing of OER sites. Whenever I ran into a wall, someone would find additional sites, and I'd be off again.

First off, my original plan was to find books to use in our new MA program, but the more I thought about it, I wanted to do a text for one particular class. Because of the requirement to be part of a group and focus on something we all wanted to research, I met (virtually) some great teachers who guided me along the way--Susan I want to meet you in person. I also wrote a grant to get softchalk software for to use for the book. While the grant was only funded for 1/3 of the cost of the program, my department chair committed to funding the rest. So today, I'm going to spend my heart out. Finally, I wish more people had been at our meetings because I always learned so much from each and every presentation--not just the material presented, but the added comments from other participants. This course was a great experience, and I'll be looking forward to others.