Open Educational Resources
Open educational resources or OERs are educational materials (ranging from activities and assessments to entire textbooks and everything in between) that have been published under an open license or are in the public domain. Others are then able to reuse, modify, adapt, and share the materials as needed. Below, you can access some of my course and professional development materials that I’ve made freely available as OERs. You can also click here to access my video library of additional teaching & learning resources.
CURRICULAR MATERIALS
Assessments
The Creator Portfolio
Creativity, as a transferrable competency, is career agnostic. Now more than ever, career readiness means empowering students as creators in digital spaces, and our assessment practices can play a role in realizing this pursuit. The Creator Portfolio, an iterative capstone project, creates space for metacognitive thinking while leveraging design technologies (such as Adobe Creative Cloud and Canva) to showcase and promote student work. This project allows students to (1) reflect on, curate, and annotate a set of artifacts produced during the semester and (2) learn how to produce a professional digital portfolio using a platform like Adobe Portfolio, Canva, Google Sites, or Wix.
Multimodal Project: Anatomy of a Genre
How do genres work, and how can we assess students’ understanding of their makeup? This assignment includes a three-pronged essay component and a multimodal remediation, allowing students to distill and translate their genre study into a new learning object. This assignment can easily be applied to the study of any artistic genre.
Multimodal Project: Designing a Book Cover
For this assignment, students imagine that they have been hired as graphic designers for a university press. Their first on-the-job assignment is to design a book cover (using Canva’s free book cover template, Microsoft Publisher, Google Slides, or Adobe Illustrator) for a new edition of the novel we are studying. There are two components to this project: the digital cover design and a written rationale.
Quick Guides
What is Multimodality?
This quick-reference guide defines multimodality and the five modes of communication for students in writing & digital projects-based courses.
What is a Research Proposal?
This quick-reference guide introduces students to the genre of the humanities research proposal and its key components.
What is an Annotated Bibliography?
This quick-reference guide introduces students to the genre of the annotated bibliography and includes a four-step process for crafting annotations.
Primary vs. Secondary Sources
This handout or quick-reference guide introduces students to the difference between primary and secondary sources.
Summary vs. Paraphrase vs. Quotation
This handout or quick-reference guide introduces students to the difference between summarizing, paraphrasing, and directly quoting a source.
Peer Reviewing Essays
This quick-reference guide recaps the purpose of peer review and provides a series of guiding questions that prompt students to respond to an essay's thesis, structure, and use of evidence.
Digital Activities
From Text to Image: Teaching Remediation Basics with Social Media Image Production
In this activity, students remediate content originally published as a written text into an image or graphic for a social media platform such as Instagram.
Teaching Close Reading Through Social Annotation
This activity, using the social annotation tool Hypothesis, encourages students to become more attentive readers and thoughtful collaborators in a digital environment.
Women of Colour: Using Corpus Analysis for Introducing Representations of Race in 19C Fiction
As a digital humanities tool, corpus analysis allows students to visually map language use. Adopted as a tool for anti-racist pedagogy, corpus analysis allows us to recognize from a distance the role race plays in a given text, visualizing its prominences, patterns, and even silences.
Co-created with Annelise Norman
Writing, Discussion, & Reflection Activities
Discussion Activity: Roll the Dice
If you are looking for a way to not only assess content knowledge or reading comprehension but also get students thinking metacognitively, then this activity is for you.
Peer Review Activity: Revising Introductions
This active learning activity tasks students with both peer reviewing and revising essay introductions. In small groups, students move through multiple rounds as they comment on another group's anonymized introductions.
The Creativity Matrix
A tool for students to articulate their definition of creativity, as well as their creative self-perception, goals, and ideal conditions.
Teaching for Transfer
Digital Skills Crescendo
The Digital Skills Crescendo is a tool for making transfer visible, as it helps facilitate student-led conversations about how the skills they are learning are applicable to their unique personal, academic, and professional contexts.
I created this resource to help students in my ENG-W171: Projects in Digital Literacy and Composition visualize at a glance how the digital skills they were learning were scaffolded. The Crescendo outlines the digital tools used to produce a set of deliverables, culminating in a carefully branded and curated portfolio at the end of the semester. Additionally, it makes note of which of the five modes of communication are most applicable for each deliverable.
FACULTY DEVELOPMENT
The following faculty development resources, developed in collaboration with Miranda Rodak, are rooted in our design philosophy: we bring our expertise in Writing Pedagogy Education (WPE) to designing programs, platforms, and materials that create the self-reflective, collaborative conditions that unlock and foster creativity through engaged learning experiences and professional development. Everything we create is transparent, transferrable, intuitive, and learning focused.
Toolkits
Strategically Publishing OERs Toolkit
Open Educational Resources (OERs) provide an excellent way for faculty to publish and circulate the innovative, high-quality curricular assets they already create to accompany their instruction while also freeing students from the burden of additional course costs. This toolkit empowers faculty to construct a framework for thinking critically about the variety of instructional assets they create – including lesson plans, in-class and flipped learning activities, supplemental media, etc. – and strategically packaging, publishing, and featuring them in ways that contribute to their ongoing, self-reflective praxis and demonstrate their teaching excellence.
Crafting Strategic Course Descriptions Toolkit
The Crafting Strategic Course Descriptions Toolkit empowers graduate students and new faculty who are proposing and teaching new lower-division undergraduate courses targeting non-majors. The toolkit positions instructors as strategic course designers who follow a sequence of steps to craft course descriptions that (1) speak to a unique student audience and (2) convince internal stakeholders that the course is both pedagogically sound and capable of driving enrollment.
Teaching Observation Toolkit
The Teaching Observation Toolkit makes transparent the processes for conducting a productive and collaborative formative observation, including the necessity of pre- and post-observation meetings. It includes a guide to conducting formative observations, lesson plan and note taking templates, and an observation rubric that can both focus the observation and guide conversations about instructor preparation, facilitation of learning, and engagement.
Cheat Sheets
Crafting Strategic Teaching-Focused CVs
This cheat sheet explains how crafting a strategic teaching-focused CV works alongside your teaching portfolio.
8 Moves to Assemble a Successful Lower-Division Course Proposal Infographic
Proposing lower-division courses – for instance, general education courses and electives – offers faculty a way to design courses rooted in their particular areas of interest and expertise in a way that is pitched more broadly to students outside their disciplines. This not only drives enrollment by attracting new students into your department’s courses but also initiates a new generation of students into your discipline’s ways of knowing and doing. Nevertheless, developing rhetorically savvy course proposals that speak to multiple audiences and attest to your teaching excellence can be tricky. Whether you are planning to propose a course or are coaching instructors, this infographic empowers course designers with an eight-step process to intentionally craft strategic proposals for lower-division courses.
