Advancing Sustainability to the Social Sciences: An OER Human Development Course Tool Kit for Early Childhood Educational Stakeholders

The main objective of this presentation will be to demonstrate a Sustainable Human Development course by utilizing OER and universal design learning principles in order to help beginner or novice educator and students learn about human development. The reflective presentation will have four parts to demonstrate our process and describe our experience in building a sustainable Human Development OER Course. First, we will briefly present the rationale why we built the course, for whom, and outline how we built the steps. Second, we will discuss how we developed our understanding of OER, including understanding licensing, finding resources, and adapting an OER Textbook to correspond with the course. The third portion will cover how we designed and adapted an existing Human Development course to include only OER course material and incorporating Universal Design Principles to increase accessibility for a diverse body of students. The fourth and final section will include a sample of the course in Blackboard (CourseSites) that would be available as a current open educational resource for the purpose of continuing education and educator program development. The presentation agenda would include a review of the course as whole through an accessible syllabus and course outline, and a short navigation of the course content and open educational resources. We will have a short demonstration of the accessibility of course materials using a screen reader and closed captions featuring the different assessment methods to practice relevant skill sets important for teachers in the classroom using VoiceThread.