On Friday, Oct. 27, Becky Parton, dean, LLCC Academic Innovation and eLearning; Barry Lamb, director, LLCC Instructional Technology Services; and Amanda Wiesenhofer, electronic resources and library systems administrator presented at the ForwardFocus:  Inspiring Library Innovation Conference at Illinois Central College in Peoria, Illinois. ForwardFocus 2017 was dedicated to open educational resources (OER) in community colleges. As institutions struggle to cut costs and eliminate barriers to student achievement, librarians are called to find solutions. OER initiatives have gained momentum and offer a promising path to overcoming budget constraints and textbook affordability issues for students.

Becky, Barry, and Amanda gave their presentation, “Pilot, Pilot, Pilot,” which presented an overview of the professional development workshop series offered through AIEL last spring. In this workshop series, participants learned to utilize instructional design fundamentals, SoftChalk Cloud and OER to create digital textbooks to share with students for free through Blackboard, with the goal of reducing textbook costs for LLCC students. Please click here to view the recorded presentation, which provides an overview of the professional development program, a discussion of the development of the program, as well as the results of the programs pilot offering and plans for continuation.