After over a decade in the Office of Open Learning (OOL), on May 1, 2025, I redeployed to the Centre of Teaching and Learning in the Centre of Teaching and Learning (CTL) at the University of Windsor.
It is a little sad to say good bye to OOL, because we were a small but mighty team championing open educational resources (OER) and open practices on campus.
While we lost some OOL team members to retirement and to opportunities at other higher education institutions, three OOL colleagues will also be a part of CTL as well.
I am excited to be continue supporting UWindsor faculty with creation, adoption, and adaptation of open-licensed teaching resources. I am looking forward to collaborating with the librarians at Leddy Library. I have enjoyed collaborating with faculty, student partners, instructional designers, multimedia designers, etc. to contribute to the creation of many excellent open textbooks, open courses, ancillary materials, etc. that have been adopted by other instructors here at the U as well as at other institutions.
I am proud of the OER development work I have supported since 2014. It has changed the way I teach students, as well. I have always used journal articles and web resources to reduce textbook cost and increase accessibility for my students, but for the first time, I piloted an open textbook that I pulled together for students in my graduate research methods course in winter 2025. The textbook is still a work in progress, but it includes chapters from existing open textbooks, and adds some original text and multimedia content. I received very positive feedback from my students on the course design and reading selections, so I am feeling encouraged to complete revisions.
A new and exciting program that I will be teaching in and will be contributing to is the Graduate Diploma in University Teaching. I love teaching and mentoring graduate students, so this is an exciting opportunity for me. I am hoping to adapt some content from the Humanizing Digital Learning Micro-Program to create new courses for the Grad Dip in the next year or so.
A workshop that I am also excited to contribute to is the Instructional Skills Workshop (ISW). I am a ISW facilitator, but I have not had a chance to teach these workshops for a few years!