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Education

Abstract

Nursing faculty strive to engage students; however, many may have competing priorities that reduce their available time to produce high-quality lessons. Novice faculty facing role transition, some without formal preparation as educators, may be especially susceptible to these time constraints. Open educational resources (OER), educational materials openly licensed for free access and use, are growing rapidly and can play a role in filling this gap. Specifically, open teaching tools are a subset of OER that can help meet this faculty need for engaging lessons with limited resources. Open teaching tools are teaching resources rather than student-learning resources. They allow expert faculty to share knowledge, expertise, and strategies with novice educators to help meet educational outcomes.

Literature about OER in nursing education is limited,1 and the literature related to open teaching tools is especially lacking. Through more visible dialogue regarding open teaching tools in nursing, faculty can start to break down some barriers to their use, including quality concerns, difficulty finding open teaching tools, and perceived lack of existence. Embracing OER, especially open teaching tools, provides nurse educators an achievable route to help meet the challenge of curating engaging, interactive content.

Open teaching tools benefit student learning and also faculty scholarly engagement. While they may yet lie beyond traditional views of academic scholarship, embracing open teaching tools as innovative scholarly work helps faculty justify the time spent in these OER endeavors as both teaching and scholarship effort. This article describes the creation and impact of an open teaching tool and demonstrates how open teaching tools can be a scholarly endeavor for nursing faculty.

Original Citation

Elrod, G. B., & Strouse, S. M. (2022). Establishing Open Teaching Tools: A Faculty Journey With Open Educational Resources. Nurse Educator, 47(5), E120. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNE.0000000000001222

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