Kelly Pilato's journey to using open educational resources (OER) started with a single question.
How could she improve the learning experience for her students?
"That really is at the heart of everything I'm doing. I always think about how I can make things better for students," says the Assistant Professor of Health Sciences.
For her first-year Introduction to Health Sciences course, that meant exploring OER as an alternative to the textbooks she'd used in the past.
OER are free teaching and learning materials that anyone can use or alter, allowing educators to expand their course materials while lowering costs for students, a priority for Pilato.
With guidance from the Brock University Library and the Centre for Pedagogical Innovation, she has created a collection of free learning materials for her class this year. With funding from Brock's Open Educational Resources Grant Program, she has hired two student research assistants to support the project.
Pilato's move to OER has allowed her to include more diverse resources, particularly related to Indigenous Peoples, and more Canadian content.
"In the past, I have felt disappointed by the way inequities in health are represented in some texts, sometimes as a callout box at the side or bottom of a page," she says.
As well as OER and peer-reviewed journal articles, students in her class are learning from podcasts, videos and other texts, an experience Pilato hopes will strengthen their ability to evaluate different sources of information in the future.
"A big theme in the course are social determinants of health and relatedly, health literacy," she says. "I try to connect for them that as future health professionals, it will be their job to help reduce inequities and help other people be able to make informed choices about their health based on reliable sources."
Assistant Professor of Health Sciences Kelly Pilato is creating an open education resource (OER) collection for her first-year Introduction to Health Sciences course with support from Brock's OER Grant Program.
Beyond supporting her own students' learning, Pilato's project will also be available for use by other educators in the future. The resources she has gathered with her research assistants will be published as a complete OER collection using Pressbooks later this year. The collection will be available through the eCampusOntario Open Library.
"The more we share our best practices and what we're doing, the more we can learn from one another," Pilato says. "I deeply believe education is a right, and everybody should have access to education. It really aligns with my own values that we're going to have this open educational resource out there that other people will be able to access and build on."
Pilato and Professor of Educational Studies Ruth McQuirter are the most recent OER Grant recipients. They join a growing list of 32 faculty, instructors and lab supervisors from across the University to receive funding since the program was launched in 2023.
To date, OER Grant-funded projects have helped nearly 4,500 students save a cumulative total of $566,000 on course materials.
The next OER Grant application deadline is Sunday, May 31.
Teaching and Learning Librarian Kymberly Ash says experts within the Brock Library and Centre for Pedagogical Innovation are available to help faculty and instructors explore OER, from finding supplementary resources to developing textbook replacements.
"OER can have huge financial benefits for students as our grant data shows, but it can also provide more flexibility and freedom to instructors," she says. "Some instructors come to me with unique content needs that traditional textbook publishers cannot accommodate. By creating our own materials and sharing them freely with other educators, we're joining a community that values access, sharing and collaboration."
Information on OER supports and resources at Brock can be found on the Library website.
