Once I had found all of the 54 primary sources I planned to assign, the only challenge of significance that remained in my OER adventure was finding a way to provide the students with a context about these sources.
This challenge was intensified because I had also chosen to make the class entirely online. I would not be able to rely on typical classroom discussions to provide relevant facts about the writers or the historical context for the readings.
American Literature I is usually divided into three sections: Early beginnings to 1700; 1700-1820; and 1820-1865. Most editions of "The Norton Anthology of American Literature" provide helpful overviews of each of these eras in terms of the literature that they produced. The Rio Salado online text I planned to use for many of the readings did not feature any such overviews.
It would be one thing to find essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson and to tell my students to read them. But how would they know what to make of it if they did not also have a basic understanding of the Transcendentalist movement of which Emerson was a part?
I could assign them to read the letter that Christopher Columbus wrote to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, but how could I expect the students to fully appreciate the significance of Columbus' words if they did not have a basic understanding of the political, historical, and sociological forces at work?
Usually, in a literature course, I would have relied on two things to help provide this context:
1). The historical overview sections provided by the textbook
2). Class discussion
I spent quite a bit of time searching for online resources—both written and video form—that would do a good job of providing context for each of these three major eras. I did find some resources that came fairly close to being what I wanted. There were a number of videos available on good old Youtube, for example (which would likely have had the added bonus of already being ADA compliant), created by high school and college English instructors on the topic.
Making my own materials
In the end, though, I made three power points on the eras on my own (my goal, next time, is to turn these into H5P resources, but first things first). I made good use of the "notes" feature (and told my students to be sure to read the notes) so that I could include lots and lots of material without the slides themselves becoming overwhelmed with text.
Though making these power points took a good deal of time, I was ultimately glad that I chose to make my own. Doing so forced me to really think about what the students should know and needed to know. It also made me think about the kinds of questions I wanted to pose for our online discussions, and what kinds of topics I wanted to offer for their writing assignments.
Additional resources
I also provided an "Additional Resources" section on our class Moodle page, something I have been doing in all of my classes for a while, but which took on a more important role in my OER & online class. I would encourage students to make use of these materials to further their understanding (but they would not be quizzed over these materials, nor would they be required to refer to them when answering discussion questions).
Finding and adding material to this section as the semester unfolded was great fun. The materials I linked to this section included everything from a Shmoop breakdown of Transcendentalism to a wonderful 44-minute video from a Great Books series on Henry David Thoreau to a fantastic interactive, annotated version of Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" on Slate.com. There is a good chance that if I had not been teaching this class as an OER, I would not have found this excellent resource:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/10/herman_melville_s_bartleby_the_scrivener_an_interactive_annotated_text.html
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