What Worked, What Didn't, and Plans for the Future

What worked

The short answer is "almost everything." Most of the challenges I had to navigate in teaching this semester had as much (or more) to do with the class being online than its being OER.

Following is a list of the benefits I found of teaching American Literature I without a textbook:

1. The cost to the students 
Currently on Amazon, the cost of the 8th edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, most likely the one I would have assigned, is $69.34. The cost of the 9th edition is a little better, at $51.56. However, $51.56 is still plenty of money, and I know that students must appreciate not having to spend the additional money on a textbook.

2. The relevance for students
The OER format is more in keeping with how students live and learn. Students today are used to finding materials online. Having them access the essays, stories, and poems for American Literature I online felt relevant to how they exist in the world—making the class and its materials a more integrated part of their daily lives instead of a separate thing (a textbook) that they would pick up occasionally and then set aside.

3. Freedom and creativity in designing the syllabus
 Having the freedom to choose from literally almost any relevant material online allowed me to think outside the box; it encouraged me to use material I may not have otherwise found or required. While it's true that I could have found supplemental material online even if I had stuck to using a textbook, I would have been much less likely to do so.

4. A renewed focus on goals and objectives
Additionally, going OER forced me to really think about my goals and objectives for the class. As I put together the syllabus, I gave more thought to what materials I wanted students to read (or watch) and why than I would have if I had been choosing the items from a table of contents in a textbook.

5. A greater investment in the class 
People often tend to be more invested in things when they have a say in creating or designing them—my experience with going OER was no exception. Though I am certainly invested in the classes where I use a traditional textbook, the time I spent reading through materials and carefully deliberating what to include led to, I'm certain, an even greater sense of instructor investment than usual.

What didn't
I cannot think of anything that didn't work. Truly. The only downside would be the time it took on the front end to find the materials. I could add to that the time it took, then, for me to create the historical and literary context overviews. However, the time spent on both endeavors had so many benefits that I am reluctant to even refer to this as a downside. Maybe the time involved is not a downside, then, so much as a practical consideration.

Odds & Ends
How to present the links on Moodle: One thing that I improved upon as the semester unfolded was how I presented the links to the Rio Salado online textbook each week. If a student started at the collegeopentextbooks.org  website, the students would have to go another three steps or so, entering some key phrases, to get to the Rio Salado text.

I started out, under each week's reading assignments, providing the collegeopentextbooks.org website and the list of instructions for how students should find the Rio Salado book once they got there. By about the fifth week, I started just posting the link to the Rio Salado book itself, without all of the extra "How to Find It" directions.

Plans for the future
I am already looking forward to teaching the class again with thoughts on how I could improve both the OER and the online aspects of the course. Now that I have done the work of finding all of the necessary primary sources, the main thing I will focus on, in terms of OER, will be finding an even greater number of additional resources for students to read and watch. I also plan to turn my three historical overview power points into H5P presentations. I would also like to make five short videos: one that works as an introduction to the class; three short ones to go with the historical overviews of each main era; and one where I would offer "Tips for Writing a Literary Research Paper" towards the semester's end.