2025 Colorado OER Conference: Full Schedule

8:00am MDT

Registration, Breakfast & Networking

Friday May 30, 2025 8:00am - 9:00am MDT

Collect your name tag, select swag, grab breakfast, and meet your fellow open education colleagues from across Colorado!

Friday May 30, 2025 8:00am - 9:00am MDT
UNC Campus Commons 1051 22nd St, Greeley, CO 80639

General conference activity

9:00am MDT

Opening Remarks

Friday May 30, 2025 9:00am - 9:20am MDT

UNC Campus Commons

Speakers

Chealsye Bowley

Director of Open Education and Learning Innovation, Colorado Department of Higher Education

Got questions about OER in Colorado? Email: OER@dhe.state.co.us

Katie Brown

Associate Professor, Colorado State University Pueblo

Provost Kirsten Fleming

Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, University of Northern Colorado

Friday May 30, 2025 9:00am - 9:20am MDT
UNC Campus Commons 1051 22nd St, Greeley, CO 80639

General conference activity

9:20am MDT

OER Keynotes

Friday May 30, 2025 9:20am - 10:00am MDT

UNC Campus Commons

Four Colorado OER community members (a faculty, librarian, administrator and student) will share their open education hot takes to inspire and challenge the audience.

Speakers

Alegría Ribadeneira

DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR AND CHAIR, DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND WORLD LANGUAGES, Colorado State University Pueblo

Mitch Cota

Reference and OER Librarian, Arapahoe Community College

I am very interested in how different Community College's are maintaining OER materials and programs to ensure sustainability.

Friday May 30, 2025 1:15pm - 1:30pm MDT

UNC Campus Commons

Friday May 30, 2025 1:15pm - 1:30pm MDT
UNC Campus Commons 1051 22nd St, Greeley, CO 80639

1:35pm MDT

Break

Friday May 30, 2025 1:35pm - 1:45pm MDT

UNC Campus Commons

Friday May 30, 2025 1:35pm - 1:45pm MDT
UNC Campus Commons 1051 22nd St, Greeley, CO 80639

Break

1:45pm MDT

Make OER for STEM Accessible using PreTeXt

Friday May 30, 2025 1:45pm - 2:35pm MDT

UNC Campus Commons

All course materials posted online should (and legally must) be accessible. Instructors using OER are likely to create learning materials themselves; all the onus of ensuring accessibility falls to us.This is especially challenging for STEM fields where course materials are heavy with symbolic expressions and graphs. One solution is to use the PreTeXt authoring system, which in addition to producing fully accessible output, can embed interactive demonstrations and assessments to improve engagement of all your students.In this hands-on workshop, participants will develop a workflow for using PreTeXt for the creation and distribution of accessible materials. We will explore how to convert existing materials to PreTeXt, and share resources to learn additional features that PreTeXt offers to engage students. Instructors with all skill-levels of PreTeXt, from novice to expert, will gain understanding of what is required to use PreTeXt for every-day teaching materials.

Speakers

Oscar Levin

Professor, University of Northern Colorado

Friday May 30, 2025 1:45pm - 2:35pm MDT
UNC Campus Commons 1051 22nd St, Greeley, CO 80639

Workshop

Audience Beginner
Subject STEM

1:45pm MDT

Open Educational Resources: A Workshop for Every Stage

Friday May 30, 2025 1:45pm - 2:35pm MDT

UNC Campus Commons

This workshop is designed to support instructors at any stage in the OER process whether exploring pathways towards OER or enhancing existing materials. Each table will have one of our experienced colleagues to answer questions and provide resources to guide you covering the following topics: How to get started with OER with examples of what others have done in various disciplines. How to build on your existing OER materials to make them more accessible, diverse, up to date etc. 

Speakers

Joan Anderssen

Faculty, Arapahoe Community College

Felicia Brown

Instructor, Arapahoe Community College

Natalie Lascala

Content Developer, Arapahoe Community College

Friday May 30, 2025 1:45pm - 2:35pm MDT
UNC Campus Commons 1051 22nd St, Greeley, CO 80639

Workshop

1:45pm MDT

Playful Inquiry: Remixing TTRPGs for OER Scholarship and Teaching

Friday May 30, 2025 1:45pm - 2:35pm MDT

UNC Campus Commons

This hands-on workshop examines how play enriches research methodologies and teaching through open educational resources (OER). Drawing from Roll for Learning: 51 Micro Tabletop Role-Playing Games to Use in the Classroom, an open-access book featuring original games and pedagogical strategies for K12-higher education teaching, participants will explore playful inquiry as a method for deepening engagement and broadening access to knowledge. Through remixing a Creative Commons BY 4.0 "micro" tabletop role-playing game on paper and with an AI tool, attendees will gain practical experience in integrating game-based learning into their own contexts. By embracing play as a serious mode of exploration, this session reimagines OER scholarship and pedagogy as dynamic, interactive, and transformative spaces.

Speakers

Matthew Farber

Associate Professor, University of Northern Colorado

Matthew Farber, Ed.D. is an associate professor of educational technology at the University of Northern Colorado and the co-director of the Gaming SEL Lab. He developed game-based lessons with Tracy Fullerton for her award-winning Walden, a game EDU. He has collaborated with UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP), iThrive Games, and Games for Change. He was a contributing writer for... Read More →

William Merchant

Associate Professor, University of Northern Colorado

Friday May 30, 2025 1:45pm - 2:35pm MDT
UNC Campus Commons 1051 22nd St, Greeley, CO 80639

Workshop

1:45pm MDT

Principles and production of accessible course materials

Friday May 30, 2025 1:45pm - 2:35pm MDT

UNC Campus Commons

A good educator wants to make their instructional materials as accessible as possible for maximum benefit. This has become even more important for higher education instructors in Colorado, who are required to provide digital communications and information technology that are accessible to individuals with disabilities. This can be particularly difficult for educators who are typesetting technical documents that include complex formulas and mathematics because the software tools commonly used for creating these documents do not natively support documents accessible for those with disabilities. In this talk, we will demonstrate an alternative workflow relying on Pandoc to typeset technical documents that are more accessible materials for those with disabilities. We will also discuss additional tools that can help instructors assess how accessible their materials are. We will walk through self-contained examples that will help instructors improve the accessibility of their instructional materials.

Speakers

Joshua French

Associate Professor and Director of Data Science, University of Colorado Denver

Friday May 30, 2025 1:45pm - 2:35pm MDT
UNC Campus Commons 1051 22nd St, Greeley, CO 80639

Workshop

Audience Intermediate

2:35pm MDT

Break

Friday May 30, 2025 2:35pm - 2:45pm MDT

UNC Campus Commons

Friday May 30, 2025 2:35pm - 2:45pm MDT
UNC Campus Commons 1051 22nd St, Greeley, CO 80639

Break

3:15pm MDT

Break

Friday May 30, 2025 3:15pm - 3:25pm MDT

UNC Campus Commons

Friday May 30, 2025 3:15pm - 3:25pm MDT
UNC Campus Commons 1051 22nd St, Greeley, CO 80639

Break

3:25pm MDT

Empowering Student Voices: Building Effective OER Advocacy Groups on Campus

Friday May 30, 2025 3:25pm - 4:15pm MDT

UNC Campus Commons

In this session, panelists will provide a brief presentation on student OER advocacy on college campuses, including types of advocacy groups, ways students can promote and sustain OER on campus and to legislators, student roles in advocacy groups, and how to get started with developing OER advocacy groups on campus. Speakers will then provide details about the recently formed Pikes Peak State College advocacy club and discuss takeaways from the first campus OER kickoff on March 21. This will be an open conversation with the audience, where panel members will provide insight and support for developing OER student advocacy groups for college campuses across Colorado.

Speakers