Free, relevant & customizable

I am Sandra Lepper, and I teach Understanding World Art: which is an art appreciation course that is also a diversity credit. This course is fairly unusual in that it combines basic visual concepts with global images and ideas, and I always had a difficult time finding an appropriate and useful text. With OER I have now developed a combination of my own written and visual materials, with sources ranging from the Thematic Essays at the Metropolitan Museum to films, videos of artists, and other internet sources (like the Washington Archaeology and Historic Preservation site) and not only included these inside their Canvas course but made them available in a Google site they can access once they are registered. This way our material is 1) customized to our course and location 2) accessible in a variety of formats and technology through the Google site and 3) free! So far they love it! They especially like the custom videos I made describing how to do each assignment and showing examples. Happy, and more successful students this year.