Open educational practices at AUCA

At AMICAL Conference we would like to share our practice of implementing OER in AUCA. Participation on the conference gives opportunity to receive feedback, to network with colleagues from AMICAL Consortium and to exchange experiences.

In American University of Central Asia, two departments worked together to implement the pilot project on inclusion of Open Access resources as the core text for the course. The pilot project brought together two departments: Sociology and Library to create a new syllabus for the introductory course in Sociology. The main objective of the project is to popularize the use of open access resources in Introductory level course across all the disciplines existing in our University. The first course which syllabus was designed and almost all the required readings were from Open Access resources, is “General Sociology for non-sociologists” course. To build this course several core texts were used and one of them is Sociology 2e, by OpenStax Open Access resource. At the beginning of the course, students were offered a workshop introducing them to the concepts of open education training them on using different formats of open textbooks and materials. At the end of the course, students and faculty will be surveyed regarding their teaching and learning experience while using open educational resources. The discussion of the experiences will help develop further strategies to popularize open educational resources across disciplines.