Creating 2SLGBTQ+ Inclusive OER

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**This webinar is part of the OLC Innovate 2023 Best-in-Track webinar series!**

Whether due to the pandemic or the broader shift to online delivery, instructors are embracing open pedagogy as a way to engage learners in both in-person and online courses. As a framework for creating sustainable and authentic materials and assessment, open pedagogy and its related tools like open educational resources (OER) offers the possibility to increase inclusion in higher education. This webinar focuses on the importance of queer and transgender inclusion in OER and strategies for how instructors can both evaluate existing OER and find new sources for their courses.

Commercial textbook costs continue to rise; students can spend an average of $600 per semester on textbooks (The College Board, 2019). Adopting OER has been shown to increase student engagement, content comprehension, and course grades (Colvard, Watson, & Park, 2018; Hilton, 2016). In addition to OER (which must be able to be reused, retained, revised, remixed, and redistributed), instructors can utilize free-to-access materials, such as research articles and Youtube videos as course texts. Using a variety of scholarly and non-scholarly sources can help students connect to complicated topics and engage with personal stories. 

OER can also supplement voices and perspectives that are frequently left out of commercial textbooks. The majority of commercial textbooks used in college courses are written by authors of privileged identities (e.g., white, abled, cisgender, straight) for audiences of students of similar privileged identities. This can mean that people in marginalized groups are cast as the “other” or as exotic. In a sociopolitical period of heightening hostility toward 2SLGBTQ+ individuals, a lack of queer/trans inclusion can have outsized negative implications. 

Key Takeaways:

By the end of this webinar, participants will be able to:

  • Evaluate the level of queer/trans inclusion in their existing course materials
  • Identify new potential sources of OER and/or free-to-access course materials that can increase their courses’ queer/trans inclusion. 

Intended Audience:

Faculty and instructors, instructional designers, librarians

Speaker Bio
Kat Klement, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Psychology – Bemidji State University

Dr. Kat Klement (they/them) is an assistant professor of psychology at Bemidji State University, teaching courses primarily related to research methods, social psychology, and sex and gender. They first got into OER in 2020 and have since developed three courses using it: Human Sexuality, Queer Psychology, and Death & Culture. Along with faculty and librarian colleagues, they are working to increase queer and transgender inclusion in OER across disciplines. Their major research interests include sexual violence, how transphobia relates to other systems of oppression, and transgender patients’ experiences in healthcare. They have also published work related to consensual BDSM (bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, and sadism/masochism), sexual consent, and sexual entitlement.