Name: The Seven-Year Evolution of a Z-Course Boot Camp
Start: 2026-10-07T16:55:00-0400
End: 2026-10-07T17:25:00-0400

All sessions are available online except round tables, special activities, and workshops.

The Seven-Year Evolution of a Z-Course Boot Camp

Wednesday October 7, 2026 4:55pm - 5:25pm EDT

6 DR4

ID: 33944

Since 2019, the Open Educational Resources Committee at Fort Hays State University (FHSU) has offered an annual Z-Course Boot Camp event to teach faculty interested in converting to zero-cost course materials about reasons to consider switching, project management, copyright and licensing, OER authoring tools, accessibility, (more recently) generative artificial intelligence, and publishing and sharing. The boot camp is taught by a combination of librarians and instructional designers and is aimed primarily at faculty who have received a Z-Course Grant to convert their course to use zero-cost course materials, although it is open to all faculty. This session discusses the evolution of the boot camp through several formats, from a two-day in-person event, to a synchronous Zoom event, to a one-day event, to its current form as an asynchronous course offered in Blackboard Ultra, FHSU’s LMS. The boot camp has always had a strong emphasis on feedback and revision. In its asynchronous form, the camp begins with a welcome module that introduces participants to resources available to support OER work at the institutional and state level and provides a syllabus and list of relevant terminology. Each module contains readings and/or videos, a discussion requiring participants to apply and share new knowledge and skills, and a brief survey to capture participants’ feedback and suggestions for how the module could be improved. The camp ends with a final survey and a certificate for participants who complete it. We are currently on the second iteration of the asynchronous boot camp and expect to continue to update it iteratively every year. The current iteration contains the following modules:Why Open, which contains testimonial videos from faculty and readings about student needs and behaviors around course material costsProject Management, which contains a worksheet walking participants through searching for existing OERs, readings and videos about textbook structure and elements and textbook mapping for revision projects, and an exercise in which students review an existing textbookAccessibility, which talks about current regulations and best practices and includes a reflection and persona exerciseAI and OER, which is currently fairly minimal, with a single reading and a discussion about concerns and opportunitiesCopyright and Licensing, which contains readings about evaluating copyright, requesting permission to use student work, and finding free-to-use mediaAuthoring Tools, which contains a comparison between Pressbooks and Libretexts (the two OER authoring platforms for which FHSU provides support) and instructional videos on how to use bothPublishing and Sharing, which discusses how to implement peer review, add metadata, publish, print on demand, and promote new open resources within the OER and scholarly communities

Speakers

Claire Nickerson

Associate Professor and Open Initiatives Librarian, Fort Hays State University

Claire Nickerson is an associate professor and the Open Initiatives Librarian at Fort Hays State University (FHSU) in Kansas. She also sits on Open Up Learning Kansas, the statewide OER steering committee for the Kansas Board of Regents (KBOR). At FHSU, she chairs the institutional... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 4:55pm - 5:25pm EDT
6 DR4 MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality In-person
Track Innovating Open Content to Democratize Knowledge

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OEGlobal 2026

Claire Nickerson

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OEGlobal 2026

Claire Nickerson

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