Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Pedagogy are powerful tools that can lower course costs, increase student engagement, and create opportunities for inclusion, accessibility, and student empowerment. Our hands-on, interactive workshops and training sessions provide focused time to put research-driven philosophy into practice for your current and upcoming courses.
Current Offerings
Open for All Workshop & Discussion Series (April 10 – May 6, 2026)
The Open for All Workshop is a process-based faculty development program focusing on how to evaluate a course for inclusivity along different dimensions (representation, accessibility, and student voice and choice) and how Open Educational Practices can foster student belonging in the online classroom. The workshop is built around a series of five live online discussions with a supporting LMS resource site.
As a final workshop project, participants conduct a review of an SPS course that they have developed or taught, specifically looking at opportunities to implement inclusive pedagogy through open educational practices. All SPS faculty and course developers are invited to participate in the workshop, whatever their level of experience with DEIA pedagogies, OER, or Open Pedagogy.
Please note that eligible faculty are compensated upon successful completion of the workshop. See our flyer or Advanced Workshops for full description.
Register by Monday, April 6: [Registration]
Previously Offered
Open UDL Workshop
This fifteen-day, online workshop provides an in-depth introduction to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and to the intersection of UDL and Open Educational Practices (OEP), which include OER and Open Pedagogy. Participants will review the principles of UDL and explore how OEP can help reduce accessibility barriers for all learners, including those with disabilities. Participants will also learn about best accessibility practices in online courses, including identifying and fixing common accessibility issues. For the workshop project, participants will complete an inventory of one of their courses from a UDL perspective and create a plan for implementing UDL principles and open practices.
Open and Active Video Workshop
This workshop invites faculty to identify a pedagogical need that can be addressed by the addition of multimedia content presented in an active learning context. Participants will be trained on the steps for scripting, recording, and editing an instructional video and on adding interactive elements to videos in their courses. The workshop includes technical training and support for the screencast recording, hosting, and sharing tools available at SPS.
OER and Open Pedagogy Workshop
This two-week workshop introduces the theory and tools that support OER and Open Pedagogy in online courses. In the first week, participants investigate OER identification and adoption/adaptation, attributes and examples of Open Pedagogy, and how OER can be used as Open Pedagogy. In the second week, participants find, adapt, or build OER or Open Pedagogy lessons to implement in their own courses.
From Open Educational Resources (OER) to Open Pedagogy (one-hour training session)
Whether you’re looking to lower course costs for your students, update or customize instructional materials to make them more relevant and engaging, or empower your students to become active contributors to your field, Open Educational Resources (OER) and open pedagogy may be just what you’re looking for. In this one-hour session, we’ll introduce the why and how of OER—materials that are free and openly licensed for you or your students to reuse, retain, revise, remix, and redistribute. We’ll also explore how student-created or student-remixed OER can fulfill the goals of open pedagogy—an approach that invites students to create knowledge rather than to merely consume it.
