One of the great things about a project-based course is that students can bring fresh, creative angles to the standard topics in a field. Unfortunately, their contributions often don’t have a lifespan beyond the semester or a good way to reach a broader audience. Google recently revamped its aging Google Sites service, and I found it to offer an effective solution for this challenge in my course this semester, especially in combination with the rest of Google’s cloud services .  If you’re interested in sharing student projects on a public-facing site, I also found some licensing tools from Creative Commons nicely address some important concerns about credit and reuse. Engaging Students As a philosopher teaching in ASU’s School of Life Sciences, I’m always looking for creative ways to engage students with philosophy as an activity – something we can do together as a group -- rather than a bunch of theories disconnected from what they’re studying. I’ve been teaching an upper-level ...

At yesterday's information session, we shared a number of resources to help faculty participate in the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement . Faculty and Grad Students discussed the many challenges of awareness and finding the right open materials. However, all agreed that with ASU's "inclusive" environment, the use of OERs in the classroom would continue to develop in the future. Our ASU Life Sciences Librarian, Rene Tanner, discussed the benefits of submitting papers to the ASU Digital Repository as an important step in increasing the impact of scholarly work. Making pre-publications, post-review publications, white papers, and data available in ASU's Digital Repository will make it possible for others to find, use, and reference your work without paying a fee. More information can be found on the ASU Library Guide for Open Education . Some other highlights of the session were: Defining OER, Open Access, and Open Pedagogy with this 4-minute video by...