Creating and Using OER Materials in an Intro-Level Atmospheric Science Class

A new Open Education Resource (OER) was created with funding from the Outreach College at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. OERs are materials for teaching and learning that can be used freely at no cost by anyone; our materials are designated under a creative commons copyright license. Supplemental materials to the “Practical Meteorology” textbook by Roland Stull were created to add additional descriptive material to aid in student learning. Traditionally the Atmospheric Science department's introductory class used Ahren’s “Essentials of Meteorology” textbook and was supplemented by equations and other quantitative material in lecture. Now we use Stull’s textbook which is quantitative, but has less descriptive content as compared to other introductory level textbooks, and we supplement it with our OER materials.

The Stull textbook is freely available online, as are the OER chapter discussions and practice questions we created. A combination of the two were subsequently used in the UHManoa atmospheric science introductory course for majors this past semester. Over the course of the semester, students were asked to use and to comment on the OER materials. Course participation credit was given for specific feedback. Through this process, we learned a lot about creating useful OER materials, as well as using it, and getting feedback from students. Furthermore, the OER materials that we created are shared online, and we encourage members of the broader community to use and give feedback and additional input to help make them even better in the future.