Higher education faculty are tasked with providing students with unique and creative opportunities to explore real-world exposure and experience. Content creation puts students in the driver’s seat for learning and application of course content. This paper discusses the redesign of a senior-level Business Communications course at a public four-year institution in Hawaii through project-based learning and content creation, linking students with their community. The course redesign provided a creative platform for students to create, collaborate, and share their original work with a local non-profit focused on giving back to the community. Faculty utilized High Impact Practices (HIPS) in the course redesign to fuse creative and collaborative assignments with community-based learning. The utilization of Open Educational Resources (OER) was selected for the course redesign chiefly for its openly licensed format, increasing equity and access to learning materials (Van Allen & Katz, 2020). OER provides zero-cost course content, essential for the underserved student populations hit notably hard during economic dips (Colvard et al., 2018). The course redesign provided a hands-on approach that required students to develop their research and critical thinking skills while allowing for creativity and collaboration with stakeholders. Students created an e-portfolio of content focused on the non-profit’s primary goals. Each portfolio consisted of numerous writing assignments aligned with a theme. The course utilized peer reviews and instructor feedback to revise and rework the e-portfolio in preparation for sharing or publication. The final student portfolios were made available as OER to contribute back to the nonprofit organization and educational community.

Authors:
Leslie Rush, University of Hawaii West Oahu, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Leslie Rush is a University Assistant Professor/Lecturer at University of Hawaii West Oahu in United States

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