For the last two years I have worked with Confluence Courseware to create Open Education Resource (OER) based Course Guides for my classes, in an effort to not only reduce the cost of classroom materials (the required textbook costs to students have been cut in half), and thus boost learning, but also to reverse current social trends by using digital technology not as an ends but a means—as a tool to promote genuine and significant human conversation. Using open access great works—including influential and important texts from all of human history in the creative arts and literature, religion, philosophy, the natural, applied and social sciences—these Course Guides utilize the more beneficial aspects of our technological society, while mitigating the more deleterious cultural consequences by requiring more classroom conversations (and out-of-class preparation for engagement). Having field tested this approach with over 1,000 students, I know it works.
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The Confluence Course Publishing Process
1. Choose a Course to Digitize
Increase student access to course materials and engagement, include Open Educational Resources including multimedia, track assessments, and more.
2. Customize a Confluence Course
Confluence Collegiate provides humanities courses as a foundation for adding your own original, edited or rearranged content to meet your students’ needs.
3. Create a New Course for Your Class
Bring us your course manuscript and we will do the rest from editing through completion of a beautiful, easy-to-use digital course.
4. Confluence Digitizes Your Course
Confluence uses state-of-the-art course creation software that results in a digital course complete with the text from a manuscript, links to Open Educational Resources, multimedia, and trackable assessments.
5. Your Course Hosted by Confluence
Your course will be handsomely displayed in the Confluence Catalog where it is easy to purchase and is backed up with secure servers.
6. Lower Student Text Cost at Our Catalog
The digital courses we develop have been made available to students at a fraction of the cost of traditional textbooks. The % Dr. Redwing’s JC students possessing the courseware has risen from 15% to 85%.