OER Heroes
An OER Hero is a faculty member who has displayed great dedication to using Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) or developing Open Education Resources (OER) for their classes. We admire these heroes for their courage in forging a new pedagogical path, for their achievement in developing or adopting new resources for their students, and for the dedication to helping students overcome financial barriers to academic success.
2022
Malerie Fernandes is our OER Hero for Spring 2022.
Malerie Fernandes is committed to student equity in online education and through Open
Educational Resources and Zero Textbook Cost. She was active in seeking training and
resources in making her courses OER/ZTC by participating in the OER/ZTC training course
online.
Her full time work in the field at Stanislaus County Office of Education contributes
a great deal to her success as an Part-Time Instructor in the community. Her currency
and knowledge in the subject matter is demonstrated by her use of the OER resources,
materials, and content used in the course learning applications.
Malerie is a valuable part of the Child Development department. Her shared enthusiasm
for promoting current and best practices allows the rest of the department the ability
to support student success with the community and workforce preparation through the
use of OER content.
Our inaugural OER Hero is Rebecca Reyes.
Before Rebecca’s untimely and tragic death, the OER/ZTC Team had chosen her to be
our first OER Hero. We still want to honor her for her hard work and dedication to
her students.
Rebecca's commitment to increasing student access was made obvious when she enrolled in the ZTC/OER online training course. Upon completion of this training, she developed her English 103- Advanced Composition & Critical Thinking course as a ZTC course. Following this process, she took it upon herself to convert all of her classes to ZTC, which we know, was an incredible investment of effort and time. Her colleague, who nominated her writes, “Rebecca worked so hard on transitioning all of her courses to ZTC. She was very proud of all the materials she was able to find and provide for her students."
One of the textbooks she adopted for her English 103 course is Arguing Using Critical Thinking.