With partnership, Morgan State is bringing open content platform to campus

Morgan State University has a new partnership with a New York-based company, panOpen, that’s designed to support access to freely accessible education resources for faculty and students at the Baltimore institution.

Open education resources, or OER, are free and openly licensed educational materials. In the case of Morgan State, they will be peer-reviewed, and designed to be used in the same manner as a textbook. The company’s platform also adds interactive elements.

At Morgan State, the platform will allow for faculty to collaborate with peers at other institutions. In turn, the faculty’s academic contributions will be made available with a Creative Commons license. For students, the platform provides a way to read and build study guides, as well as communicate with faculty and other students.

“By drawing on the disciplinary expertise here at Morgan and elsewhere, and powerful learning technologies specifically designed to support OER collaboration, we seek to lower costs, improve outcomes for our students, and better prepare them for their post-graduate professional lives,” Dr. Solomon Alao, Morgan State’s assistant VP of assessment and operations, said in a statement. “We are therefore excited to work with panOpen to help achieve these goals and engage our entire academic community in its innovative OER-based learning platform.”

Along with signing the partnership, there are also efforts to work directly with faculty to bring the technology to campus. Morgan State faculty have begun training on the platform. Grants are also being made available to continue through the summer.