About our OER audio shorts
What’s OER?
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials — books, articles, images, audio, video, interactive modules, and more — that educators and students can freely create, license, (re)use, own, and modify at no cost.
The open education movement aims to create alternatives to traditional educational resources, often inaccessible and unaffordable due to publisher monopolies, paywalls, and the neoliberal marketplace’s grip on the educational sector. OER can mitigate the high cost of learning materials, which otherwise typically falls on students and educators.
OER can also allow educators to integrate perspectives — like those of Black, brown, queer, and other marginalized people — that challenge the dominant white supremacist status quo reproduced by mainstream publishers and educational standards.
At BBQ+, we aim to create innovative OERs that add crucial voices to the conversation and enhance the current educational landscape — from K-12 to higher education to community and nontraditional settings.
Why audio shorts?
Our Pedagogy Lab summer Fellows each create two open educational resource (OER) audio shorts (under 20 minutes long) that blend guided meditation, storytelling, oral history, and podcast. These shorts lead listeners through sensory experiences, introduce theories and concepts, reflect on aspects of Black, brown, and queer existence, and more.
Any one media format may intrinsically exclude some people, and audio is not accessible to those who are d/Deaf, hard-of-hearing, or have audio processing disorders, especially if not transcribed. We are currently working on transcribing our audio OER. As an accessibility best practice, we recommend providing learning materials in as many formats as possible.
Our expanding OER Library supports and host OER in many different formats.
That said, the Pedagogy Fellowship focuses on audio specifically in order to:
Challenge the privileging of the written word in academia, K-12, and Western societies in general.
Increase accessibility for those who process information better in audio, reduce cognitive overload, and meet more students’ needs.
Provide a healing antidote for students and educators enduring systemic failures and the ongoing pandemic. Shorter than a full-length podcast, audio shorts create temporal spaces that students and educators can enter together.
Enhance the content in public OER repositories used by educators worldwide. Oral/audio forms of narrative, research, and meaning-making in general, along with content from Black, brown, and queer people, are underrepresented in the OER landscape.
Cultivate a sense of play, creativity, and care in the creation and distribution of educational material.
Challenge Fellows to draw on their personal experiences and interests and succinctly address complex theories and ideas for various audiences.