There has been a great deal of discussion in the news lately about the cost of colleges texts and rightly so.  But not all Open Educational Resources are created equal, and most have been aimed at introductory classes or at replacing textbooks.  That can be quite helpful, but that doesn’t always meet the needs of upper-level undergraduate or graduate history classes.

I propose a session in which we talk about existing openly available resources for teaching history, identify the key components in good resources, discuss the possibilities of working with students to create openly available resources of our own, and collaborate on a Google doc to share those ideas.

I titled this “obligatory” because the issue of convincing departments, administrators, hiring committees, and tenure and promotion boards of the value of digitally enabled scholarship and teaching has been coming up since the very first THATCamp in 2008 (and most of the hundreds since then).  The advantage of the question coming up that often is that lots of people have had chances to talk about it and even formulate some responses. [The AHA itself released its Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians just this year.]  And yet, each situation, each school, each project, each individual’s work is different, so it continues to be a topic worth discussing.

So, I propose a session where we discuss people’s concerns in this area, talk about strategies others have used in the past, and talk about the ways that the AHA’s new guidelines provide some structure for the profession going forward.