A faculty member in the University of Houston Cullen College of Engineering recently published a new open educational resource (OER) with the support of UH Libraries Open Education Services.

Dr. Tasha Bennett

Dr. Tasha Bennett, Lecturer in Human Development and Consumer Sciences, participated in the OER Creation Program with UH Libraries, an incentive program that supported faculty in developing high-quality course materials that are free to access, share, and customize. The program provided professional development and financial support for faculty to develop new OER that would be used as required course material in a UH course or program, and that would fill a gap in existing OER content.

Bennett successfully completed a year-long professional development program facilitated by the Rebus Foundation, which provided training for OER project scoping, content creation, review, and editing. After completing the program, Bennett developed and organized the content for the book, then formatted and published the completed OER on Pressbooks, a publishing platform provided by UH Libraries for open course materials.

Reflecting on her experience, Bennett noted that the structure and support provided helped her move the open textbook project from concept to completion. “It not only supports the development of high-quality open textbooks but also empowers faculty to rethink how learning resources can be designed to better serve our students,” Bennett said.

The open textbook, A Journey Through eLearning Design: From Idea to Impact, was published on UH Libraries Pressbooks in December 2025. It was designed to support two undergraduate Human Resources Development courses, Instructional Design for Human Resources Development and Designing eLearning Applications, both required for students majoring in the program. 

A Journey Through eLearning Design: From Idea to Impact

The textbook equips emerging creators with skills and strategies to design digital learning experiences that will engage learners in modern classroom settings. Covering a variety of foundational topics like learning design models and dimensions of learner engagement, in addition to emerging technologies like AI, the book will help students understand how they can design learning experiences intentionally to maximize their impact. 

The resource is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, allowing other instructors to reuse, adapt, and redistribute customized versions that meet their specific teaching and learning needs. 

“This OER will have a huge impact on the students who will be using it, not only because it’s free of cost, but it is a unique, custom resource that is tailored to Dr. Bennett’s courses,” said Kate McNally Carter, Coordinator of Open Education Services. “I am excited to see how she will be able to build upon this resource as she continues to teach with it. Additionally, it will also benefit the broader OER community by serving as an exceptional resource for instructional design education.”

In addition to structure and support, the OER Creation Program offered flexibility and emphasized faculty ownership and agency over the materials they were developing. “I appreciated the autonomy of designing a resource that aligned closely with my teaching philosophy and the specific needs of my students,” Bennett said. This enabled Bennett to center the OER around her curriculum, providing targeted training for in-demand skills that will better prepare UH students for the training and development industry.

To learn more about creating OER, contact Open Education Services by emailing [email protected].