New Blog, Who Dis?

Posted on Oct 26, 2025
tl;dr: Inaugural blog post, with a link to an introductory OER presentation video.

Welcome to OERforge

Setting up this blog has been on my (very long) list of “projects to do someday” for a while now, and I’ve been meaning to try out Hugo for even longer. Recent events have give me a good reason to take it off the back burner, though, so here it is.

I expect to cover a wide range of OER-related issues, but my focus will probably on the software, standards, and processes needed to create and adapt, and then package and distribute, open educational resources.

OER Presentation

In order to make this first post worth your while, I’m also including a presentation I made in the Focus on Student Learning workshop here at Shepherd last week. You can grab the slides in PDF or Markdown format, and you can watch a video screencast version of my talk that I recorded afterward.

Here are some useful places to search for OER that I mentioned in my presentation:

And here are some useful cross-platform, open-source tools for creating OER (or anything else):

Acknowledgements

Finally, this is probably a good place to thank the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission, which supports OER here in the WV public university system with grants, workshops, and other initiatives. This commitment to students is one of the best things about my new (since Fall 2023) job here at Shepherd!

So far, I’ve been fortunate to receive four individual grants related to adopting and creating OER in my classes at Shepherd, and I’m co-leading a team that just received a “challenge grant” from WVHEPC this semester. I’ll be reporting on my work on that grant here over the 2025–2026 academic year.

As Shep used to say, “Excelsior!”