A self contained, interactive open educational resource for object oriented programming

As the need for workers in STEM disciplines increases, the importance of addressing barriers to diversity in the discipline also increases. Open Educational Resources (OER) have been shown to be of particular benefit for underserved populations and persons with financial need, but also have a positive impact on overall student achievement. Interactive educational resources are popular with students and generally have a positive impact on student achievement. In the discipline of computer programming, a good interactive resource can provide learners with incremental practice and interactive examples that are much more difficult to understand when provided as part of a static textbook. Unfortunately, interactive resources can be difficult to find and are often part of expensive subscription-based programs. This can result in instructors adopting a patchwork of resources that requires learners to use several different websites and services in the process of completing a single course. This causes several learning challenges: students may not be able to afford the subscription cost of one or more resources, students may experience additional technostress due to the number of different resources required, and students may not have adequate internet availability to meaningfully interact with the online resources. The patchwork of resources solution only works for learners that have reliable, ubiquitous access to the internet and who are confident in their ability to navigate many different technical resources. This paper discusses the development of a Self-Contained, Interactive Open Educational Resource (SCI-OER) for use by students and instructors of Object-Oriented Programming using the Java programming language. Since the resource is self-contained and provides all the tools necessary for learners, it can assist in reducing the technostress associated with using new software development tools in parallel with new software for learning and skills practice. The self-contained nature of the resources also eliminates any requirement for students to have reliable internet access. The interactive nature of the resource encourages experimentation and incremental practice as well as provides the capacity for learners to annotate the resource with their personal observations and learnings. The paper describes the development of the Object-Oriented SCI-OER resource and then discusses the potential for a semi-automated process to create SCI-OER resources for other courses.