Free U. S. History Discussion Prompts for Higher Ed

Expanding OER

Open Educational Resources (OER) are free, online materials for use in education. They seek to provide quality resources at no cost for educational purposes. This offsets the expense of both formal and informal education.

There are a number of great OER textbook options for American history in higher education, but not a lot of supporting activities that can be used in the virtual or physical classroom. My colleague Prof. Christopher Gerdes and I spent a year developing and refining discussion prompts to fill this void.

Thanks to a grant from The Higher Education Coordinating Board of Texas and support from Houston Community College and North American University, we were able to create these resources for the second half of U.S. History survey courses. Each prompt contains background reading, an image, a primary source, contemporary commentary, and questions to connect it all.

Overview

“These resources are discussion post prompts designed for use in online classes or for class discussions. Each focuses on a topic from a specific chapter in the OpenStax US History textbook beginning with chapter 17. As such, all topics and themes are designed for the second half of the US History survey course.

Each prompt is designed to center on a specific topic from each chapter and then connect it to the context of a theme or idea in modern or contemporary times.

In this way history is taught so students can understand that it is relevant to their own lives, rather than merely a series of events surviving in their own insulated past.“

Peruse and download the resources (free!) at OER Texas.