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The Vision and Change (V&C) report called for biology departments to transform their programs by using student-centered teaching approaches and integrating core concepts and competences throughout their curriculum. The biology education community has responded to this call in a variety of ways, including the development, sharing, and implementation of open educational resources (OERs) that apply research-based instructional strategies. OER lessons are structured activities that are published in peer-reviewed journals. Collecting information on how instructors implement OER lessons can increase our understanding of how shared materials are being translated into classroom practice and how students ultimately engage with OER content and activities. This study aims to understand how instructors implement published OERs and to what extent student-centered teaching approaches are used during implementation. We selected five top-downloaded OER lessons published in a peer-reviewed journal based on their feasibility to complete in 1-2 class sessions and relevance to V&C core concepts. For each of the target lessons, we recruited instructors from different institution types who implemented one of the lessons in their courses. We collected video recordings of the class meeting(s) in which the instructors implemented the lessons. We used the Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS) to analyze the video recordings and identify what student and instructor behaviors occur during each two-minute segment of class time. We found that instructors utilize similar types of practices when implementing the same OER lesson. However, we found variation in student COPUS behaviors between the classes that implemented the same lesson, likely due to instructors changing student in-class activities to some extent. Together, these results indicate that though instructors generally follow the published lessons, minor modifications are being made that change how students engage with the lesson material, particularly during in-class activities.
