Penn State University Libraries is leading a pilot project on behalf of the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) to develop a model for supporting open-source online homework delivery systems as supplemental resources for teaching with open educational resources (OER). Funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the project is intended to support IMLS’s objective to advance shared knowledge and learning opportunities for all students, as well as strengthen the ability of libraries to work collaboratively for the benefit of the communities we serve, said Bryan McGeary, learning design and open education engagement librarian at Penn State and principal investigator on the project.
Saturday, September 30, 2023
Friday, September 29, 2023
OpenStax welcomes largest group of schools into Institutional Partner Program to date
Rice University’s OpenStax is welcoming 16 colleges and universities into its Institutional Partner Program for the 2023-24 school year. Participants receive support from experts in institutional change management and strategic initiatives aimed at increasing campus use of free, openly licensed OpenStax textbooks. This year the program welcomes the following institutions: Adrian College, Barry University, Chattahoochee Technical College-Mountain View, Clinton College, Coker University, Collin College-Plano, University of Arkansas-Cossatot Community College, Georgia State University, Meredith College, Motlow State Community College, Pace University-Pleasantville, Southwest Texas Junior College, Texas A&M University-Commerce, University of San Diego, University of South Carolina-Beaufort and West Virginia Wesleyan College.
Thursday, September 28, 2023
Openverse Wins 2023 Open Education Award, Seeks Community Feedback for 2024 Roadmap - Sarah Gooding, WP Tavern
Openverse has landed an Open Education Award for Excellence in the Open Infrastructure category. Open Education Global (OEG) is a non-profit organization that supports the use of open education to expand education access and affordability. Its annual awards recognize outstanding contributions to the Open Education community and its network of resources. Openverse is one of 16 winners selected from more than 170 applicants. The award reviewers suggested Openverse “should be the primary recommended search for OER development,” due to its clear licensing and easy, one-click attribution, among other features:
Wednesday, September 27, 2023
OpenStax to Release Free Online Organic Chemistry Textbook, Instructional Materials - Kristal Kuykendall, Campus Technology
Rice University’s OpenStax project has announced that on Sept. 12, it will release the complete digital version of Organic Chemistry: A Tenth Edition, with unlimited free access online to students and faculty. The historically costly textbook, which is required material for organic chemistry courses nationwide, will be available in printed form for purchase at “an affordable price,” OpenStax said in a news release. The organization will also offer free access to aligned supplemental resources, including lecture slides, test items and a solution manual, through its website, OpenStax.org.
Tuesday, September 26, 2023
Introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER) - Clark University
"Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. OER form part of ‘Open Solutions’, alongside Free and Open Source software (FOSS), Open Access (OA), Open Data (OD) and crowdsourcing platforms. UNESCO
Monday, September 25, 2023
OEAwards -Jennryn Wetzler Creative Commons
Jennryn is the Director of Learning and Training at Creative Commons. She runs the Creative Commons Certificate program, a training in open licensing, copyright, and the ethos of our global, shared commons. She focuses on projects to increase collaboration and support for open education, globally. Prior to Creative Commons, Jennryn worked on open policy and open educational resources (OER) at the U.S. Department of State. She has also enjoyed gaining a different perspective on education through international development work in Thailand and as a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger. The ten week online Creative Commons Certificate course provides an-in depth study of Creative Commons licenses and open practices, developing participants’ open licensing proficiency and understanding of the broader context for open advocacy.
https://awards.oeglobal.org/awards/2023/catalyst/jennryn-wetzler/
Sunday, September 24, 2023
Learning by doing: practical tips from 10 years of making Moocs - Stuart Nicol , Fiona Buckland, Times Higher Ed
Two online learning experts share lessons gained during a decade of developing and refining massive open online courses (Moocs). As we look back over 10 years of producing massive open online courses (Moocs), we can be very proud of our achievements, with the 100 courses reaching more than 4.5 million students all over the world. As part of our commitment to open education, more than 1,000 of the videos we produced have been shared as open educational resources (OERs): freely downloadable, editable and reusable under Creative Commons licences.
Saturday, September 23, 2023
Penn State HOTLINE GIVE APPLY This is Penn State Academics Admission Tuition and Aid Research Athletics News ACADEMICS Second annual Open Champion award winners honored for work with open education - Penn State
At the end of the spring 2023 semester, six Penn State Commonwealth Campuses named faculty members as Open Champions, recognizing their work with open education in the second year of Penn State’s Open and Affordable Educational Resources (OAER) Champion Awards. A collaboration between Penn State University Libraries and the University-wide OAER Working Group, the OAER Champion Award began as a pilot initiative in 2022 and seeks to recognize excellence, innovation and impact in open educational practices at Penn State campuses.
Friday, September 22, 2023
Rowley receives PALSave Open Educator Award - Depauw University
The Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI) has named nine faculty and staff members from its supported institutions as recipients of the PALSave Open Educator Award for the 2022-23 academic year. The award recognizes innovation and excellence in support of higher education, textbook affordability and student success. Sarah Rowley, associate professor of history, is one of the recipients. She was selected for being a key player in the creation and adoption of Open Educational Resources, a move that reduces costs for students, improves access to required texts, and increases student success and retention.
Thursday, September 21, 2023
Announcing the 2023-24 Open Educational Resources (OER) Grant recipients - McMaster University
Fourteen McMaster University faculty, instructional assistants, and staff are receiving grants to support nine projects that will foster the creation of free online textbooks and other openly licensed digital educational materials. The McMaster Open Educational Resources (OER) Grant Program is supported by the Office of the Provost, McMaster University Library, McMaster Students Union, and the MacPherson Institute. It provides successful applicants with funding to create or adapt and customize OERs, enabling new pedagogical approaches and costs savings for students. The program also offers an award for instructors to peer review an existing open textbook.
Wednesday, September 20, 2023
Open-access textbook on the Holocaust co-edited by Hazleton sociology professor - Penn State Libraries
An open educational resource (OER) textbook, “The Holocaust: Remembrance, Respect, and Resilience,” is now available for previewing by educators and learners. This preview edition is co-edited by Michael Polgar, professor of sociology, Penn State Hazleton, and Suki John, professor of classical and contemporary dance, Texas Christian University. The text's audience includes people involved with secondary and college/university education. It is an ongoing and growing collaboration among dozens of multidisciplinary international contributors working in university and secondary education, cultural heritage organizations, and other sectors.
Tuesday, September 19, 2023
Are textbooks in or out? The state of open educational resources - Don Watkins, Open Source
The cost of textbooks has added a tremendous financial burden to students around the world. In response, the U.S. Department of Education initiated the #GoOpen movement last year, which helped provide the impetus for schools and universities to consider the use of open educational resources seriously. One of the leaders in this rapidly changing landscape in education is Cable Green, director of Open Education for Creative Commons. I interviewed him recently to find out more about his experience. His insights provide an embarkation point for anyone seriously interested in this topic.
Monday, September 18, 2023
Free textbooks and other open educational resources gain popularity - Toni Feder, Physics Today
The prices of college textbooks have skyrocketed: From 2011 to 2018, they went up by 40.6% in the US, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index. That can add up to as much as $1000 for a single semester. So it’s no surprise that freely available, openly licensed textbooks, lectures, simulations, problem sets, and more—known collectively as open educational resources (OERs)—are having a moment. Last year, for the first time, more than half of US college faculty reported “some level of awareness” of OERs, finds Bay View Analytics, a company that conducts research at the intersection of technology and education.
Sunday, September 17, 2023
Top 20 Professional Development Resources For Teachers - Teaching Expertise
Today’s ever-evolving educational landscape calls for teachers to be lifelong learners. From understanding new technologies to getting to grips with innovative pedagogical techniques, staying abreast of the latest trends is crucial! To assist in this department, we’ve curated a list of 20 diverse development resources- each unique in what they offer. Whether you’re looking for online courses, instructional coaching, or simply a community of educators to learn from, you’ll find a wealth of knowledge and inspiration here. Get stuck right in to take your teaching to new heights.
Saturday, September 16, 2023
Free your content! A guide to creating sustainable open licensed media - Lorna Campbell, Times Higher Ed
Universities invest considerable time and resource in developing high-quality media for teaching and learning, so it’s important that these materials are sustainable and reusable and can reach the widest number of students and learners. However, use of media resources can be limited by copyright restrictions. Media that includes licensed third-party content, such as images, audio and music, may be used only in closed teaching spaces, for a fixed period of time, or with a limited number of learners. A great way to ensure that your teaching and learning media can be widely reused in a broad range of contexts, without concerns about infringing copyright, is to develop them as open educational resources (OER).
Friday, September 15, 2023
More Professors Aware of, and Using, Open Educational Resources - Lauren Coffey, Inside Higher Ed
Bay View Analytics, with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, conducts an annual survey focused on open educational resources, or OER. They are teaching and learning materials that are openly licensed, adaptable and freely available online. This year's survey found that both usage and awareness of OER are at an all-time high, with nearly a third of instructors, 29 percent, requiring OER in their classrooms.
Thursday, September 14, 2023
Free-to-Students Initiative has saved students $1.5M on textbooks - Longmont Leader
Over the past five years, Aims Community College has focused on moving more classes to their Free-to-Student (F2S) initiative. This initiative prioritizes the use of learning resources that are freely available to educators and students. It has now saved students more than $1.5 million on textbooks. “I'm very proud of the work that our faculty and staff have done so that we can support students not just to save money but also to address equity challenges that students face,” Doug Strauss, program director of the Learning Commons, said in a press release.
Wednesday, September 13, 2023
Zero Textbook Cost program continues to grow - Seth Henderson, the Connection
Participation in the Zero Textbook Cost program has increased to two-thirds of faculty with Cosumnes River College leading the district in the number of ZTC courses offered. The campus is looking to set an example for other colleges by innovating new ways for students to access resources at no cost to them, said Andi Adkins-Pogue, faculty lead for CRC’s Open Educational Resources and Zero Textbook Cost project. “This really is an equity issue,” Adkins-Pogue said. “If we’re concerned about creating a space that helps as many students as possible, we need to look at the cost of textbooks.”
Tuesday, September 12, 2023
MTSU Mondays: Improving free course resources, promising enrollment, national ranking - MTSU
While the cost of textbooks in higher education poses a significant challenge to many students, accessibility to course materials for those with disabilities is an even greater challenge for some whose limitations make learning more difficult. So a multidisciplinary team of five faculty members is working toward improving accessibility for all through Open Educational Resources, which are course materials made free to students through a variety of platforms.
Monday, September 11, 2023
OpenAI will introduce new products - Daniel Casil, GearRice
For the first time, OpenAI will hold a conference in San Francisco. Called “DevDay”, it will support the arrival of new products, such as the appearance of watermarks for AI content, and certainly improvements in terms of GPT-4 image understanding. What about GPT-5? On its blog, the Californian company managed by Sam Altman remained vague on the program of the event. An opening speech, several round tables organized by members of the company’s management, and finally the revelation “new tools”. A form will arrive in the next few weeks to apply for physical participation in the event. OpenAI says there will only be a few hundred places.
Sunday, September 10, 2023
WE NEED FRAMEWORKS THAT BALANCE SHARING AND CONSENT - Alek Tarkowski, OpenFuture
Salvaggio’s piece is also relevant for another reason. In his analysis of the impact of generative AI on creativity, he quickly focuses on the field of free culture enabled by Creative Commons licenses. Salvaggio makes a crucial observation that: Copyright is insufficient to understand these issues. We also need to consider the role of data rights: the protections we offer to people who share information and artistic expression online.
In our AI_Commons work, we reached similar conclusions – although, in that case, our focus was on photographs seen not just as creative works but also as content that expresses personal data about a person. Salvaggio rightly notes a tension between stewarding the commons that can be accessed and reused and ensuring data rights – as this quickly leads to limiting access.
Saturday, September 9, 2023
‘Français inclusif’ curriculum named finalist for Open Education Awards for Excellence - Boise State News
Every year, the Open Education Awards for Excellence honors outstanding contributions in the Open Education community, recognizing exemplary individuals, distinctive open educational resources, and innovative open practices from around the world. Boise State’s Français inclusif has made the shortlist of 2023 finalists in the category of “How We Share: Open Reuse / Remix / Adaptation!” The awards received 174 nominations across 16 categories and winners will be announced on Sept. 13.
Friday, September 8, 2023
WT Students Won’t Pay for Textbooks Beginning in 2024 - Chip Chandler, Pampa News
West Texas A&M University announced Aug. 24 an ambitious plan to eliminate most textbook-related costs for WT students. “Making education affordable is our responsibility,” President Walter V. Wendler said. “We want to help lower the cost of higher education for students and families and continue to make WT the University of choice for students across the region, the state, the nation and the world.”
https://www.thepampanews.com/stories/wt-students-wont-pay-for-textbooks-beginning-in-2024,53927
Thursday, September 7, 2023
JU, DLIS organises lecture on 'Understanding Open Educational Resources for Teaching, Learning, and Research'
The Department of Library and Information Science (DLIS) University of Jammu is honored to host Dr. Shri Ram Panday, Head of DLIS at the Central University of Haryana, Mahendargarh, for an engaging lecture on the topic "Understanding Open Educational Resources for Teaching, Learning, and Research. Dr. Panday's lecture brought together students, faculty, and professionals from the field of library and infor mation science to delve into the dynamic world of open educational resources (OER). His extensive expertise in the subject matter added significant value to the academic community's understanding of OER and its role in modern education and research.
Wednesday, September 6, 2023
Exploring Preference Signals for AI Training - Catherine Stihler, Creative Commons
One of the motivations for founding Creative Commons (CC) was offering more choices for people who wish to share their works openly. Through engagement with a wide variety of stakeholders, we heard frustrations with the “all or nothing” choices they seemed to face with copyright. Instead they wanted to let the public share and reuse their works in some ways but not others. We also were motivated to create the CC licenses to support people — artists, technology developers, archivists, researchers, and more — who wished to re-use creative material with clear, easy-to-understand permissions.
https://creativecommons.org/2023/08/31/exploring-preference-signals-for-ai-training/
Tuesday, September 5, 2023
Rice University: OpenStax To Launch Open Access Organic Chemistry Textbook - Iednewsdesk
The first 12 chapters of the textbook Organic Chemistry: A Tenth Edition are now freely accessible to students through OpenStax, an educational initiative of Rice University. On Sept. 20, students and faculty will have free access online to the full version of this historically costly textbook that is a required material for organic chemistry courses nationwide. OpenStax is also providing free, aligned supplemental resources, including lecture slides, test items and a solution manual on their website. For those preferring print materials, the textbook will be available to purchase at an affordable price in hardcover and paperback. The author of the text, Cornell University professor emeritus John McMurry, chose to publish the upcoming 10th edition with OpenStax as a tribute to his son, Peter McMurry, who died in 2019 after a long battle with cystic fibrosis.
Monday, September 4, 2023
University Says It Won’t Charge for Textbooks. Professors Ask How. - Ryan Quinn, Inside Higher Ed
West Texas A&M's Faculty Senate voted no confidence in its president last spring, partly for his talk of a “textbook-free” campus. Now he's doubling down. “If a course requires a textbook, the college’s dean will utilize college resources to pay for the textbook—not the student or student fees,” Walter V. Wendler wrote in an email Thursday to students, staff and faculty members. (His message did note that there are a “multitude of examples … which will surface” of “reference books and digital materials,” such as the International Building Code, that won’t be considered “textbooks.”) “I wrote an op-ed published on October 26, 2018, entitled Text-Book Free, Not Free Textbooks,” Wendler wrote. “I waited and prodded for campus responses for five years.
Sunday, September 3, 2023
Librarians advocate for alternative to textbooks - Maddie Pukite, Daily Lobo
An alternative to requiring students to purchase textbooks, University Libraries have begun to develop programs and offer grants to help professors integrate Open Educational Resources into their curriculum. All resources on an OER are licensed as Creative Commons - free to use. Three librarians at the University of New Mexico – Holly Surbaugh, Jennifer Jordan and Leo Lo – conducted a study in July of 2023 on the impact of textbook cost at a Hispanic-serving institution UNM. 70% of the 315 UNM undergraduate students in the study reported the amount they spent on textbooks was “somewhat or extremely unreasonable,” and 102 said the cost of materials impacted their ability to purchase basic needs such as housing, food and transportation.
Saturday, September 2, 2023
Fall 2023 Affordable Content Grants: OER@UNO - University of Nebraska Omaha
Applications are now available in the NuRamp system! To apply, log in to the system using your NetID. You can find the “Open Internal Competitions” list: Affordable Content Grants: OER@UNO – Spring 2022. Applicants who are interested in viewing the full grant rubric can visit our OER Research Guide. Grant funds will vary based on the scope of the project with $1,250-$2,750 for single section conversions and a maximum of $11,000 for large-scale, multi-section course conversions involving multiple faculty. Grant recipients will be notified by October 27, 2023.
Friday, September 1, 2023
New open educational resource helps students to save this fall - Sara Velasquez, University of New Mexico
The University Libraries Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative is thrilled to announce its collaboration with the Department of English Language and Literatures in the development of an Open Educational Resource (OER) designed for First-Year English Core Composition classes. The creation of the OER will save students money and make course work much more accessible. With an enrollment of approximately 3,509 students in their composition classes, the UNM English Department is poised to make a substantial impact on student affordability. At a conservative estimate of $27.50 per course material for the OER, this translates to an astounding savings of $96,500 for students within a single semester.
http://news.unm.edu/news/new-open-educational-resource-helps-students-to-save-this-fall
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