COC awarded $600,000 for OER/ZTC materials - the Signal

College of the Canyons has been awarded $600,000 from the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office in support of Zero Textbook Cost acceleration and Open Educational Resources materials that can be used and repurposed by other California community colleges.   The three $200,000 grants will allow the college to create ZTC and OER pathways for certificate programs in the fields of land surveying, water systems technology, and sustainable design and development.  

https://signalscv.com/2023/12/coc-awarded-600000-for-oer-ztc-materials/

OER Textbook Wins Music Theory Award - Preston Waddoups, Utah State University

The Open Educational Resources textbook Foundations of Aural Skills, which was authored by Utah State University music Professor Timothy Chenette, was recently awarded the Pedagogy of Music Theory Award by the Society of Music Theory. This annual award is given to exceptional pedagogical scholarship and resources. The Open Education Resources (OER) team at USU Libraries aims to reduce costs for students by helping faculty find and create freely available and openly licensed teaching resources. Because these resources are freely accessible online, their impact can reach far beyond USU.??

https://www.usu.edu/today/story/oer-textbook-wins-music-theory-award

Making Education More Affordable and Accessible - PALNI

Supported by a Lilly Endowment Inc. grant, PALSave supports student success and retention by fostering the use of Open Educational Resources (OER). The program provides collaborative resources and a framework for OER awareness, education, and engagement. In addition, it funds and supports faculty adoptions of affordable learning materials to enhance the teaching and learning missions of private higher education in Indiana. PALNI-supported campuses are affiliate members of the Open Education Network through this initiative.

https://palni.org/palsave

How to access thousands of free audiobooks, thanks to Microsoft AI and Project Gutenberg - Lance Whitney, ZDNet

Another challenge with audiobooks is that they can take hundreds of hours to create, edit, and publish. Working with Microsoft AI, Project Gutenberg was able to cut that time dramatically by automatically producing high-quality audiobooks from existing online e-books. "In particular, we leverage recent advances in neural text-to-speech to create and release thousands of human-quality, open-license audiobooks from the Project Gutenberg e-book collection," a team of people from Project Gutenberg and Microsoft said in a paper about the project. "Our method can identify the proper subset of e-book content to read for a wide collection of diversely structured books and can operate on hundreds of books in parallel," the team explained. "This work contributed over five thousand open-license audiobooks and an interactive demo that allows users to quickly create their own customized audiobooks."

https://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-how-to-access-thousands-of-free-audiobooks-thanks-to-microsoft-ai-and-project-gutenberg/

Open Access: 100 Big Ten Titles on Gender and Sexuality - Porter Anderson, Publishing Perspectives

As Publishing Perspectives readers know, interests in the commercial trade side of the international publishing industry can at times show remarkable parallels to those in the academic publishing world. Sometimes the twain shall meet, after all. An example of this today (August 14) is in the release of the first collection produced by a new collaboration called the Big Ten Open Books project, a collaboration between the university presses and libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance. The university presses participating in this first collection comprise:

Indiana University Press

Michigan State University Press

Northwestern University Press

Purdue University Press

University of Michigan Press

University of Wisconsin Press

https://publishingperspectives.com/2023/08/university-librarians-a-free-gender-and-sexuality-collection/

Colleges want to move away from expensive textbooks. Can it be done? - Danielle McLean, Higher Ed Dive

 A couple months after the university’s initial announcement, West Texas A&M President Walter Wendler conceded his plans were too ambitious and said they would only apply to first- and second-year classes. In an email last month, Wendler said he planned to achieve this goal by finding “whatever means we can to reduce costs to students and assist faculty in finding resources acceptable to them for teaching.” One of several solutions the university is exploring to eliminate textbook costs is turning to open-access materials. 

https://www.highereddive.com/news/open-educational-resources-textbooks-west-texas/702587/

Educationists for engaging students with technology for learning - New Age Bangladesh

Local and foreign educationists on Sunday emphasised on engaging students with technology for learning. They expressed their opinion at a workshop on ‘Faculty Development on Open Educational Resources based Blended Learning at Bangladesh Open University’ held at the e-Learning Centre of the university’s Gazipur campus. As chief trainer of the workshop, Sangam University, Rajasthan (India) pro-VC professor Manas Ranjan Panigrahi said that engaging learners through technology posed challenges, but it could overcome through strategic implementation. OU’s 32 teachers are participating in the workshop who works on effectiveness of texts and text transformative videos in OER-based blended learning environment under the chair of professor Sabina Yeasmin, dean of open school. The workshop was conducted by open school member Md Mizanoor Rahman.

https://www.newagebd.net/article/220490/educationists-for-engaging-students-with-technology-for-learning

Pressbooks - University of Iowa

Join us to learn about the incredibly versatile, easy-to-use, and impactful platform of Pressbooks. It is a software that allows you to create Open Educational Resources (OER), including eBooks, handbooks, student work collections, portfolios, anthologies, and more. The Office of Teaching, Learning, and Technology provides expertise, tools, and services to optimize teaching and learning through learning sciences research, ICON, teaching and learning data, and advanced classroom and instructional technology.

https://now.uiowa.edu/event/130646/0

ACD Receives $1.9 Million Federal Grant for Open Educational Resources - Alamo Colleges District

The Alamo Colleges District has been awarded a $1.96 million grant for the Alamo Colleges Open Educational Resources (OER) Consortium Project through the U.S. Department of Education’s Open Textbooks Pilot Program for community colleges and universities.  This year, Alamo Colleges is one of only five institutions to receive the grant funding. The Alamo Colleges OER Consortium Project will provide support for the AlamoBOOKS+ initiative, an innovative, dual-investment program that provides Alamo Colleges students with universal access to instructional materials, including open educational resources. “This grant funding will be pivotal for the Alamo Colleges to sustain the viability of AlamoBOOKS+ and create new and innovative professional development opportunities,” said Dr. Mike Flores, Alamo Colleges District Chancellor.

https://www.alamo.edu/news--events/news/2023/12-december/alamo-colleges-receives-$1.9-million-federal-grant-for-open-educational-resources-consortium/

COC Awarded $600K for Zero Textbook Cost, OER Materials - COLLEGE OF THE CANYONS

College of the Canyons has been awarded $600,000 from the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office in support of Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) acceleration and Open Educational Resources (OER) materials that can be used and repurposed by other California community colleges.The three $200,000 grants will allow the college to create ZTC and OER pathways for certificate programs in the fields of land surveying, water systems technology and sustainable design and development

https://scvnews.com/coc-awarded-600k-for-zero-textbook-cost-oer-materials/

Bridging The Gap: Technology In Education For Underserved Communities - IBC

The availability of Open Educational Resources (OERs), including textbooks, videos, and interactive modules, plays a pivotal role in democratizing education. These resources, often freely accessible online, break financial barriers by providing high-quality educational content at no cost. Platforms offering OERs empower educators and learners in underserved communities to access a wealth of educational materials, enhancing the quality of education despite budget constraints.

https://ibcworldnews.com/?p=125358

Trine University reducing online tuition rate for undergrads

The university offers more than 200 online courses that use open educational resources (OER), eliminating expensive textbook costs. This includes two degree programs that use OER in all their core courses. Trine also offers generous transfer credit opportunities, with incoming students able to apply up to 90 credit hours from prior college courses, prior workplace learning, college-level examinations or military coursework.

https://www.trine.edu/news/2023/trineonline-tuition.aspx

How much should a textbook cost? Try '$0.00' - Benjamin Kessler, George Mason University

Sophia Marshall, an assistant professor in the Business Foundations area at Costello College of Business, recently made a valuable contribution to this discussion with her completed dissertation for her EdD from Marymount University, entitled "Closing the Traditional Textbook to Make Room for Open Material." Marshall surveyed 33 faculty members on their use and perceptions of OER. Marshall's respondents were vaguely familiar with OER as a concept, and their answers indicated positive feeling about using OER as a form of financial relief to students. However, their responses evinced confusion as to the differences between OER and other forms of unlicensed material downloadable from the internet.

https://phys.org/news/2023-12-textbook.html

WMU Libraries awards 10 grants to help reduce textbook costs for students - Sara Volmering, Western Michigan University

The University Libraries has awarded seven Open Educational Resources (OER) adoption grants and three OER creation grants to WMU instructors in December. The grants are anticipated to save students in 10 courses over $170,000 in textbook costs in based on course enrollments. The OER adoption grants support WMU instructors in switching from a commercial textbook to free, high-quality online resources. The creation grants support faculty in developing new OER materials that will be used in their courses and made available to instructors and students globally. Open Educational Resources are openly licensed teaching and learning resources that are free to access, use, adapt and redistribute.

https://wmich.edu/news/2023/12/73818

Using Creative Commons Images in Professional Work - Susan Neuhausm Creative Pro

If you’ve ever read Wikipedia or watched a TED Talk video, you’ve benefited from media that was shared under a Creative Commons license. You can find amazing content—images, 3D models, video, software, news, stories, databases, even whole academic courses—all available free. Creative Commons—CC for short—offers a very simple way for creators to grant blanket advance permission for others to use their creative work, all while setting conditions and affirming their intellectual property rights. By applying a certain type of Creative Commons license, creators can decide whether to permit others to use this material in commercial work, or limit its use to noncommercial contexts. They can decide to let others alter it—crop an illustration, remix music, apply effects to or change the colors of a photo—or prohibit reuse that transforms the original.

https://creativepro.com/using-creative-commons-images-in-professional-work/

Wisconsin College breaks student barriers as global leader of OER - American Association of Community Colleges

Several years ago, in the face of these rising costs, CVTC realized it was time for us to make learning more affordable and accessible, and we continue on that journey. Since 2013, CVTC has been a leader in the development of open education resources (OER). Our OER teaching and learning materials are licensed to be used, shared, adapted, and retained at no charge and do not require extra permission. Like OER, affordable educational resources (AER) make use of resources such as eBooks or journal articles that cannot be shared, adapted or retained but may be used at no cost to the student.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/wisconsin-college-breaks-student-barriers-as-global-leader-of-oer-302009488.html

New Course from NASA Helps Build Open, Inclusive Science Community - NASA

NASA released its free Open Science 101 curriculum Wednesday to empower researchers, early career scientists, and underrepresented communities with the knowledge and tools necessary to embrace open science practices. The curriculum’s initial goal is to train 20,000 scientists and researchers over the next five years, enabling them to embrace open science practices and maximize the impact of their work. “NASA is committed to ensuring people around the world have equal and open access to science data whenever they need it,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “This innovative curriculum will support the White House’s Year of Open Science to help people make informed, research-based decisions that will benefit humanity and improve life here on Earth.”

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/new-course-from-nasa-helps-build-open-inclusive-science-community/

National Endowment for the Humanities Supports Initiative to Develop Open Educational Resources that Advance Social Justice - CUNY Graduate Center

With growing concerns about the cost of college education, open educational resources (OER), which are public domain or openly licensed teaching materials, are attracting interest. Several states, including New York, have invested in providing these free alternatives to expensive course texts at their public universities. A new grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Office of Digital Humanities positions the CUNY Graduate Center to lead efforts to create social justice-oriented open educational resources that engage diverse college students in active learning. With a $250,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the CUNY Graduate Center will offer the Open Education Publishing Institute: Collaborative Knowledge and Social Justice, a summer institute for scholars with experience in the digital humanities to design open educational resources that foreground diverse, anti-racist perspectives and empower students as co-creators of knowledge. The institute draws on the Graduate Center’s strengths in digital humanities and digital pedagogy.

https://www.gc.cuny.edu/news/neh-supports-initiative-develop-open-educational-resources-advance-social-justice

Student Research Finds Free Materials Could Replace Books - Stockton University

Replacing expensive textbooks with free educational resources could reduce high college costs, but more professors and administrators need to promote the option to have an impact, according to student research published today by the William J. Hughes Center for Public Policy at Stockton University. The National Center for Education Statistics estimated that college textbooks and materials for the 2021-22 academic year cost an average of $1,326 per student nationally. Over the last 50 years, prices increased at three times the rate of inflation, a research paper by Stockton senior Jessie Nash reported. Textbook costs have increased by 7 percent since 2020, outpacing increases in tuition, fees and housing, the report found. 

Textbook costs are a financial barrier to higher education that disproportionately affects minority, low-income, first-generation and food-insecure students." “Textbook costs are a financial barrier to higher education that disproportionately affects minority, low-income, first-generation and food-insecure students,” said Nash, a Social Work major who produced her research as part of a Hughes Center internship.

https://stockton.edu/news/2023/student-research-free-materials.html

Grants awarded for nine Open Ed resources projects - University of Manitoba

The nine OER projects are supported by the UM Libraries Advance Open Ed 2023-24 fund through the UM OER grant. An OER Lab was established to provide editorial and project management assistance, as well as help with publication and distribution for the projects. OERs are teaching materials that have an open license that allows them to be used, adapted, and shared by instructors and students at no cost. 

https://news.umanitoba.ca/grants-awarded-for-nine-open-ed-resources-projects/

Open Ed 2023 by Innovation and Praxis (recorded and notes)

Reimagine opportunities for instructional designer/faculty partnerships on your campus through Open Educational Resources and Open Pedagogy. Explore the affordances of OER and OP in creating intentionally inclusive and accessible learning environments, and take home practical, flexible ideas for fostering collaborations across campus in support of Open projects at your institution. 

Attendees of this session will be able to:

Apply new strategies to foster faculty designer collaborations for Open Education

Design an OER symposium and professional development event series for their institution

Clarify the importance of OER in campus support of learning, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility

https://opened23.sched.com/event/1Q9jP/designing-for-open-faculty-instructional-designer-collaborations

Oregon Tech Library and faculty produce free coursework materials to benefit students

Oregon Tech is pleased to announce its ongoing commitment to support the success of students and faculty by actively engaging in creating open educational resources (OER). The Oregon Tech Library encourages and helps facilitate the development of OER materials, which benefit students financially and contribute to the broader academic community by promoting open access to educational resources. OER materials have been gaining recognition for their ability to significantly reduce the financial burden on students by offering high-quality, freely accessible learning materials. Oregon Tech librarians, who are experts in copyright and intellectual property, ensure the materials produced through OER remain free for users through Creative Commons publishing licenses, preventing them from being sold for profit by publishers.

https://www.oit.edu/news/oregon-tech-library-and-faculty-produce-free-coursework-materials-benefit-students

Penn State offers low-cost course marker as most Pa. college students worry about textbook costs Pittsburgh Post-Gazette logo - MADDIE AIKEN, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Penn State students can now easily navigate course options with little or no cost as textbook prices skyrocket and a majority of students worry about course material costs. LionPATH, the university’s student information system, will designate whether a course section’s required texts are free, low-cost or under $50. The new search option aims to bolster Penn State’s “access and affordability goals,” said Ann Taylor, an assistant dean in the university’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. The cost indicator brings “optimism and hope” to Nora O'Toole, Penn State’s student body president. Ms. O'Toole told the Post-Gazette she has already used the cost marker to schedule her spring semester classes.

https://www.post-gazette.com/news/education/2023/11/24/pennsylvania-colleges-textbook-costs-penn-state-university-of-pittsburgh-students/stories/202311220080

Meet CommonCanvas: An Open Diffusion Model That Has Been Trained Using Creative-Commons Images - Tanya Malhotra, MarkTechPost

Artificial intelligence has advanced significantly in text-to-image generation in recent years. Transforming written descriptions into visual representations has a number of applications, from creating content to helping the blind and telling stories. The researchers have been facing two significant obstacles, which are the lack of high-quality data and copyright issues related to datasets that are scraped from the internet. In recent research, a team of researchers has proposed the idea of building an image dataset under a Creative Commons licence (CC) and using it to train open diffusion models that can outperform Stable Diffusion 2 (SD2).

https://www.marktechpost.com/2023/11/01/meet-commoncanvas-an-open-diffusion-model-that-has-been-trained-using-creative-commons-images/

Report to Congress on Financing Mechanisms For Open Access Publishing of Federally Funded Research - the White House

https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2023/11/22/report-to-congress-on-financing-mechanisms-for-open-access-publishing-of-federally-funded-research/

“Free Science Lessons: Expanding Knowledge Accessibly” - Robert Andrew, City Life

**FAQs**

Q: Are free science lessons a substitute for formal education?

A: While they can complement formal education, they are not a complete substitute. Formal education provides a structured learning environment, professional guidance, and recognized qualifications.

Q: How can I find reliable free science lessons?

A: Look for resources from reputable institutions or organizations. Websites like Khan Academy (khanacademy.org) and MIT OpenCourseWare (ocw.mit.edu) are known for their quality content.

Q: Can free science lessons lead to a career in science?

A: They can be a starting point or supplement to formal education, but most science careers require formal qualifications. However, they can help build foundational knowledge and spark interest in pursuing a science career.

https://citylife.capetown/uncategorized/free-science-lessons-expanding-knowledge-accessibly/480919/

Open Education: Find OER (open textbooks and more - VT University Libraries

Open Educational Resources include more than textbooks, though open textbooks are a popular subset of open educational resources. Regarding non-book content, OER Commons, Merlot, and Google Advanced Search are helpful places to look. See also the tab above for Images & Illustrations.

https://guides.lib.vt.edu/oer/opentextbooks

Places to find Open Textbooks - Oregon State University

Many of the largest OER projects funded over the past fifteen years targeted high cost, high impact courses to save students money. Because of this, most of the OER available today are for general education courses such as Psychology, Biology, and Calculus. This does not mean that there are no OER available for specialized subject areas or graduate-level courses; however, there are more resources to choose from for instructors who teach Introduction to Psychology than for those who teach Electronic Systems Integration for Agricultural Machinery & Production Systems.  Note: This is beginning to change as more institutions begin publishing OER through regional and institutional grant programs.

https://open.oregonstate.education/oosguide/chapter/textbooks/

Open Educational Resources: Searching OER Collections - Lehman College

OASIS

Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 61 different sources and contains 160,072 records.

Pressbooks Directory

The Pressbooks Directory works by collating public books created on PressbooksEDU networks and allowing users to search the metadata written by the authors of the books.

CC Search (Creative Commons)

Search for free content in the public domain and under Creative Commons licenses. CC Search searches images across 19 collections pulled from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset, including cultural works from museums (the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art), graphic designs and art works (Behance, DeviantArt), photos from Flickr, and an initial set of CC0 3D designs from Thingiverse.

OER Metafinder

The OER Metafinder is a real-time, simultaneous search across all the content of 17 different sources of open educational materials.

https://libguides.lehman.edu/c.php?g=612694&p=4255681

https://guides.library.uwm.edu/oers/findtextbooks - UW Milwaukee

It is estimated by the College Board that undergraduate students can expect to pay upwards of $1,298 a year for ​​​textbooks and supplies. The cost of textbooks impacts student success and retention. Students who participated in the 2016 Florida Student Textbook Survey answered that, at least once over the course of their academic careers, the cost of required textbooks caused them to:

66.6% Not purchase the required textbook

47.6% Take fewer courses

45.5% Not register for a specific course

37.6% Earn a poor grade because I could not afford to buy the textbook

26.1% Drop a course

19.8% Fail a course because I could not afford to buy the textbook

Open textbooks...

https://guides.library.uwm.edu/oers/findtextbooks

Open Educational Resources: Find Open Textbooks - UIC

OER Centralized Searching

These search engines are a great place to start your OER search, especially if you're not tied to textbooks. They search across a variety of OER collections, databases, and repositories to make your search a bit easier. 

https://researchguides.uic.edu/opentextbooks/search