Should Temple go textbook free? - Valeria Uribe and Claire Zeffer, Temple News

As students struggle financially, universities across the country are debating if going textbook free is a smart solution to relieve some financial burden and improve accessibility. However, there are also concerns that switching to free online materials may compromise the quality of education students receive. Opinion Editor Claire Zeffer, a junior journalism major, and Assistant Opinion Editor Valeria Uribe, a sophomore journalism major, argue for and against universities going textbook free.

https://temple-news.com/should-temple-go-textbook-free/

Textbooks without breaking the bank CAROLINE CHRISTENSEN, Northern Iowan

As the new semester begins, some UNI students may have to choose between paying for necessary items like groceries, or required textbooks for classes. UNI’s Textbook Equity Librarian Anne Marie Gruber said this is a reality many students face. “If that’s your experience as a student, you are absolutely not alone,” Gruber said.

https://www.northerniowan.com/21291/news/textbooks-without-breaking-the-bank/

WT Students to Be Provided Core Textbooks Free of Charge Beginning Fall 2024 - Chip Chandler, West Texas A&M

West Texas A&M University students will be provided textbooks for all core curriculum courses beginning in fall 2024, President Walter V. Wendler announced in a Jan. 16 memo. University funds have been budgeted to support a three-year publisher agreement, as well as to pay for instructional materials for core courses that are not available via the selected publisher or through open educational resources, or OER.

https://www.wtamu.edu/news/2024/01/wendler-wt-students-to-be-provided-core-textbooks-free-of-charge-beginning-fall-2024.html

Eleven UTSA faculty members receive Adopt-a-Free-Textbook grant - UTSA

UTSA Libraries announces the recipients of its Adopt-a-Free-Textbook grants for the 2023-24 academic year. Seven grants have been awarded to 11 faculty members for their commitment to adopting or creating free or Open Educational Resource (OER) textbooks as the primary instructional materials in their courses. These grants will result in substantial student savings, totaling $552,686 over the course of the grant period. OERs are teaching and learning materials available to students at no cost. These resources, created and tailored by faculty, are openly licensed, allowing for reuse, adaptation and distribution.

https://www.utsa.edu/today/2024/01/story/faculty-awarded-grants-from-utsa-libaries.html

OER State Policy Tracker - SPARC*

Open educational resources (OER) has increasingly become a go-to strategy for legislators seeking to make college education more affordable and effective. More than half of all U.S. states have considered OER legislation in past years, and the trend continues as more leaders recognize the benefits of open educational resources and practices. Updated weekly during the legislative season, this page tracks the latest state-by-state policy activity relevant to the SPARC community. Click states highlighted in red to view current activity, and see the list below for existing policies. Note that page is for tracking purposes only and being listed does not imply endorsement.

https://sparcopen.org/our-work/state-policy-tracking/

Recent survey shows students’ concern about affording course materials - Maggie Day, The Daily Collegian

t the start of each semester, students experience concerns about navigating new courses and purchasing classroom materials. A reported 81% of participants in a recent survey of Pennsylvania students worried about meeting course material costs, according to Affordable Learning PA and the Partnership for Academic Library Collection and Innovation.The survey, conducted over spring and fall 2023, received responses from over 4,000 students across 14 participating institutions, including Penn State.

https://www.psucollegian.com/news/campus/recent-survey-shows-students-concern-about-affording-course-materials/article_f3a51cda-b65f-11ee-ae04-4ffe92262a48.html

Take IP&T 531: A Pitch to Graduate Students Steven Proctor - EdTechBooks

What if there was a way to reduce college textbook costs to zero? While taking a course, what if you and your peers could legally add content to the textbook and share this new version? And what if I told you this same resource can help students escape the effects of intergenerational poverty?  Come experience and contribute to this impactful educational movement by taking IP&T 531: Intro to Open Education!  Spoiler alert: it’s a mixed bag. Most people would equate “open” with “free”, which can mean “gratis”— “no-cost”, but free can also mean “libre”—“freedom”. While an open educational resource is free of cost, “open” is more about what you can do with educational resources based on which open license an author uses. This “free-ing” aspect means you could revise, remix, and redistribute personalized content for your audience.

https://edtechbooks.org/open_education/take_ipt_531_a_pitch_to_graduate_students

UTSA Libraries announces 2023-24 Adopt-a-Free-Textbook faculty grant winners - UTSA Today

UTSA Libraries announces the recipients of its Adopt-a-Free-Textbook grants for the 2023-24 academic year. Seven grants have been awarded to 11 faculty members for their commitment to adopting or creating free or Open Educational Resource (OER) textbooks as the primary instructional materials in their courses. These grants will result in substantial student savings, totaling $552,686 over the course of the grant period. OERs are teaching and learning materials available to students at no cost. These resources, created and tailored by faculty, are openly licensed, allowing for reuse, adaptation and distribution.

https://www.utsa.edu/today/2024/01/story/faculty-awarded-grants-from-utsa-libaries.html

OER Quick Start: A short introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER) - University of Edinburgh UK

March 20 @ 12:00 pm - 12:30 pm

Open education resources - property of everyone

This 30 minute Quick Start  information session will introduce you to open education resources (OER) – free sustainable teaching and learning materials that can be used by anyone anywhere.  You’ll learn a brief history of the OER movement, why the University of Edinburgh has an OER Policy and a strategic commitment to open education, and how you can engage with OER to transform your own teaching and learning.

https://open.ed.ac.uk/event/oer-quick-start-a-short-introduction-to-open-educational-resources-oer-3/

Open Educational Resources, Part 1 - University of Manitoba

Date and time: Wednesday, February 14, 2024, 9:30 – 11:00 AM

The term open educational resources (OER) describes a wide range of materials in teaching and learning that are available for public use with an open license or in the public domain. Examples of OER include full courses, course modules, syllabi, textbooks, lectures, assessments, and datasets. In this workshop, participants will learn why OER are valuable, how to locate them, how to evaluate them using a rubric, and how to adapt and create them. The workshop does not assume prior experience with these topics.

https://news.umanitoba.ca/the-centre-for-the-advancement-of-teaching-and-learning-february-workshops/

Open Education Development Series available for online educators - Boise State News

Applications are now open for the Open Education Development Series, a cohort-based learning experience offered through the eCampus Center in the Division of Extended Studies. The five-part series provides training, funding and support for online faculty to grow in their understanding, use and creation of open educational resources (OERs). Sessions include a range of opportunities to explore and interact with existing OERs as well as provide scaffolded support in the creation of OERs.

https://www.boisestate.edu/news/2024/01/12/open-education-development-series-available-for-online-educators/

Engaging the future: How private universities and tech companies are pioneering a new era of learning - B&FT

Technology is becoming increasingly cheaper in education delivery. This trend can be attributed to several factors: Digitalization: The shift from physical textbooks to digital resources and e-learning platforms has reduced the cost of producing and distributing educational materials.

Open Educational Resources (OER): The availability of free or low-cost OER, including textbooks, videos, and interactive learning modules, has democratized access to educational content.

Cloud Computing: Cloud-based services and storage have eliminated the need for expensive on-premises infrastructure, reducing the overall cost of delivering educational conten

https://thebftonline.com/2024/01/10/engaging-the-future-how-private-universities-and-tech-companies-are-pioneering-a-new-era-of-learning/

Should Temple go textbook free? - Valeria Uribe and Claire Zeffer, Temple-News

On average, students spend between $628 and $1,471 on school textbooks and other class materials each year, according to the Education Data Initiative. As students struggle financially, universities across the country are debating if going textbook free is a smart solution to relieve some financial burden and improve accessibility. However, there are also concerns that switching to free online materials may compromise the quality of education students receive. Opinion Editor Claire Zeffer, a junior journalism major, and Assistant Opinion Editor Valeria Uribe, a sophomore journalism major, argue for and against universities going textbook free. 

https://temple-news.com/should-temple-go-textbook-free/

These Songs & Recordings are now in the Public Domain and Free to use - Bruce Houghton, Hypebot

As of January 1st, 2024, works from 1928 are open to use, as are sound recordings from 1923. The most famous work to become free this year is the film Steamboat Willie, featuring Mickey and Minnie Mouse. But thousands of songs and sound recordings also entered the public domain.

https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2024/01/these-songs-and-recordings-are-now-free-to-use-public-domain-day-2024.html

Column: Mickey Mouse and ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ enter the public domain on Jan. 1, a reminder of our crazy copyright laws - MICHAEL HILTZIK, LA Times

That’s because both Mickey and Mellors, the Chatterley estate gamekeeper, made their first published appearance in 1928. The applicable law afforded them copyright protection for 95 years, a term expiring with the arrival of 2024. Thousands of other works — literary, dramatic and musical — are entering the copyright-free period of their lives, according to the annual select list compiled by Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-12-26/mickey-mouse-and-lady-chatterleys-lover-enter-the-public-domain-on-jan-1-under-our-crazy-copyright-laws

January 1, 2024 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1928 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1923! - Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain

On January 1, 2024, thousands of copyrighted works from 1928 will enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1923. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. This year’s highlights include Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence and The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht, Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman and Cole Porter’s Let’s Do It, and a trove of sound recordings from 1923. And, of course, 2024 marks the long-awaited arrival of Steamboat Willie – featuring Mickey and Minnie Mouse – into the public domain. That story is so fascinating, so rich in irony, so rife with misinformation about what you will be able to do with Mickey and Minnie now that they are in the public domain that it deserved its own article, “Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain: a 95-year Love Triangle.” Why is it a love triangle? What rights does Disney still have? How is trademark law involved?

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2024/

Unlocking OER for Public Libraries - Milo Santamaria & Michelle Reed, Library Futures

Open educational resources (OER) are free teaching and learning materials that are in the public domain or released under an open copyright license. These materials can be accessed, repurposed, adapted, and redistributed for free. Rooted in the human right to education, OER gained attention by making information and education more affordable and accessible, especially as tuition at colleges and universities increased. While conversations about their use have focused on academic and school libraries, OER have much to offer public libraries.

https://www.libraryfutures.net/post/oer-for-public-libraries

Yuba College continues low-cost textbook efforts Appeal - Yuba Appeal

After being awarded a series of state grants, Yuba College will be able to continue its efforts of reducing, if not eliminating, the costs of textbooks for many of its students, officials announced on Thursday. These grants are designed to help institutions utilize existing open educational resources or public domain learning materials that are free or low-cost to students and meant to be shared. This commitment is an expansion of Yuba College’s existing efforts to reduce textbook costs, and will begin by establishing a zero-cost textbook course pathway in its early childhood development and psychology programs.

https://www.appeal-democrat.com/news/yuba-college-continues-low-cost-textbook-efforts/article_17374dba-ab5e-11ee-847f-636695a16e32.html

Academic Success Tip: Promoting Affordable Course Materials - Ashley Mowreader, Inside Higher Ed

Affordability in higher education remains a great concern for students, particularly when it comes to required course materials. Librarians at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania are broadening efforts to make stakeholders aware of the effects of high textbook prices on students as well as affordable and free options in course material. As a result of their work, 104 course sections at the college in 2023 had zero course material costs, saving students $300,000.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/student-success/academic-life/2024/01/05/librarians-lead-affordability-conversations

Use Information Correctly - Using Creative Commons Content - GCF Global

Creative Commons licenses add flexibility to the restrictions of traditional copyright. For instance, you can use any Creative Commons material for free. Creators choose these licenses for their images, music, films, and other types of content in order to share it with as many people as possible. Of course, there are still a few conditions you’ll need to follow whenever you use Creative Commons material. Depending on what the creator wants, they may require you to give proper credit or forbid you from using their work to make money.

https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/useinformationcorrectly/using-creative-commons-content/1/

A Case for OER in BYU's SFL 223 - Natalie Larson, EdTech Books

This short presentation presents three reasons as to why the BYU SFL 223 faculty should consider switching their traditional textbook to an open format. These reasons includes better achieving the mission of BYU, helping increase student wellbeing, and being able to more easily improve students learning now and throughout their lives.

https://edtechbooks.org/open_education/a_case_for_oer_in_sfl_223

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). To do this, two major obstacles need to be overcome, which are as follows (see URL).

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

Fondant AI Releases Fondant-25M Dataset of Image-Text Pairs with a Creative Commons License - Mohammad Arshad, MarkTechPost

The current challenge with generative AI, such as Stable Diffusion and Dall-E, is trained on hundreds of millions of images from the public Internet, including copyrighted work. This creates legal risks and uncertainties for users of these images and is unfair toward copyright holders who may not want their proprietary work reproduced without consent. To tackle it, researchers have developed a data-processing pipeline to create 500 million datasets of Creative Commons images to train the latent diffusion image generation models. Data-processing pipelines are steps and tasks designed to collect, process, and move data from one source to another, where it can be stored and analyzed for various purposes.

https://www.marktechpost.com/2023/10/15/fondant-ai-releases-fondant-25m-dataset-of-image-text-pairs-with-a-creative-commons-license/

Creative Commons CEO Catherine Stihler Concludes Time Leading the Organization - Gary Price, Library Journal

Today Creative Commons CEO Catherine Stihler is announcing the conclusion of her time leading the organization. On behalf of the Board of Directors, staff, and global community, we want to offer Catherine our sincere thanks. We are grateful to her for over three years of leadership at CC. During her tenure as CEO, Catherine demonstrated tremendous energy. Joining as a leader in August 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic, meant navigating challenging times. Like many nonprofits during that time, the organization struggled financially. Under Catherine’s leadership the organization recovered from that. A successful 20th Anniversary Campaign that concluded in December 2022 led to more predictability for some of CC’s core program areas, due to multi-year funding commitments.

https://www.infodocket.com/2023/12/29/creative-commons-ceo-catherine-stihler-concludes-time-leading-the-organization/

Open Educational Resources (OERs) FAQs - Oxford University

OpenSpires was a cross-departmental project based in Oxford University IT Services which, along with other similar projects at Oxford University and worldwide, aimed to share Open Educational Resources (OERs), primarily podcasts, for the benefit of humanity globally. The material is release with a globally well-known licence for use, reuse and repurposing worldwide

https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/open/faq

2024-25 Institute on Open Educational Resources JULY 22 – 23, 2024

In July 2024, AAC&U, with expertise and leadership from OpenStax and ISKME, will launch the next cohort of the Institute on Open Educational Resources (IOER). The IOER provides a year long, online engagement opportunity for teams from campuses or state systems seeking to actualize an ambitious strategy to broaden campus engagement with and adoption of open educational resources (OER). This model directly engages the IOER teams for a full year via virtual events and interactions as participants’ OER implementation and acceleration plans are put into practice.

https://www.aacu.org/event/2024-25-institute-open-educational-resources

Apply For Faculty Grants That Improve Teaching And Bolster Student Success - UTSA

UTSA Libraries is pleased to announce it will again offer faculty two grants, Faculty Teaching in the Archives (FTIA) and Adopt-a-Free Textbook, designed to enhance teaching and directly support the success of UTSA students. The application period is now open for UTSA faculty members interested in applying for one or both grants. The deadline for submitting applications for either grant is March 18. The FTIA grant from UTSA Special Collections encourages instructors to design or stimulate courses with unique content from UTSA archives. The Adopt-a-Free Textbook grants enable faculty to adopt or create free Open Educational Resources (OER) textbooks as the primary textbooks in their courses. Courses that adopt OER provide the university’s largely first-generation and diverse student body with equal access to their books regardless of socioeconomic status.

https://lib.utsa.edu/news/apply-for-faculty-grants-that-improve-teaching-and-bolster-student-success

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

West Texas A&M University made headlines in August after announcing its lofty goal of eliminating the majority of textbook-related costs. 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/

Ohio University Libraries’ John Canter to join OhioLINK cohort - Mimi Calhoun, Ohio University

Ohio University Libraries’ John Canter, subject librarian for the physical sciences and mathematics, will participate in the OhioLINK cohort to become an Open Educational Resources (OER) specialist librarian through the Open Education Network (OEN). The program is eight months long and Canter will be joining eight other OhioLINK member institution librarians. The purpose of the cohort is to prepare participating members to serve as advocates for high quality and openly accessible educational resources.

https://www.athensmessenger.com/connect/ohio-university-libraries-john-canter-to-join-ohiolink-cohort/article_f57c2d26-a0bd-11ee-a864-b7f8d928b505.html

More Support for Post-Secondary Students - Advanced Education, NovaScotia

The Province is supporting Nova Scotian students with the cost of post-secondary education by providing a one-time, needs-based grant and investing to reduce the cost of textbooks. Almost 12,000 students at Nova Scotia universities, Nova Scotia Community College or a private career college are eligible for a grant of $1,350 that does not have to be repaid.  “I know from talking to students that affordability is a key issue for them,” said Brian Wong, Minister of Advanced Education. “I have also heard from students that the cost of books can be a real challenge, and I’m proud to take action on solutions that will make a real difference.”

https://novascotia.ca/news/release/?id=20231221001

Association of Research Libraries: Andrew K. Pace Named ARL’s New Executive Director - Gary Price, ARL

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is pleased to welcome Andrew K. Pace as its next executive director, effective February 1, 2024. Andrew joins ARL from the University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions (USMAI) Library Consortium, where he has served as executive director since 2022. At USMAI, Andrew leads the consortium of 17 academic libraries across the state of Maryland, centrally hosting management, discovery, and resource-sharing applications for millions of print, licensed, and open-access resources. His team also leads new digital initiatives in digital asset management, open educational resources (OER), and new service development.

https://www.infodocket.com/2023/12/20/association-of-research-libraries-andrew-k-pace-named-arls-new-executive-director/