To help ease the burden of the high costs of textbooks, Scott Sawtelle and Kathleen Curry have committed $100,000 to the UTSA Libraries’ Adopt-A-Free Textbook program which supports faculty in utilizing free and low-cost learning materials. The gift is the largest commitment to the free textbook program and will allow additional grants to be funded to professors who adopt open access resources in their courses.
https://www.utsa.edu/today/2021/05/story/sawtelle-curry-libraries-donation.html
EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) is releasing a new e-book collection containing thousands of high-quality open access (OA) e-books from the world’s most trusted university presses and scholarly publishers. The EBSCO eBooks™ Open Access Monograph Collection is DRM-free and available at no cost on the EBSCOhost® platform and easily discoverable via EBSCO Discovery Service.
Nominations are open for the UCT Open Textbook Award. The award may be made to single or multiple authored books. No restriction is placed on disciplinary orientation, language or format in which the book is written. There is also no restriction in terms of the publication date of the work. All nominated works must carry a Creative Commons or similar open license. The UCT Open Textbook Award carries a value of R30 000 and may be shared between more than one recipient. The deadline for nominations is 30 July 2021. For more information, please visit the UCT Open Textbook Award page on the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching website.
https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2021-06-09-uct-open-textbook-award-and-other-updates
U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) today announced that the University of Illinois (U of I) System has been awarded $1.08 million from the U.S. Department of Education’s Open Textbooks Pilot Program – a competitive grant program based on Durbin’s Affordable College Textbook Act. The funding will support the creation and expand the use of open college textbooks – textbooks that are available under an open license, allowing professors, students, researchers, and others to freely access the materials. The University of Illinois System is one of nine grant recipients nationwide selected for Fiscal Year 2021. Later this month, Durbin will be leading a group of Senators in requesting an additional $25 million for the program in Fiscal Year 2022 to support additional grants and savings for students.
Bay College was one of eight colleges selected by Achieving the Dream to participate in the next phase of its research on open educational resources, or OER. The goal of ATD’s Teaching and Learning with OER study is to understand whether and how faculty’s use of OER leads to the adoption of new pedagogical strategies in the classroom.
https://www.miningjournal.net/news/2021/06/bay-college-in-ed-research-program/
Otero Junior College has been awarded a $30,000 grant to implement open educational resources. For select courses, students would no longer have to purchase books to other materials. Otero Junior College was granted a $30,000 Open Education Resources (OER) Grant earlier in May. The grant is funded by the Colorado Commission on Higher Education (CCHE). The grant is teaching and learning materials that can be used free of cost. The resources are often created by individuals or companies that choose not to copyright their productions in order to prevent inaccessibility because of cost. OER's offer opportunities for changes in instruction and allows instructors to design their own curriculum and content. Educators will be able to network their strengths and improve the quality of education for their students be sharing these teaching tools and strategies.
Innovative Course Design with OER - Covers the basics of Open Educational Resources (OER) and provides practical guidance in locating and applying openly available resources. Anyone interested in registering to attend a session, being a presenter, or receiving notifications for future EdTech Thursday events can reach out to the 37th TRSS Faculty Development team at 37TRSS.FAD@us.af.mil.
4. The Expansion of Open Educational Resources
Open Educational Resources are learning and research materials that are free for students to access. The University of British Columbia’s Emerging Media Lab, for example, developed an open-source 3D data visualization of the metabolic network. This OER can potentially be used for not only high school courses, but also courses in medical schools. In addition to making education more affordable, OERs can also make it easier to for students to learn complex information.
https://www.avnetwork.com/news/6-emerging-technology-trends-in-higher-education-edtech-magazine
The award, which was launched in 2020, is an initiative of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (DVC): Teaching and Learning, Associate Professor Lis Lange, and aims to incentivise innovation in teaching and learning, recognise the efforts of open textbook authors and promote the creation and reuse of open educational resources. “Open textbooks are digital, free-to-use and openly licensed collections of course-related teaching and learning content published on platforms and in formats that provide affordances for the integration of multimedia and ancillary practice and assessment components,” wrote Associate Professor Lange in a recent campus communication.
The UCLA chapter of CALPIRG Students hosted a panel to educate the campus community on educational equity to promote affordable textbooks at the UC’s. In the past, CALPIRG has helped commit the UCs to 100% clean energy, but our main focus for the Affordable Textbooks Campaign this quarter is to address the financial challenges of students. The cost of textbooks has risen by 1041% since 1977, which is 4 times the rate of inflation. The US PIRG reports that 65 percent of students skip out on buying a textbook knowing that it would jeopardize their grades.
https://www.smdp.com/panel-discussion-education-for-all/205499
OpenStax, Rice University’s educational technology initiative, will welcome a dozen new colleges and universities serving diverse students across the United States to its Institutional Partner Program, This OpenStax program has helped over 70 colleges and universities expand the use of open educational resources on their campuses, saving their students money and putting more flexible course materials into the hands of educators and learners.
https://www.miragenews.com/openstax-institutional-partner-program-expands-571212/
A dozen new colleges and universities will join in on Rice University’s educational technology initiative OpenStax, which helps provide open educational resources, textbooks and technologies to universities. “This OpenStax program has helped over 70 colleges and universities expand the use of open educational resources on their campuses, saving their students money and putting more flexible course materials into the hands of educators and learners,” said Rice University officials.
I had been teaching a senior-level Astrodynamics (Space Orbital Mechanics) course for many years and developed a lot of my own material. I found that most textbooks in the field were either outdated or very expensive, and there was no one comprehensive textbook for the subject matter. Thus began my journey with OER in the fall of 2019, when I attended an information session sponsored by the Faculty Resource Center.
The SA meeting April 28 saw a presentation and discussion regarding an issue most students are all too familiar with — the excessive costs of college textbooks. Senior Assistant Librarian Malina Thiede of the Feinberg Library and Open Educational Resources intern Katie Sheehy delivered a presentation outlining this rapidly worsening problem. They pointed out that according to the Bureau of Labor, textbook prices have risen by almost 1000% in recent years and that individual textbooks can cost between $200 and $400.
http://cardinalpointsonline.com/sa-discusses-high-textbook-costs/
So why the OER adoption gap between the US and UK? Clearly each nation's education system is based on very different models. But as Andrea Eastman-Mullins, founder and CEO of US-based West End Learning, points out: 'I think the UK has been a little more forward thinking in terms of recognising teaching and the tenure promotion process, so now the US is feeling the pain of student affordability more which has resulted in more [OER] advocacy.' Indeed, according to Eastman-Mullins, the early adopters of OERs in the US, have been largely motivated by student affordability. ‘They really see the pain of the average college student paying $1200 on textbooks every year,’ she says. ‘In the US, deciding between buying a textbook or buying food is a real issue for some students.’ Despite advocacy, numerous OER repositories and early adopters, issues exist. For example, an ongoing survey on OERs from the Babson Survey Research Group recently put faculty awareness at less than 50 per cent.
https://www.researchinformation.info/feature/oers-future-education
The nine-member Kansas Board of Regents is the governing board of the state's six universities and the statewide coordinating board for the state's 32 public higher education institutions (six state universities, one municipal university, nineteen community colleges and six technical colleges). In 2019 the KBOR OER Steering Committee began in an effort to coordinate, inspire and expand OER initiatives across the higher education institutions across our state. Since that time in the fall of 2020 the Steering Committee published a series of OER webinars for faculty across the state, in October 2020 we joined the Open Education Network as a consortial member and offered a series of 5 OEN Faculty workshops in the spring of 2021 for over 100 faculty members. We have more faculty workshops planned for the fall of 2021 and are planning our first KBOR OER annual conference to be held in February 2022
https://oerworldmap.org/resource/urn:uuid:576010e8-e58f-4a56-9a01-2dea4f155a7a
Achieving the Dream (ATD) has selected eight colleges to participate in the next phase of its research on open educational resources (OER). The goal of ATD’s Teaching and Learning with OER study is to understand whether and how faculty’s use of OER leads to the adoption of new pedagogical strategies in the classroom. Bay college is a member of the ATD network and was selected to participate. ATD has partnered with SRI Education to conduct the research, which will include interviews and focus groups with students, faculty, and administrators, as well as observations of OER classrooms during the 2021 spring and summer academic terms.
Dr. Joseph Williams, Assistant Professor of Technical Communication and Rhetoric in Louisiana Tech’s College of Liberal Arts, has been awarded the Interactive Open Educational Resources (OER) for Dual Enrollment Program Grant from the Department of Education and the Louisiana Library Network at the Louisiana Board of Regents (LOUIS) consortium to pursue the creation and development of OERs. Dr. Joseph WilliamsOERs are courses that both “have the potential to reduce costs and improve outcomes for 250,000 total student enrollments statewide per academic year” and align with the strategic initiatives that the University of Louisiana System (ULS) has pursued under the leadership of ULS President Dr. Jim Henderson, said LOUIS Associate Commissioner Dr. Teri Gallaway.
https://www.latech.edu/2021/05/24/williams-earns-oer-grant-to-increase-student-opportunities/
The Simon Fraser Student Society (SFSS) recently launched a new petition to support the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) and increase textbook affordability for students. The SFSS proposed the use of OER, including open textbooks, multimedia, and assessment tools, as a solution to rising educational costs. “We incorporated the student responses in the textbook statistics from the SFU bookstore, and then we talked about how we can alleviate financial burdens attributed to these costs,” Liu said.
https://the-peak.ca/2021/05/sfss-calls-for-open-educational-resources-for-students/
A recent Bay View Analytics report suggests that overall faculty awareness of OER has grown during the pandemic. When the country went into lockdown in March 2020, we saw a massive migration online to synchronous and asynchronous learning experiences. In the nine months that followed, OpenStax, for example, saw its rate of adoptions increase by 183 percent as compared to the same time period the previous year. In addition, the number of faculty accounts jumped by 87 percent. To put this in context, at the beginning of the 2019-20 academic year OpenStax served approximately 3.1 million students. By the start of academic year 2020-21, OpenStax was serving 4.5 million students.