scholarly journals Opening up to OER: Creating Open Education Awareness on a large campus

2020 ◽  
Vol 81 (6) ◽  
pp. 294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen Lyon ◽  
Gina Bastone ◽  
Sarah Brandt

ike many academic libraries, the University of Texas Libraries (UT) at UT-Austin is looking for ways to increase awareness of open educational resources (OER) on our campus. Our university does not have an OER mandate from our central campus administration, so the path towards greater awareness hasn’t been straightforward. We hope that sharing our nascent attempts to start this conversation on our campus, which have included starting a working group, offering faculty workshops, and fundraising for an OER librarian position, will help others begin to champion OER on their campuses.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Quail ◽  
Sarah Coysh

Catalyzed by the passing of the York University Open Access Policy last year, a recognition has been growing at York University, like most other institutions, about the value of Open Educational Resources (OER) and more broadly, open education. This heightened awareness led to the formation of a campus-wide Open Education Working Group in January 2020. The group advocated that faculty members who receive internal funding for teaching innovation projects through York’s Academic Innovation Fund (AIF) should include a Creative Commons license on their grant outputs to facilitate the re-use, and potentially re-mixing, of the content by educators inside and outside of York University. A copy and/or link to their grant output would also be deposited into York’s institutional repository, YorkSpace. To support the 71 funded projects in achieving these lofty goals, an open education and open licensing curriculum was developed by two of the librarian members of the Open Education Working Group. This session describes how the librarians created the training program and participants will leave the session better understanding: How to develop learning modules for adult learners and apply these best practices when teaching faculty online (synchronously & asynchronously); How to access York’s open education training program and learn how they can remix the content for their own institution’s training purposes; The common types of questions and misconceptions that arise when teaching an open education and Creative Commons licensing program for faculty. Originally the program was conceived as an in-person workshop series; however, with the COVID-19 campus closure, it was redesigned into a four module synchronous and asynchronous educational program delivered via Moodle, H5P and Zoom. Modeled after the SUNY OER Community Course and materials from Abbey Elder’s OER Starter Kit, the program gave grant recipients a grounding in open educational resources, searching open course material repositories, copyright/Creative Commons licensing, and content deposit in York’s institutional repository, including OER metadata creation and accessibility considerations. The librarians modeled best practices in the use and creation of Creative Commons licensed resources throughout the program. Qualitative feedback was gathered at the end of each module in both the synchronous and asynchronous offerings of the program and will be shared with participants. The presenters will also discuss lessons learned, next steps, and some of the challenges they encountered. https://youtu.be/n6dT8UNLtJo


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahlaga Molepo

<div>The University of the Free State (UFS) Libraries have introduced open educational resources (OER) as a tool for the promotion of open access to science. However, the creation as well as the use of OER amongst lectures, researchers, students and librarians remain low. Discussion forums can be helpful in opening up the debate on the pros and cons of OER.</div><div><br></div><div>The researcher recently submitted a letter on the ‘Refinement of Open Educational Resources through rigorous theoretical examination’, and it was accepted and published. The researcher is currently engaging with scholars and academics from all over the world in a discussion worth participation. All staff members in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the UFS were invited to participate. The discussion will be open for the next 3 months beginning 21 July 2021 next to the published letter on Academia Letters.</div><div><br></div>Academia Letters is a new experiment in academic publishing. The platform aims to publish short-form articles such as brief reports, case studies, “orphaned’ findings, and ideas dropped from previously published work.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahlaga Molepo

<div>The University of the Free State (UFS) Libraries have introduced open educational resources (OER) as a tool for the promotion of open access to science. However, the creation as well as the use of OER amongst lectures, researchers, students and librarians remain low. Discussion forums can be helpful in opening up the debate on the pros and cons of OER.</div><div><br></div><div>The researcher recently submitted a letter on the ‘Refinement of Open Educational Resources through rigorous theoretical examination’, and it was accepted and published. The researcher is currently engaging with scholars and academics from all over the world in a discussion worth participation. All staff members in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the UFS were invited to participate. The discussion will be open for the next 3 months beginning 21 July 2021 next to the published letter on Academia Letters.</div><div><br></div>Academia Letters is a new experiment in academic publishing. The platform aims to publish short-form articles such as brief reports, case studies, “orphaned’ findings, and ideas dropped from previously published work.


Author(s):  
Jane Brückner

Die Nutzung und Bereitstellung von Open Educational Resources (OER) sind mit vergleichsweise hohen Unsicherheiten und Herausforderungen verbunden, die in der deutschen Bildungslandschaft zu einem erhöhten Bedarf an Qualitätsausweis für freie Bildungsmaterialien führen. Die Debatte um diese vermeintlich geringer-wertigen Unterrichtsmaterialien reisst nicht ab und qualitätssuggerierende Entwicklungen begleiten die Nutzung von OER in der Schulpraxis: Verlage und Hochschulen geben cc-lizenziertes Material an die Lehrkräfte in allen Bildungsbereichen, Plattformen für OER versuchen Qualitätsnachweise über Nutzerbewertungen, Bildungsinstitutionen entwerfen Qualitätskriterienmodelle für OER. Bei allen Unternehmungen dem Bedarf an Qualitätssicherung und Qualitätsausweisen nachzukommen, wird vernachlässigt, dass gerade OER und die konsequente Praxis von Open Education die Nutzer als autonome, kreative und kompetente Lehrenden und Lernenden versteht. Vor diesem Hintergrund steht ein kritisches Hinterfragen der aktuellen Implikationen des verwendeten Qualitätsbegriffes aus, sowie des Beteiligtenkreises für den Aushandlungsprozess von OER-Qualität.


Open Praxis ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivien Rolfe

For those receiving funding from the UK HEFCE-funded Open Educational Resource Programme (2009–2012), the sustainability of project outputs was one of a number of essential goals. Our approach for the hosting and distribution of health and life science open educational resources (OER) was based on the utilisation of the WordPress.org blogging platform and search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques to curate content and widen discovery.This paper outlines the approaches taken and tools used at the time, and reflects upon the effectiveness of web strategies several years post-funding. The paper concludes that using WordPress.org as a platform for sharing and curating OER, and the adoption of a pragmatic approach to SEO, offers cheap and simple ways for small-scale open education projects to be effective and sustainable.


Open Praxis ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanja Urbančič ◽  
Anja Polajnar ◽  
Mitja Jermol

An international online mentoring programme Open Education for a Better World (OE4BW) has been developed to unlock the potential of open education in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The programme provides an innovative approach to building Open Educational Resources, connecting developers of educational materials with experts volunteering as mentors. The model of the programme has been carefully designed and tested in two subsequent implementations in years 2018 and 2019. Results have proved the model to be useful for building capacities in open education, while producing concrete educational materials with great potential for social impact. Analysis of results has been used to suggest further improvements needed for enabling the program to be used on an even larger scale. The paper presents the development of the OE4BW model, its main characteristics, implementation results and guidelines for the future.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quazi K. Hassan ◽  
Khan R. Rahaman ◽  
Kazi Z. Sumon ◽  
Ashraf Dewan

Open educational resources (OER) have become increasingly popular in recent times. Here, the aim was to synthesise the lessons learned through the development of OER materials for a university-level course called “environmental modelling”. Consequently, the topics of discussion included: (i) how to choose an appropriate creative commons license; (ii) ways of incorporating materials from other sources, such as publicly available sources, other open access materials, and an author’s own published materials if not published under a creative commons license; (iii) the impact of the developed OER in the field of environmental modelling; and (iv) the challenges in developing OER material. Upon developing the materials, we observed the following: (i) students enrolled in the course did not purchase textbooks; (ii) our OER materials ranked as one of the most accessed (i.e., number 7) materials according to the usage data that summed the number of file downloads and item views from PRISM (i.e., the hosting platform maintained by the University of Calgary); (iii) the students learned relatively better as per the data acquired by the University of Calgary’s universal student ratings of instruction (USRI) instrument; and (iv) other universities expressed interest in adopting the materials.


Author(s):  
Alexandra Okada ◽  
Simon Buckingham Shum ◽  
Michelle Bachler ◽  
Eleftheria Tomadaki ◽  
Peter Scott ◽  
...  

The aim of this chapter is to overview the ways in which knowledge media technologies create opportunities for social learning. The Open Content movement has been growing rapidly, opening up new opportunities for widening participation. One of the Open Educational Resources (OER) initiatives is the OpenLearn project, launched by the Open University, which integrates three knowledge media technologies: Compendium, FM and MSG. In this chapter, the authors analyse some examples, which show how these tools can be used to foster open sensemaking communities by mapping knowledge, location and virtual interactions. At the end, they present some questions and future horizons related to this research.


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