Home – Open Educational Resources Advocacy Toolkit | LibGuides at CAUL – Council of Australian University Librarians

Posted on September 7, 2022 by OATP primary

The OER Advocacy Toolkit was created as part of the CAUL Enabling a Modern Curriculum OER Advocacy Project. It was designed as a reference to support academic librarians in advocating for the creation and re-use of open educational resources (OER) at their institution.

The Toolkit contains:

information
resources
checklists
practice-based ideas

for communicating with and advocating to OER stakeholders such as academics, librarians, teaching and learning committees and university executives.

Evaluation of Open Access Websites for Anesthesia Education : Anesthesia & Analgesia

Posted on August 21, 2022 by OATP primary

Abstract: BACKGROUND:

While the prevalence of free, open access medical education resources for health professionals has expanded over the past 10 years, many educational resources for health care professionals are not publicly available or require fees for access. This lack of open access creates global inequities in the availability and sharing of information and may have the most significant impact on health care providers with the greatest need. The extent of open access online educational websites aimed for clinicians and trainees in anesthesiology worldwide is unknown. In this study, we aimed to identify and evaluate the quality of websites designed to provide open access educational resources for anesthesia trainees and clinicians.

METHODS:

A PubMed search of articles published between 2009 and 2020, and a Startpage search engine web search was conducted in May 2021 to identify websites using the following inclusion criteria: (1) contain educational content relevant for anesthesia providers or trainees, (2) offer content free of charge, and (3) are written in the English language. Websites were each scored by 2 independent reviewers using a website quality evaluation tool with previous validity evidence that was modified for anesthesia (the Anesthesia Medical Education Website Quality Evaluation Tool).

RESULTS:

Seventy-five articles and 175 websites were identified; 37 websites met inclusion criteria. The most common types of educational content contained in the websites included videos (66%, 25/37), text-based resources (51%, 19/37), podcasts (35%, 13/37), and interactive learning resources (32%, 12/37). Few websites described an editorial review process (24%, 9/37) or included opportunities for active engagement or interaction by learners (30%,11/37). Scores by tertile differed significantly across multiple domains, including disclosure of author/webmaster/website institution; description of an editorial review process; relevancy to residents, fellows, and faculty; comprehensiveness; accuracy; disclosure of content creation or revision; ease of access to information; interactivity; clear and professional presentation of information; and links to external information.

CONCLUSIONS:

We found 37 open access websites for anesthesia education available on the Internet. Many of these websites may serve as a valuable resource for anesthesia clinicians looking for self-directed learning resources and for educators seeking to curate resources into thoughtfully integrated learning experiences. Ongoing efforts are needed to expand the number and improve the existing open access websites, especially with interactivity, to support the education and training of anesthesia providers in even the most resource-limited areas of the world. Our findings may provide recommendations for those educators and organizations seeking to fill this needed gap to create new high-quality educational websites.

Job: OEN Open Educational Practices Specialist | Open Education Network

Posted on August 19, 2022 by OATP primary

The OEN is hiring an open educational practices specialist to serve as the point of contact for members regarding the use of all OEN-supported online platforms and technologies to advance open educational practices.

Our goal is to develop and facilitate training for OEN-supported platforms and technologies in order to encourage broad utilization for open education program growth. The open educational practices specialist will bring creativity, organization, and initiative to the management of open education platforms and technologies. On our small team, you will be responsible for consulting with OEN members about open practices and the use of OEN-supported platforms and technologies as well as recommending and implementing program improvements based upon community needs. You will be creating project timelines to ensure that support resources are aligned across the OEN’s portfolio of programs. You will also be providing support for the Open Textbook Library and the OEN hub and data dashboard.

Working in a collaborative culture rooted in gratitude, the open educational practices specialist will take the lead on ensuring that OEN-supported platforms and technologies are managed and facilitated with responsiveness and enthusiasm, engaging with a variety of stakeholders across the open education landscape.

[…]

NSF Grant for New STEM-focused Commons | Platypus – the Humanities Commons Blog

Posted on August 17, 2022 by OATP primary

by Kathleen Fitzpatrick

The Commons team is delighted to have been awarded one of the inaugural FAIROS RCN grants from the NSF, in order to establish DBER+ Commons. That’s a big pile of acronyms, so here’s a breakdown: the NSF is of course the National Science Foundation, one of the most important federal funding bodies in the United States, and a new funder for us. The FAIROS RCN grant program was launched this year by the NSF in order to invest in Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable Open Science (FAIROS) by supporting the formation and development of Research Coordination Networks (RCN) dedicated to those principles.

We have teamed up with a group of amazing folks at Michigan State University who are working across science, technology, engineering, math, and more traditional NSF fields, all of whom are focused on discipline-based education research (DBER) as well as other engaged education research methodologies (the +). Our goal for this project is to bring them together with their national and international collaborators in STEM education to create DBER+ Commons, which will use — and crucially, expand — the affordances of the HCommons network and promote FAIR and CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics) practices, principles, and guidelines in undergraduate, postbaccalaureate, graduate, and postdoctoral science education research activities.

Learned Societies and Responsible Research: Results of the survey for the TSV member societies | Tieteellisten seurain valtuuskunta

Posted on August 12, 2022 by peter.suber's bookmarks

Abstract: The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies studied its member societies’ activities related to responsible research in connection to open science, research integrity and research evaluation. In addition to these areas, the assessment covered the societies’ scientific activities and activities promoting societal impact, as well as the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on the societies’ ability to operate. The material was gathered through a survey carried out in November 2021. A total of 116 member societies, representing various fields, responded to it.

The Book Costs How Much??? Textbook Cost & OER Awareness in Political Science | Journal of Political Science Education

Posted on August 9, 2022 by peter.suber's bookmarks

Shawna M. Brandle (2022) The Book Costs How Much??? Textbook Cost & OER Awareness in Political Science, Journal of Political Science Education, DOI: 10.1080/15512169.2022.2104164

Abstract

Introductory level political science courses are a near-universal experience for undergraduate students in the US. Despite the wide occurrence of introductory courses, and the increasing attention paid to student loan debt, the cost of the teaching materials for introductory courses has largely been ignored in political science. This paper brings together several data sources to show how political science has not been attentive to textbook costs and highlight one possible solution, Open Educational Resources (OER), which has the potential to increase access to political science for all students.

Open For Antiracism Program | CCCOER

Posted on August 2, 2022 by OATP primary

The Open for Antiracism (OFAR) program – co-led by CCCOER and College of the Canyons – emerged as a response to the growing awareness of structural racism in our educational systems and the realization that adoption of open educational resources(OER) and open pedagogy could be transformative at institutions seeking to improve. Although many institutions have published impressive statements decrying racism, calling for change, and putting equity into their strategic plans, these haven’t always been translated into teaching practices that directly affect students.

Accessibility in Open Educational Resources: a series of 3 no-cost Academies designed to build capacity in educator teams

Posted on August 2, 2022 by OATP primary

ISKME and CAST’s National AEM Center invite teams of educators to learn how to use accessible Open Educational Resources (OER) to make learning more equitable and bust the barriers to learning that millions of learners experience every day. This opportunity is free to educators and you can watch an explanation here.

Our joint Accessible OER Academy series is provided at no-cost to educators and will introduce district cohorts to how openly licensed resources can be key levers for both adapting existing resources to increase accessibility and using the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework to design resources that are accessible for learners with disabilities from the start. The resources and engagement will occur on OER Commons and all resources will be organized into collections that can be posted to OER Commons’s partner Hubs and pushed to partner microsites.

We invite educators from the same district to form a cohort that will join experts in OER and accessibility. Throughout the six-week Academy series, district cohorts will receive access to a curated set of high quality resources to review and adapt for use in their own settings. District cohorts that complete all six sessions will be invited to present at a national summit alongside CAST and ISKME. Each individual participant of the Academy will receive a certificate of completion. Each team will submit one application.

We encourage multidisciplinary cohorts of 3-5 educators that represent a diversity of lived experiences, classroom expertise, and current educational roles. Consider representatives from general ed, special ed, ed tech, assistive technology, library media, and administration. Your team will produce resources that can be used with and to benefit all learners, so consider building a team that can collaborate for instructional purposes. These resources might include student-facing assignments, newsletters to families or other instructional materials.

As a result of participating in the Academy series, educators will be able to:

Understand the fundamentals of both accessibility and OER, and why synergy between the two matters for learners with disabilities.

Apply best practices to ensure OER are created with accessibility from the start.

Evaluate the accessibility of curated OER based on the principles of accessible design.

The series will consist of six 90-minute webinars with activities between each. The series is split into three levels that have two sessions per level. Each of the six sessions will feature Accessibility and OER experts, resources and group breakout work time.

101 – Fundamentals of Accessibility and OER on Sept. 27th and October 4th – 7:00pm ET/4:00pm PT

201 – Adapting and Creating Accessible OER on Oct. 11th and October 18th – 7:00pm ET/4:00pm PT

301 – Curating and Evaluating OER for Accessibility on Oct. 25th and Nov. 1st – 7:00pm ET/4:00pm PT

Apply as a team by September 13th. If you have any questions, please contact Michelle Soriano (msoriano@cast.org) or Joanna Schimizzi (joanna@iskme.org).

Use of preprint peer review to educate and enculturate science undergraduates

Posted on July 29, 2022 by OATP primary

“Key points•Undergraduate science education should include education in scholarly practices like peer review.•Authentic experiences in peer review increase science literacy and science identity.•Peer review of preprints provides a means for undergraduates to be involved in peer review that is independent of journal gate-keeping processes.”

OER-Strategie – Freie Bildungsmaterialien fu?r die Entwicklung digitaler Bildung | Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung

Posted on July 29, 2022 by OATP primary

Mit der OER-Strategie als lernende, langfristige Strategie will das BMBF deshalb zum einen mit allen Akteuren Antworten und Konzepte zu zentralen Fragen digitaler Bildungsmaterialien entwickeln.

Zum anderen zielt das BMBF darauf, zusätzliche und nachhaltige Impulse in der digitalen Bildung und für eine insgesamt veränderte Lehr- und Lernkultur zu setzen. In welcher Form dafür dauerhafte OER-Strukturen in Deutschland sinnvoll und notwendig sind, wird im Licht der sich entwickelnden Bildungsmedien- infrastrukturen zu prüfen sein.

Ein Sowohl-als-auch von kommerziellen und freien Bildungsmaterialien ist sinnvoll und notwendig. Wie ein Miteinander gestaltet werden kann, ist wichtig für die Weiterentwicklung von Bildungsmedien. Das BMBF will die Mehrwerte von OER beim Zugang und der Gestaltung von Bildungsprozessen gezielt mit den anerkannten Stärken kommerzieller Bildungsressourcen und mit den Ansätzen innovativer Medienanbieter verbinden. Dafür sind auch bislang in Deutschland fehlende und nicht ausgelotete Kooperationsmodelle und Vergütungsstrukturen bei offen lizenzierten Bildungsmaterialien zu explorieren.

Das BMBF will bei der Etablierung von OER Innovationen fördern. Dazu dienen anwendungsorientierte Begleitforschungsprojekte, die die Vernetzung von OER-Akteuren vorantreiben. Die gezielte Entwicklung und Bereitstellung offener Bildungsmaterialien in praxisorientierten Lehr- und Lerngemeinschaften wird das BMBF dabei zusätzlich durch Software-Projekte unterstützen. Anknüpfend an Ergebnisse der OERinfo-Förderlinie soll die lernende OER-Strategie dabei Handlungsfelder der Strategie verbinden, weiterentwickeln und in Förderrichtlinien umsetzen.

IFLA Guidelines for Professional Library and Information Science (LIS) Education Programmes

Posted on July 28, 2022 by OATP primary

“LIS education builds, holistically, the capacity of professionals with ingrained ethics and humanistic values. Equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility (EDIA) are essential to LIS professionalism, service-orientation, social responsibility, sustainability, education, and lifelong learning. Access to information, including open access (OA), as a public good; intellectual freedom; responsible stewardship of data, information and knowledge; and the technologies and intelligence driving them, are central to the profession….

Research proficiency includes problem-oriented research which analyses the basis of issues encountered in LIS and attempts to provide possible solutions and understanding for professional practice in diverse information settings. It also includes the ability to identify, collate, catalogue, retrieve, evaluate, and disseminate research produced by others for scholarship advancement across disciplines as well as for general societal impact and innovative policy development for the betterment of communities. Such scholarly communication includes open access which ensures unrestricted access to research for further knowledge generation….”

Lazarus & Suryasen (2022) The quality of higher education through MOOC penetration and the role of academic libraries

Posted on July 26, 2022 by OATP primary

Lazarus, Flora Charles, and Rajneesh Suryasen. 2022. “The Quality of Higher Education Through MOOC Penetration and the Role of Academic Libraries”. Insights 35: 9. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.577

Abstract

The governments of emerging economies have realized the potential of massive open online courses (MOOCs) for enhancing the quality of higher education, but MOOC penetration is still very low in countries like India. This article explores the issues relating to MOOC integration and attempts to identify the key drivers for the adoption of a MOOC-based curriculum. Integration into the curriculum, the MOOC services of the academic library and the Indian Ministry of Human Resource Development’s (MHRD) policy and support are identified as the key drivers for increasing MOOC penetration. The article also suggests a direct relationship between the level of MOOC penetration and the quality of higher education in emerging economies. The practical implications for practice and policy are classification of the MOOC services of the academic library and a decision-making model that chooses a hybrid learning strategy for higher educational institutions.

An Overseas Ed-Tech Firm Wants to Buy 2U. What Could That Mean for Colleges?

Posted on July 23, 2022 by peter.suber's bookmarks

“Byju’s, an ed-tech behemoth based in India, has put more than $1 billion on the table to acquire the online program manager, Bloomberg first reported late last month. 2U is one of the largest online-program managers, or OPMs, in the United States, known for scaling up online-degree programs and teaming up with more than 130 American colleges, including large institutions such as Arizona State, New York, and Syracuse Universities. It’s also the parent company of the online-course provider edX….

The worry among colleges, these experts say, is that if Byju’s wanted to shave costs or focus more on short-term, course-level products, it could scale back that “high-touch” model that many institutions have come to expect in exchange for paying 2U millions of dollars through tuition-sharing agreements. There’s wariness, too, of temporary disruptions that can happen whenever a company undergoes reorganization.

College leaders fear that Byju’s intent is to “use the toehold and cash flow to accomplish some other goal,” and that 2U’s clients will not be a priority, said Clay Shirky, vice provost for educational technologies at New York University, which works with 2U. “That’s what we’re worried about.” …”

Copyright: for learning, teaching, and research ( A guide) | Library & Cultural Services at University of Essex

Posted on July 22, 2022 by OATP primary

Copyright is relevant whenever you are copying or sharing creative work. This includes publishing academic works, creating educational resources, uploading a thesis to the Repository, sharing images online, and more. This guide helps you to understand copyright and its relevance to your work and study at the University of Essex.

‘‘They Didn’t Care’: Inside One University’s Sputtering Online Partnership With 2U’ | Jeff Pooley

Posted on July 22, 2022 by peter.suber's bookmarks

Michael Vasquez, writing for The Chronicle [paywalled] a few weeks ago: When a pair of professors stepped down from their posts at Arcadia University this year, without another job lined up, they did so to halt the creation of a physician-assistant program in partnership with 2U, the online-learning giant. […] After the full-time faculty members left, the program director also stepped down — further dampening any hopes of launching the program soon, as a program director must be on the job for 15 months before any accreditor visit. The resignations came several months after the accreditor’s virtual site visit to evaluate Arcadia’s fledgling hybrid physician-assistant program. That virtual visit did not go well. If and when the delayed, staff-less program gets launched, 2U will receive 62.5% of tuition revenue for 15 years, The Chronicle reported. Online Program Managers (OPMs) like 2U are stealth privatizers of nonprofit higher ed, even as they drain dollars from our universities and students. The Government Accountability Office’s mild-mannered May report [pdf] calling on more oversight was followed, earlier this month, by a hard-hitting Wall Street Journal piece (“2U Inc. isn’t a university, but it sometimes looks like one”), so maybe scrutiny of the sleazy sector is picking up. Just in time for 2U’s likely sale to an Indian ed-tech giant. What looks worse than ever is Harvard and MIT’s shameless decision last year to sell edX.

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