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

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).

 

 

Pilot Scheme Gives Students the Chance to Benefit From Free E-Books and Resources

In a 12-month pilot scheme, the Kortext Open Resources Collection – a curated collection of open access (OA) books and open educational resources (OERs) – will be available to all Jisc FE member institutions. This means that the UK’s 1.7 million FE learners will have free and fair access to these resources, which support a range of subjects from arts, business, and environment information technology and English literature.

Will Libraries become stewards of our Open Data Collections | Chris Moore | Pulse | LinkedIn

“What I have been thinking about lately is the role of our Public Libraries as stewards of Open Data.  As long as I can remember the Library and our Librarians are the stewards of information, those that guide us on our quests for knowledge.  What if our libraries had a person who had a responsibility for the communities Open Data collection.  This elevates data beyond just something a government “chooses” to release to a set of important current and historic information that needs to be curated.”

THE TRANSFERABILITY OF TRUSTED DIGITAL REPOSITORY STANDARDS TO AN EAST AFRICAN CONTEXT

[From the ABSTRACT] Digital preservation is a topic that has been extensively explored over the last thirty years in the fields of archival and information studies. However, relatively little literature has touched on the topic of Trusted Digital Repositories (TDRs). A TDR is ‘[A]n archive, consisting of an organization of people and systems that has accepted the responsibility to preserve information and make it available for a Designated Community.’1 Standards governing TDRs, namely the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) and Repository Audit and Certification (RAC), have been designed and tested by developed nations with minimal reference to the developing world. Little attempt has been made to question whether these standards, entirely developed in one context, are actually transferable or applicable to another. There is an assumption, however, that because these standards have been generalised, they are ubiquitous and robust, transferable to any locale. This thesis seeks to question the basic assumptions that are made when standards or best practice created in the developed world are applied to different contexts outside of the original milieu of elaboration. Further, this thesis considers the applicability of TDRs to the Eastern African archival context …”