Category Archives: oa.teaching

New study explores how open educational resources transform teaching & learning | Achieving the Dream

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“Open educational resources (OER) are freely available, open-source learning materials that can be downloaded, edited, and shared to serve all students. Using OER in higher education makes college courses not only more affordable for students, but more personalized, dynamic, and responsive to their lived experiences.

Based on promising findings from the multiyear OER Degree Initiative, ATD and SRI Education have conducted a study to examine whether the use of OER can transform teaching and learning and how open content can enable more equitable, culturally responsive teaching practices.

Teaching and Learning with Open Educational Resources presents the findings from this study. It is the first report of its kind to look extensively at how instructors are using OER to advance equity in the classroom….”

Teaching and Learning with Open Educational Resources (OER) | Achieving the Dream

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“Based on promising findings from the multiyear Open Educational Resources (OER) Degree Initiative, ATD and SRI Education have conducted a study to examine whether the use of OER can transform teaching and learning and how open content can enable more equitable, culturally responsive teaching practices.

Teaching and Learning with Open Educational Resources is the first report of its kind, presenting findings from this study and examining how instructors are using OER to advance equity in the classroom….”

Goodbye, world! OER World Map Blog

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The North-Rhine Westphalian Library Service Centre (hbz) will cease operating the OER World Map on 2022-04-29. We would like to thank all those who have supported and promoted the project in recent years. hbz will provide an appropriate solution for archiving the collected data. The software and data are openly licensed, so it is possible to continue operating the platform. If you are interested in continuing to operate the OER World Map, please do not hesitate to contact us at info@oerworldmap.org.  

UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science | Wikiversity | Week 10: Open Science Infrastructures

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“…Week 10: Open Science Infrastructures

Learning Outcomes

Explain the role of infrastructure in making open science possible
Describe gaps in the current infrastructure of open science
Describe challenges in making open science infrastructure, inclusive, collaborative, and sustainable.

Readings

“Whose Infrastructure? Towards Inclusive and Collaborative Knowledge Infrastructures in Open Science” by Angela Okune, Rebecca Hillyer, Denisse Albornoz, Alejandro Posada, Leslie Chan in ELPUB, Toronto, Canada; 2018, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.[24] 20 pages. “Open is Not Forever: A Study of Vanished Open Access Journals” by Laakso, M., Matthias, L., & Jahn, N in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2021. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.[25] 14 pages.

Discussion Question

Identify an example of infrastructure relevant to your research context. Describe one strength and one weakness of this infrastructure. Focus on the extent to which your example is inclusive, collaborative, and/ or sustainable.  Conclude your post with a question for others in the class. Alternative discussion question: If you (as discussion leader) can identify one or two examples of open infrastructure familiar to your class and relevant to their research context, have the class apply concepts from the reading to evaluate the specific example(s) on dimensions of inclusivity, collaboration, and sustainability. This week also offers the opportunity for an open data activity using this dataset on open access journals: Vanished Open Access Journals (Version 3) by Laakso, M., Matthias, L., & Jahn, N. available on Zenodo, Meyrin, Switzerland: CERN, 2020….”

Teaching Linked Open Data using Bibliographic Metadata

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Abstract:  This paper describes LD4DH, the Linked Data for Digital Humanities: Publishing, Querying, and Linking on the Semantic Web workshop at the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School. It includes a description of the general structure of the workshop, how it has changed over the course of the last seven years, between 2015 and 2021, and evaluates the differences between in-person delivery in 2018–2019 and the online mode in 2020–2021. Discussion is centred on the description of the data as well as the illustration of the processes, methods, and software used throughout the workshop. The paper concludes with a summary of participant evaluation, and reflects on the opportunities and challenges of teaching Linked Open Data to a mixed cohort of predominantly Humanities researchers and professionals from the cultural heritage sector.

Five A’s of Open Pedagogy – McToonish

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“Those of us who do work in the area of open educational practices are familiar with the five Rs of OER:

Reuse
Revise
Remix
Redistribute
Retain

We’re also familiar with the inability for us to come to an agreed upon definition for open pedagogy.

Do we have to start the work by using existing open materials?
Does the work the students produce have to be shared openly and with a Creative Commons license?
Is there a particular way it needs to be assessed? …”

Using Affordable Course Materials: Instructors’ Motivations, Approaches, and Outcomes

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Abstract:  Based on 30 interviews with instructors who implemented affordable materials in their courses at a large research university, this study explored their motivations for using such resources, the processes they employed, and the extent to which the new course materials influenced teaching methods and perceived learning outcomes. Results suggest that most instructors were motivated by both student cost savings and hoped-for improvements in teaching and learning. Instructors’ choices—such as the decision to adopt an existing textbook in full or to curate a collection of disparate materials—were strongly influenced by their perception of how well available resources aligned with their own teaching and learning goals. In general, instructors felt student learning slightly improved after they put the materials into use, but the extent of improvement seemed to vary across the approaches to implementation. Librarians can leverage these results to help motivate and support the selection and implementation of affordable materials.

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Virginia Tech Publishing announce new open textbook | VTx | Virginia Tech

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“The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Virginia Tech Publishing, housed in the University Libraries, released a new open textbook on March 2 titled “Teaching in the University: Learning from Graduate Students and Early Career Faculty.”

The book is written by 15 current and former students in the Graduate Teaching Scholar Program and is edited by Donna Westfall-Rudd, the director of the program and associate professor in the Department of Agricultural, Leadership, and Community Education, and recent Ph.D. recipients and program teaching assistants Courtney Veringrin ’15 and Jeremy Elliot-Engel ’18. Leah Hamilton, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Food Science and Technology, peer-reviewed the book….”

Towards a culture of open scholarship: the role of pedagogical communities

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The UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has called for evidence on the roles that different stakeholders play in reproducibility and research integrity. Of central priority are proposals for improving research integrity and quality, as well as guidance and support for researchers. In response to this, we argue that there is one important component of research integrity that is often absent from discussion: the pedagogical consequences of how we teach, mentor, and supervise students through open scholarship. We justify the need to integrate open scholarship principles into research training within higher education and argue that pedagogical communities play a key role in fostering an inclusive culture of open scholarship. We illustrate these benefits by presenting the Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training (FORRT), an international grassroots community whose goal is to provide support, resources, visibility, and advocacy for the adoption of principled, open teaching and mentoring practices, whilst generating conversations about the ethics and social impact of higher-education pedagogy. Representing a diverse group of early-career researchers and students across specialisms, we advocate for greater recognition of and support for pedagogical communities, and encourage all research stakeholders to engage with these communities to enable long-term, sustainable change.

An ENOEL Toolkit: Open Education Benefits | Zenodo

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Welcome to the ENOEL Open Education Benefits Toolkit! It is a set of tools (slides, leaflets, and Twitter cards) prepared by The European Network of Open Education Librarians (ENOEL). The toolkit aims to help raise awareness of the importance of Open Education and it points out benefits for students, teachers, institutions, and society.

All templates are under a CC BY licence, enabling you to use and adapt them to your specific needs. Depending on your circumstances, you may choose to use Twitter cards in your campaign, or add one of the slides in your presentation, or even print out one or more leaflets and hang them on a wall of your local library. 

We invite you to pick and choose, adapt and reuse! Help us raise awareness about the benefits of Open Education!

How to use it?

The set contains three types of tools:

1. OE Benefits – ENOEL slides 

2. OE Benefits – ENOEL leaflets 

3. OE Benefits – ENOEL Twitter cards

Look at the second slide in each deck for a detailed description of how the files are organized and how they might be used. We’d love to hear how you have reused them: oer@sparceurope.org

Understanding critical data literacy beyond data skills | Zenodo

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Atenas, Javiera, Havemann, Leo, Khun, Caroline, & Timmermann, Cristian. (2021, August 3). Understanding critical data literacy beyond data skills. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5155667

Data literacy is normally understood as a set of abilities to read, understand, create, and communicate data as information. Much like literacy as a general concept, data literacy focuses on the competencies involved in working with data. 

However, data literacy can be also understood a mean to participate in the (datafied) society, thus the skills needed to work with data go beyond technicalities and have a strong social component, ergo, need to be grounded on the overarching principles of data ethics.

We suggest librarians and researchers get familiarised with a set of data skills that may help them work with data at management and research level, while being aware of the potential impact of data on individuals and the society, thus, handling data within an ethical and critical framework.

Assigning Public Philosophy Projects to Undergraduates (guest post) | Daily Nous

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“In several recent undergraduate courses, I’ve offered students the option to design a creative “public philosophy project” in lieu of writing a traditional term paper. Typically, around 10-15% of students choose this option, and I’m consistently impressed with the quality and creativity of their work.

I let students know about this option at the very beginning of the semester, and I direct them to a blurb on my syllabus with some examples of what their projects might look like, including:

Create a YouTube video or podcast.
Propose a substantive edit to a Wikipedia article or propose an entirely new Wikipedia article.
Write a philosophical op-ed or blog post.
Conduct a philosophically substantive interview with someone whose work is related to course content (philosopher, academic, artist, journalist, etc.).
Utilize another online medium or social media platform (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), perhaps by designing some way to engage non-course participants in philosophical activity….”

D7.4 How to be FAIR with your data. A teaching and training handbook for higher education institutions | Zenodo

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Engelhardt, Claudia, Biernacka, Katarzyna, Coffey, Aoife, Cornet, Ronald, Danciu, Alina, Demchenko, Yuri, Downes, Stephen, Erdmann, Christopher, Garbuglia, Federica, Germer, Kerstin, Helbig, Kerstin, Hellström, Margareta, Hettne, Kristina, Hibbert, Dawn, Jetten, Mijke, Karimova, Yulia, Kryger Hansen, Karsten, Kuusniemi, Mari Elisa, Letizia, Viviana, … Zhou, Biru. (2022). D7.4 How to be FAIR with your data. A teaching and training handbook for higher education institutions (V1.1 DRAFT) [Computer software]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5837500

This handbook aims to support higher education institutions with the integration of FAIR-related content in their curricula and teaching.  It was written and edited by a group of about 40 collaborators in a series of six book sprint events that took place between 1 and 10 June 2021. The document provides practical material, such as competence profiles, learning outcomes and lesson plans, and supporting information. It incorporates community feedback received during the public consultation which ran from 27 July to 12 September 2021.

Controlled Digital Lending of Video Resources: Ensuring the Provision of Streaming Access to Videos for Pedagogical Purposes in Academic Libraries | Journal of Copyright in Education & Librarianship

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Abstract:  This article examines a current crisis within media librarianship regarding the challenges for academic libraries in providing streaming access to video resources despite the growing need for users to have streaming access. The article discusses this crisis largely within the context of COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease of 2019) and how the pandemic has exacerbated the problem. This article also posits a possible solution to the issue through the application of controlled digital lending (CDL) to video resources for a pedagogical purpose. The article demonstrates the extent of the crisis, examines how other media librarians have addressed the problem, and shows the limitations to the solutions that have so far been offered. It then broadly discusses the concept of CDL and how this practice could be applied to video resources to address the frequent inability of libraries to provide streaming access to videos.

 

Special Collection Learning from Lockdown: challenges and benefits | Journal of Interactive Media in Education

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Collection launched: 11 Aug 2021

The articles in this collection reflect different perspectives; of students, teaching staff and administrators; and of managers and leaders across very different institutions worldwide as decisions were made about how to respond to the pandemic and provide ‘emergency remote education’.

Authors reflect on how educational technology supported higher education provision during this time, yet although the perspectives are different, common themes emerged such as the importance to promote care and community – a principle which can inform future practice. Another theme is that of professional development for academics and teaching staff, and how best to support this during challenging times in a sustainable way. Similarly particular challenges for accessibility during the pandemic were reported and here too, suggested approaches to supporting accessibility follow sustainability principles to make them relevant for the future. Tackling inequity is another related theme found in more than one contribution including an approach taken by a USA liberal arts college to make all supporting materials for their courses free materials (such as open educational resources, OER).

The papers also represent different research methods and approaches, including a longitudinal study, surveys, interviews, student artefacts, meeting notes, workshop and course evaluations and recordings of managers’ meetings and decision making.

Guest Editors: Ann Jones and Katy Jordan