Category Archives: oa.learning

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

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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.

 

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….”

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

Open For All: The OERu’s Next Generation Digital Learning Ecosystem

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This paper describes the functionality, scalability, and cost of implementing and maintaining a suite of open source technologies, which have supported hundreds of thousands of learners in the past year, on an information technology infrastructure budget of less than US$10,000 per year. In addition, it reviews pedagogical opportunities offered by a fully open digital learning ecosystem, as well as benefits for learners and educators alike.

The Open Education Resource universitas (OERu) is an international consortium made up of 36 publicly funded institutions and the OER Foundation. The OERu currently offers first-year postsecondary courses through OER-based micro-courses with pathways to gain stackable micro-credentials, convertible to academic credit toward recognised university qualifications. The OERu, adhering to open principles (Wiley, 2014b), has created an open source Next Generation Digital Learning Ecosystem (NGDLE) to meet the needs of learners, consortium partners, and OERu collaborators. The NGDLE—a distributed, loosely coupled component model, consisting entirely of free and open source software (FOSS)—is a global computing infrastructure created to reach learners wherever they are. All OERu services are hosted on commodity FOSS infrastructure, conferring significant advantages and creating opportunities for institutions adopting any of these services to enhance education opportunities at minimal cost. The NGDLE can also increase technological autonomy and resilience while providing exceptional learning opportunities and agency for learners and educators alike.

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

Oh My Git! An open source game about learning Git!

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Oh My Git! is an open source game that introduces players to the popular version control system “Git”. It is highly interactive, and aims at building intuition for operations like “merging” or “rebasing” branches. Players are guided through the features of Git step by step – each level tells a little story where the player can use their new-found powers to solve problems or help others.

Oh My Git! is available for all major operating systems on itch.io, and has been downloaded over 2000 times as of February 2021.

Factsheet

Developers
bleeptrack and blinry, a creative duo from Germany

In development since
September 2020

Latest release
February 2021 (version 0.6.0)

Platforms
Windows, macOS, Linux

Price
Free! Open source, made with the Godot Engine <3

Website
https://ohmygit.org

A Coalition for Social Learning Across Content | Hypothesis

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Today we’re announcing a coalition, Social Learning Across Content, of educational content creators, technology platforms, service providers, and stakeholder groups that are coming together in support of cross-platform social learning. Moving forward, this coalition will work together to establish user-friendly, interoperable best practices and solutions to bring social learning to all content.

Rethinking assessment during the pandemic, particularly re. disability equality | Martin Paul Eve | Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing

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The pandemic is not over. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill just went back for a week of in-person term. Seven days later, they have shut down, with over 500 students in isolation. They can now offer only remote tuition. So I repeat to those who are being optimistic about this year: no, the pandemic is not over, it is far from over, and there are many many challenges ahead. In this post I want to turn particularly to the challenge of access to library resources over the coming year for students, with particular reference to the disability equality implications.