Does Open Pedagogy require OER?

There is no rush! Don’t worry about producing a beautiful, flawless textbook. Build it in stages across multiple years, and let different cohorts of students contribute in different, layered ways. Make no claims to perfection. Your textbook is a work-in-progress, and it will continually improve as learners engage with it.

People often ask me how students can create textbooks when they are only just beginning to learn about the topics that the textbooks cover.  My answer to this is that unlike many other scholarly materials, textbooks are primarily designed to be accessible to students– to new scholars in a particular academic area or sub-specialty.  Students are the perfect people to help create textbooks, since they are the most keenly tuned in to what other students will need in order to engage with the material in meaningful ways.  By taking the foundational principles of a field– most of which are not “owned” by any prior textbook publisher– and refiguring them through their own lens, student textbook creators can easily tap their market.  They can access and learn about these principles in multiple ways (conventional or open textbooks, faculty lecture and guidance, reading current work in the field, conversations with related networks, videos and webinars, etc.), and they are quite capable, in my opinion, of designing engaging ways to reframe those principles in ways that will be more helpful to students than anything that has come before.

Archived webinar: Open Practices

bad attitude

doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to design and create better versions that maximize the benefits while minimizing the problems

And here’s the magic: we offered this book up to the knowledge commons, and though it is rough and flawed in spots, it is a real contribution on many levels, to many fields, with application for many courses and future students. Public university students generating great work, sending it off to the public to use it as they wish.

Oregon community college instructors are using to reduce textbook costs in their courses. I

Defining OEP Overall, open education practitioners and researchers describe OEP as moving beyond a content-centred approach to openness, shifting the focus from resources to practices, with learners and teachers sharing the processes of knowledge creation. In their summary of the UKOER project, for example, Beetham, et al. (2012) explicitly define the project’s interpretation of OEP as practices which included the creation, use and reuse of OER as well as open learning, open/public pedagogies, open access publishing, and the use of open technologies. Ehlers (2011) defines OEP as “practices which support the (re)use and production of OER through institutional policies, promote innovative pedagogical models, and respect and empower learners as co-producers on their lifelong learning paths.”

by inserting comments in the audio recordings they’d submit to me (as opposed to worrying about whether or not it was ok to correct their French in class in front of their peers… something I had always been hesitant to do in spite of – or perhaps because of – what had been done to me!) or by recording an audio walkthrough of suggestions and corrections to the first drafts of their compositions (instead of handing back a blood-red “fixed” version of a composition in class).

There’s something to be said about making the text your own in this manner: my students took ownership of the content and (literally) left their mark on it!

copyright law regulates our exercise of all these newfound capabilities – so that what is technically possible is also legally forbidden.

a generation of capacity building to do.

Why should I adopt an open textbook?

OEP is still in its infancy.

customized and personalized learning that has the promise to open up our classrooms to those students who so need to be freed from its current construct

economic benefit

The real potential for OER to improve education is in its open license. In contrast to “all rights reserved” copyright, OER are licensed to allow anyone, anywhere, anytime to reuse, repurpose and redistribute the content.

Textbook Example of Unbundling

PSU Library’s OERs are Free Textbooks – for Everyone

Second, how do we avoid maxing out teachers? Yes, teachers want better content. They would also like to hold on to their nights and weekends. If open educational resources rely on teachers to spend lots of time sifting through materials or creating it themselves, that could send teachers back to textbooks posthaste.

Open Educational Resources

Opening up Education: Innovative Teaching and Learning for All through New Technologies and Open Educational Resources

OER Success Framework

SUNY OER Services

Unbundling of Textbook Publishers

Open Educational Resources (OER) and the Evolving Higher Education Landscape

Open Educational Resources (OER) in higher education have the potential to triple in use as primary courseware over the next five years, from 4 percent to 12 percent, according to a survey of more than 500 faculty by Cengage Learning. I

New Directions in Open Education

but what about links people might have made to my Fall course content? I won’t be updating the Fall course anymore (I’ll be updating the Spring course)

Scary stuff. Apart from the questionable ethics, it actually disempowers students by removing their agency in the learning process.

they don’t even know that their “learning pathway” is being manipluated via machine learning.

and pruning the content we could access easily.

branching

The implication is that any depth must exist within the instructional materials accessed through the system.

Canvas’ defaults encourage a simplistic, linear course with step-by-step navigation for all tasks.

a contribution form allowing new content providers to catalog their materials for iLumina (although materials are reviewed before being finally admitted to the library).

THE NEW FACE OF THE TEXTBOOK MONOPOLY

Open educational resources (OER)-based flipped classroom practice in an undergraduate course

but the students buy the books. It’s not money that comes to us. That’s why it’s that way. That’s the power of institutionality: it’s so invisible you can’t even see it.

How can educators find and use OER in their classrooms?

every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge.

While this segment has a strong potential to become an independent revenue stream for the company, a free education market place with a look and feel similar to its e commerce segment can definitely provide a boost to Amazon’s existing products in the short term.

What will these services mean for school districts and teachers? And, more important questions linger, such as, “Should teachers and school districts be trying to create their own content when so much is available online already? If not, who curates OER content?”

“With the technology, content and expertise that Amazon has, we believed we could provide value,” he said.

But the other, more troubling development that is implied by the issues surrounding the very avoidable errors with the Inspire platform is that the platform focuses on the least interesting element of open educational resources: distribution. It would have been great to see a high-profile effort that simplified and supported authorship and remixing. The current conversations about OER remain mired in the very narrow vision of textbook replacement. The transformational potential of OER will come when we embrace the potential of both teacher and learner as creator. Open licensing makes this potential easier to realize, as it removes many of the barriers enshrined within traditional publishing and licensing schemes. 

As the Google leaders indicated, however, a major challenge is content curation in the OER world.

“Their business model is probably more about serving ancillary products around the free resources. If you’re interested in a resource about science and there are practical elements to the lesson, you might be offered a bundle of the things you need in order to deliver that lesson: batteries, wires, lightbulbs, and that sort of thing.”

For Esposito, the answer to that question is likely to involve data: “Inspire is a stalking horse to build a database of material on the K-12 professional community.”

students who used the free online textbook scored higher on departmental final examinations, had higher grade point averages in the class and had higher retention rates

Where Open Textbooks Are Used

create their own interactive learning tools

A Postcolonial Look at the Future of #EdTech

xploratory grants for developing new pathways.

The copyright for the materials in this collection is held by Universal Music Canada and their affiliates. These materials have been made available with their consent. Patrons may not download, reproduce, alter or transmit files/images without permission from the copyright holder(s). These files/images may not be used for commercial purposes but may be used under the fair dealing or educational exemptions outlined in the Canadian Copyright Act.

Open Textbook Library (OTL),

If only 2% – 5% of all faculty and their students (who are doing renewable assignments) were active creators and improvers of OER, that would likely be sufficient.

We need to enable and facilitate alternative development models if our vision of universal OER adoption is to become a reality.

Look for existing networks for collaboration that could be adapted to fit the strategy if formal networks are desired.

ANCHOR INSTITUTIONS

OER must have the right metadata

SUPPORTING ROBUST TECHNICAL and INSTITUTIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE

the Foundation will provide enhanced support for grantee collaboration.

the technical basis for OER

robust and flexible infrastructure.

Moreover, ZTC degrees ensure that the benefits of open materials follow students from enrollment to graduation, allowing for a pathway of personalized courses that guide students toward completing their degrees.

Open materials can empower faculty with the aca-demic freedom to tailor their courses to their students’ needs and even engage students in meaningful learning experiences through adaptation and improvement of the open content itself.10

reserve part of its portfolio to con-tinue funding the infrastructure necessary to support the field

Therefore, we refreshed our OER strategy to focus on our goal of using grants to help OER reach mainstream adoption.

high-quality academic materials

I hired a bunch of undergrad students and recent alums, and paid them out of my own pocket to assist me.

The Teaching Commons brings together high-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities. Curated by librarians and their institutions, the Teaching Commons includes open access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, and more.

and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.

and refreshed OER strategy.

The infrastructure

Develop innovative OER models

the frustration faculty members sometimes feel when searching for open content to include in their courses.

thinking more broadly about what ‘open’ means and how open connects to a variety of different areas

Scaling Up OER

New Hampshire System Plans Open Education Push

open education

addressed the way we treat student writing as the waste product of assessment.

Think Java: How To Think Like a Computer Scientist

Free #OER Mobile Course Is Available Online Now

especter les dispositifs réglementaires et adhérer à l'utilisation des licences Créative Commons

transcripts.

Adam Croom

Having some time to reflect

that OER can provide benefits to some schools, but that commercial resources will continue to have value because of the tech-based enhancements, in analytics and adaptive learning and other areas, that they offer beyond academic content.

Since the dawn of civilization, there have been a number of irrefutable ‘golden laws’ of business, including the following:

The new title and pricing trends in Table 1 and Table 2 were also evident in Table 3. University press totals for these three years was 1,908. Even if statistics were excluded from the final totals of commercial presses, the output of commercial presses in 2012 was higher than the university press totals for all three years; and their tally for 2012–14 reached 14,493 (which is 659.59% more than for university presses). The suggested retail price differences were again rather dramatic between university presses and commercial publishers in several marker fields, including sociology (+75.48%); political theory (+45.52%); political science [End Page 109] in North and South America (+113.26%); mathematics (+33.56%); physics (+66.55%); and natural science (+128.24%). The cost to buy one copy of the university press books in Table 3 in these seven fields was $1549.51, while commercially published books cost $2379.84 (+53.59% higher) (see Table 3 for the details).

At the University of Ottawa, Canada, the UO Press and the UO Library have developed a strategic partnership to publish and disseminate selected new monographs as gold open access (OA). Starting in 2013, the Library agreed to fund three books at C$10,000 per book (a total of C$30,000 per year) in order to remove barriers to accessing scholarship and to align with scholarly communication goals of the University.

“The monograph has been at risk for a long time,” Sisler notes. “Journals, in science in particular, have eaten up library budgets that were formerly spent on humanities and social-science monographs. As the number of units in print goes down, the price per book goes up, and you sell fewer; it becomes a vicious cycle.

And although this trend does decline eventually, the decline starts much later than is commonly asserted, starting only in 2000, and thus coinciding less with the serials crisis than with the succession of economic downturns that have squeezed university funding since the turn of the century.

Variable costs of academic journals are paid by the publisher and, as long as journals were printed and distributed physically, these costs were sizeable. In the print era, publishers had to typeset the manuscripts, print copies of journals, and send them to various subscribers. Hence, each time an issue was printed, sent and sold, another copy had to be printed to be sent and sold. However, with the advent of electronic publishing, these costs became marginal.

In that sense and contrary to any other business, academic journals are an atypical information good, because publishers neither pay the provider of the primary good—authors of scholarly papers—nor for the quality control—peer review. On the publisher’s side, average first-copy costs of journal papers are estimated to range between 20 and 40 US dollars per page, depending on rejection rates [37];

The possibility to increase profits in such an extreme fashion lies in the peculiarity of the economics of scholarly publishing. Unlike usual suppliers, authors provide their goods without financial compensation and consumers (i.e. readers) are isolated from the purchase. Because purchase and use are not directly linked, price fluctuations do not influence demand. Academic libraries, contributing 68% to 75% of journal publishing revenues [31], are atypical buyers because their purchases are mainly controlled by budgets. Regardless of their information needs, they have to manage with less as prices increase. Due to the publisher’s oligopoly, libraries are more or less helpless, for in scholarly publishing each product represents a unique value and cannot be replaced [19,20,33,34].

Data from the mid-1990s by Tenopir and King [12] suggests an increase of commercial publishers’ share of the output; by then, commercial publishers accounted for 40% of the journal output, while scientific/professional societies accounted for 25% and university presses and educational publishers for 16%.

Despite the fact that it is generally believed that the digitalization of knowledge diffusion has led to a higher concentration of scientific literature in the hands of a few major players, no study has analyzed the evolution over time of these major publishers’ share of the scientific output in the various disciplines. This paper aims at providing such analysis, based on all journals indexed in the Web of Science over the 1973–2013 period.

On the other hand, papers in arts and humanities are still largely dispersed amongst many smaller publishers, with the top five commercial publishers only accounting for 20% of humanities papers and 10% of arts papers in 2013, despite a small increase since the second half of the 1990s.

scientific societies such as the ACS or the APS publish many journals in the specialties of chemistry and physics respectively, for which they successfully managed the shift from print to electronic.

Profit margins decreased, however, between 1998 and 2003, although profits remained relatively stable. Absolute profits as well as the profit margin then rose again, with the exception of the 2008–2009 period of economic crisis, resulting in profits reaching an all-time high of more than 2 billion USD in 2012 and 2013. The profit margin of the company’s Scientific, Technical & Medical division is even higher (Fig 7B).

“Our whole reason for doing this is a social justice reason,” he said. The organization wants to make high-quality material available for free to all students.

The case for print

To me, this is what OER for the web should start to reflect.

Much of the discussion centered around ancillary materials -- tests, quizzes, worksheets. Commercial publishers now are starting to build ancillary materials to supplement OER textbooks. Get the book for free, but pay, say, $25 for other stuff to round it out.  I had to admit being impressed at the ingenuity of the publishers.

material objects that may be patentable, rather than copyrightable, may be open. The Open Design Definition, for example, was developed in 2000 by the Open Design Foundation for the world of manufacturing design

OER in Higher Ed: 'Huge Awareness-Raising Effort Needed'

Where proprietary courseware (textbooks, etextbooks, or online courseware) stand apart is in pedagogical organization and the unique value of authorship

Is it up to each individual instructor?

I don’t think it would be controversial to say that this “content worldview” was encouraged by publishers.

A growing number of peer-reviewed studies and other research reports are demonstrating that when faculty who previously used commercial products as their core instructional materials replace them with OER, student learning either stays the same or increases. Hilton’s review of this research suggests that this “same or better” outcome for OER users holds about 93% of the time.

There are no results from the instructional design, learning science, or cognitive science literature demonstrating that the language on the copyright page is a critical factor in promoting student learning.

Joyner Library's alternative textbook program benefits faculty and students

Open education’s long revolution: Cable Green on Future Trends Forum #11

Punxsutawney Campus Faculty Teaching Resources: Open Educational Resources

After hundreds of emails with developers and peer-reviewers, his open-source book will be ready for use at UConn. Neth began planning for the second version of the book in January and the project has taken more than four months.

structural inequalities present within these movements

I utilize some of the useful critiques OA has generated to inform the discussion of OER creation and practice.

Free, high-quality education resources from the National Science Digital Library

Blogs tend towards conversational and quotative reuse, which is great for some subject areas, but not so great for others. Wiki feeds forward into a consensus process that provides a high level of remix and reuse, but at the expense of personal control and the preservation of divergent goals. Wikity takes lessons from federated wiki, combining the individual control of blogging with the permissionless improvement of wiki.

putting together class materials

federation of easily remixable content

OER should be a system of connected copies.

Why American higher education faculty tend to resist digital materials: new study

Open Education Resources and Repositories

what we sell in the Open Textbook movement is not just reduced cost.

Those students that bought the cheap version of the text back in 1991? They were pill-splitters. And they failed at pill-splitting (and maybe at the course). Do we own that failure? What we’ve learned over the past five years or so in OER is that what we sell in the Open Textbook movement is not just reduced cost. It’s the simplicity that you can get when you’re not working with an industry trying to milk every last dollar out of students. It’s every student having their materials on day one, for as long as they like, without having to navigate “simple” questions of what to buy, what to rent, and when-is-the-book-on-the-syllabus-that’s-required-not-really-required.

Asking What Students Spend on Textbooks Is the Wrong Question

“free vs. open”

"I actually polled the class one time and said, 'How many of you own this book or rent this book?' and it was maybe 30 percent of the class," Bridge said.

OU's Price College to match grants for faculty who use Alternative Textbook Initiative

Kent seeks lower textbook costs for college students

Only 1 in 5 Students Obtain All Learning Materials Legally

The University of New Hampshire Open Educational Resources Ambassador Pilot

Its goal is to reduce the cost of higher education for students.

Students Should Demand Their Colleges Produce Free Open Textbooks to End the Textbook Racket

Below is an incomplete summary of our first Spring 2016 meeting.

An Introduction to Open Education Resources

Small Blog On Networked Learning

USask Open Textbook Authoring Guide – Ver.1.0