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Setting: the parlor of a London flat, dimly but warmly lit by flickering candles and a coal fire. Famed detective Sherlock Holmes sits in a wingback chair, wearing a smoking jacket and puffing on a briarwood pipe. He is reading a book. Holmes’ colleague, Dr. John Watson, bursts into the room, red-faced and muttering to himself. Holmes: Dr. Watson, you seem quite agitated this evening. Whatever is the matter? Watson: Confound it, Holmes! Some of my colleagues and I have completed a clinical study of the effects of cocaine use on violinists, and now we wish to publish our findings. But the agency that funded our study is part of a consortium of public funders called cOAlition S, and they have imposed restrictions on how and where we may publish.
Open educational materials are very popular. But how can lecturers be convinced to use open educational resources – or even better, create them? Tutorials, guidelines, videos and other information for researchers, lecturers and other interested parties play a key role here.
You might find creating OERs to be much easier than you first anticipated. Or, you might already have materials you can share with the “right” licenses. From simply digitized materials to carefully staged video lectures, OERs can add a whole new dimension to your teaching. It can improve your teaching method, and it can also improve student performances. Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can create OERs.
The number of colleges running efforts to help professors shift from published textbooks to low-cost online materials known as OER is growing rapidly. That was one key finding in the latest Campus Computing Survey, one of the largest annual surveys of college technology leaders in the U.S., which was released today.
Good afternoon! A note about accessibility before I begin. If you would like to follow along with the written version of this talk, you can visit http://bit.ly/palakeynote. That link will also have the images on the slide deck with embedded descriptions for your screen reader, and the embedded video has closed captions.
I was really honored to be asked to keynote this luncheon for the Pennsylvania Library Association’s College and Research division at the PaLA annual conference… particularly because I fancy myself a parallel-universe librarian, and I know that out there through a wormhole somewhere, it is 1979 and I am using one of those thunk-thunk machines to date-stamp library book cards.
In a recent blog post, we explored some of the questions authors are asking about open textbooks. In this post we have continued the discussion with several leaders in the open textbook movement to identify some of the common misconceptions associated with open educational resources (OER) publishing.
Below, Barbara Illowsky (co-author of one of the first open textbooks, Introductory Statistics), Amy Hofer (Open Oregon Educational Resources), Apurva Ashok and Zoe Wake Hyde (Rebus Foundation), and Nicole Finkbeiner (OpenStax, Rice University), share the top nine myths they have identified, and the facts related to each.
Everyone who has attended a college or university has had a moment where they discovered the cornucopia of digital resources available from their library. Or they could have had it if they were library-inclined. Not everyone is in love with libraries as much as yours truly, but there does come a time when Google isn't going to cut it for that final paper. It turns out there are many extremely helpful article databases one can only access when connected with an institution of higher education. The fancier your institution, the more access you typically get. (Harvard has everything, which will surprise no one.)
Public archives represent a democratic vision where all are welcome, ideas circulate, and information is analyzed and diffused for educational purposes.
Predatory publishing has been on our radar for quite a while now, but mainstream media coverage and awareness is rapidly intensifying. We have perhaps finally reached a point where the damage being done to the credibility of research may be enough to move the stakeholders involved — universities, funders, and publishers, to finally take some action. Just what that action will be is unclear — like most of our lingering problems, if there was an easy solution, it would have happened long ago. In light of the increasing debate, I thought it worth revisiting some of our coverage of predatory publishing over the years.
At Lansing Community College in Michigan, OER has been transformative. The college's librarian describes what it will take to make OER work long-term.
Via EDTECH@UTRGV, Elizabeth E Charles
The U.S. Department of Education’s first grant for open educational resources, totaling $5 million, will be awarded in late September to between one and three applicants, the department announced today in a call for proposals published in the Federal Register.
Elsevier last week stopped thousands of scientists in Germany from reading its recent journal articles, as a row escalates over the cost of a nationwide open-access agreement.
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The study by the Babson Survey Research Group, Freeing the Textbook: Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education, 2018, was supported by a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and is based on responses from more than 4,000 faculty and department chairs. The study shows improvements in OER awareness, and growing concern among faculty regarding the cost of course materials.
Pictured above is our top pick of artists and writers whose works will, on 1st January 2019, enter the public domain in many countries around the world. Of the eleven featured, six will be entering the public domain in countries with a “life plus 70 years” copyright term (e.g. most European Union members, Brazil, Israel, Nigeria, Russia, Turkey, etc.) and five in countries with a “life plus 50 years” copyright term (e.g. Canada, New Zealand, and many countries in Asia and Africa) — those that died in the year 1948 and 1968 respectively.
A lot has changed since MIT first announced that it would be making its course materials freely available online. Back in 2001, the idea that university-level content could be accessed at no cost by users anywhere in the world was virtually unheard of, and the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative was a major driver in the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement.
Week 2018 #OAWeek
Open Access Week is a global event which provides the research community with an opportunity to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation.
Over recent years, Knowledge Unlatched has harnessed the effectiveness of its consortial funding model to become the largest gatekeeper to open access for scholarly books. But as Marcel Knöchelmann describes, the changing of its status from that of a community interest company to a German GmbH or public limited company, and that it is now fully owned by the consultancy fullstopp, has gone largely uncommunicated. This information has assumed greater pertinence and urgency following the decision to appoint fullstopp to collect and analyse data that will be used to inform future policy decisions on open access. The researchers, publishers, and librarians inevitably impacted by the outcomes of this consultation should be afforded the transparency to know that the parent company of the commercial entity which stands to profit from a future of open access book publishing is advising on what the future of open access book publishing in the UK should be.
The National Screening Room showcases the riches of the Library’s vast moving image collection, designed to make otherwise unavailable movies, both copyrighted and in the public domain, freely accessible to the viewers worldwide.
The majority of movies in the National Screening Room are freely available as both 5 mb MP4 and ProRes 422 MOV downloads.
The National Screening Room is a project of the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center. The goal of this digital collection is to present to the widest audience possible movies from the Library's extensive holdings, offering a broad range of historical and cultural documents as a contribution to education and lifelong learning.
More than 80,000 of Albert Einstein's documents and drawings are now available to view for free at Einstein Archives Online. The archives include not only his scientific work but also his images and documents from his travels and thoughts on the world in general.
The library will compensate researchers’ their OA fees when publishing in pure Open Access journals.
After being kicked out of a hotel conference room where they had participated in a three-day open-science workshop and hackathon, a group of computer scientists simply moved to an adjacent hallway. There, Heather Piwowar, Jason Priem and Cristhian Parra worked all night on software to help academics to illustrate how much of their work was freely available on the Internet. They realized how much time had passed only when they noticed hotel staff starting to prepare for breakfast.
In a recent UW-Madison event focused on building community in MOOCs, Al Filreis offered a keynote, “The Non-automated Humanities MOOC,” in which he remarked, “Don’t talk about MOOCs as courses. That’s a slippery slope to creating a thing that doesn’t hybridize but colonizes.” To see the MOOC as a course, as that which reinforces ossified hierarchical relationships in learning environments, is to carry forward a banking model of pedagogy that does nothing to empower students or teachers. As Sean says, “The openness the MOOC presages is one where agency trumps position, where a student can become a teacher, a teacher a student, and the whole endeavor of education becomes a collaboration.”
Elsevier - one of the largest and most notorious scholarly publishers - are monitoring Open Science in the EU on behalf of the European Commission. Jon Tennant argues that they cannot be trusted.
Over the past twenty years, school districts have become much more prescriptive about what happens in their classrooms. Teachers no longer open up a textbook and start on page one and progress through the book until they get to the end (or the school year comes to a close). Many districts not only provide a scope and sequence so a teacher knows what to teach and in what order, but in many cases, they also provide lesson plans so that every student gets the content taught in the same manner. The creation of OER for these districts is the next logical step in tailoring the state standards for their student’s needs.
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