On May 4, Kapiolani Community College’s Faculty Senate and Student Congress sponsored a forum on Open Educational Resources at UH. We covered some of the basic concepts of OER and had a lively discussion about concerns and ways to support implementation at UH. Here is the slideshow, which you may wish to download to get the links to work: OER-talk-forum-May4.
OER Evidence Report 2013-2014
OER Research Hub examines 11 hypotheses about OER using survey data, interviews, and focus groups. Slides that provide a summary of the latest report are on Slideshare,
OER Research Findings . The full report (36 pp) is here
Kaleo reports “Free textbooks coming to some UH summer courses”
An article in Kaleo, vol. 109, issue 43, dated 2015 April 28, describes our Zero Textbook Cost courses. See the article by Marcos Dupreyiraola, Staff writer at http://go.hawaii.edu/Bc .
University of Hawaii survey about OER launched!
A survey about Open Educational Resource use, which is directed to all who teach at the University of Hawaii has just been launched. To access the survey you can use this link: https://manoahawaiiss.az1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_2fvm2gqGTmTmXHL. The survey announcement was sent to UH Announce on Friday, April 17, 2015. We will post the results of the survey when available.
The Learning, Business, and Moral Case for Open Educational Resources and Open Policies
NSF will require grantees to make published results freely available within 12 months
More research publications will be made freely available to the public as the National Science Foundation adopts a policy similar to that of the National Institutes of Health. See a report from Science, at http://go.hawaii.edu/gS . Students will have free access to current research at no cost. Instructors will have fewer hurdles in incorporating research publications into their reading lists.
Statistics on why universities and colleges adopt OER and what happens when they do
Affordable Learning Georgia lists key statistics that both drive the move to OER and show the positive effects of OER adoption at academic institutions. See which institution reported a 30-40% increase in GPA as a result of an OER pilot program.
List of Open Textbooks adopted by University of Georgia core classes
Check out this list of open textbook adoptions by University of Georgia campuses for core courses, http://www.affordablelearninggeorgia.org/find_textbooks/alg_top_courses. This is part of the Affordable Georgia Learning initiative that is having a real impact on students’ access to higher education.
Students and textbook expenditures
An interesting post at e-literate by Phil Hill analyzes data showing increased costs of textbooks but relatively level spending by students–in short, students are choosing to forgo purchasing required textbooks.
UC Irvine + California Community Colleges + California State University
Three California systems of education will offer open course content that will be collaboratively developed, as announced in a March 9th PRNewswire posting, http://go.hawaii.edu/YS. The UC Irvine Open Chemistry site, http://ocw.uci.edu/openchem/ and intends to work with the UC Davis ChemWiki textbook.
Faculty Leaders: P. Jayne Bopp, Instructor in Sociology at Leeward CC
Jayne Bopp has been teaching SOC 100, Survey of Sociology at Leeward CC with an Open Educational Textbook for the last two years.
This video highlights how Jayne got started using OER and the results she has experienced since she has adopted OER in her classroom. She also shares how students are grateful and appreciative at not having to spend so much money on a textbook.
The following is a special guest blog post by P. Jayne Bopp.
I’ve always been interested in making books affordable and accessible for my students. However even when I worked with publishers to customize books the costs never seemed reasonable and students usually couldn’t sell them back. Today publishers constantly update editions and the bookstore can only order the newest versions. I didn’t like being forced to order a new version, especially when it hadn’t even been published yet. When I tried sticking with older editions it became apparent that not all students have access to Amazon and shipping for low costs books can often take several weeks.
The homogenization of information started to put me off as well. I couldn’t help noticing that the introductory textbooks in my field, regardless of the publisher were virtually identical, even down to the chapter topics. I started to feel as if the textbook was a necessary evil. Having a book was required to legitimize the class and a starting point for learning but I always made the information my own by adapting it to my teaching style and using examples from Hawaii. I am also not interested in having publishing companies design, implement and grade my students’ assignments; I prefer a more hands on approach.
In the midst of experiencing these frustrations I remembered an email I had gotten a year earlier about free open source textbooks. I dug it out and lo and behold Open Stax College had, among other things an excellent peer reviewed Introduction to Sociology textbook. All I had to do was paste the URL into my syllabus and students could view the book online, download it and even print it for free. I tested the book with online students over the summer and it was it hit.
Like any time we use a new textbook or redesign a course there is a lot of initial work however, its well worth it. Students have access to the required course materials from day one and are enormously grateful for the free textbook. There is a lot more accountability because students have no excuses for not having a book. So far, with the help our Librarians I’ve managed to make four of my classes completely OER. Now I don’t have to fill out those pesky book order forms each semester!
Ensuring the Quality of Digital Content for Learning
Though focused on K12 Education this policy brief from State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) outlines recommendations for school systems to systematically evaluate OER digital objects. The recommendations are applicable to university systems as well. See the PDF document. A webinar provides more details on how organizations are evaluating OER.
What can you do with $1,440,000,000?
A short video from Affordable Learning Georgia, a GALILEO and University System of Georgia initiative, asks how money spent by students for textbooks might benefit the people of Georgia.
Panel discussion about OER experiences from Virginia Tech
A panel of four instructional faculty describe their experiences with creating open educational resources. All have interesting stories of their OER paths. See http://hdl.handle.net/10919/51602. Course releases and tenure/promotion support for creating instructional materials were essential incentives for these works. WebWork and APEX Calculus are two important resources highlighted in this session. This is part of Virginia Tech’s Open Education Week events.
“OER as retention initiative” from InsideHigherEd
Posted 2015 Feb 25, InsideHigherEd’s Matt Reed argues for more adoptions of free textbooks to increase student retention and progress to their degrees, see http://go.hawaii.edu/rV .