Sara Rutter

Kurt Rutter, faculty member in Nursing at Kaua‘i Community College, gave a presentation on OER to the Kaua‘i Community College on November 4.  The slides have been shared at http://www.slideshare.net/KurtRutter/oer-presentation-68272638.

See also the OER library guide created by Kaua‘i Community College librarian Anne McKenna at  http://libguides.kauai.hawaii.edu/oer .

OpenStax of Rice University just announced the release of a Microbiology textbook that is the result of a collaboration between the American Society for Microbiology Press, one of the foremost scholarly society publishers in the life sciences and OpenStax  This Creative Commons licensed (CC-By) text should be useful across the life sciences curricula.  Check it out!

The Economics Daily of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has an informative interactive graph of consumer price indexes for tuition and school frees from January 2006-July 2016.  While tuition and fees have risen 63 percent, college textbooks have risen 87.5%. See the graph and data at http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/college-tuition-and-fees-increase-63-percent-since-january-2006.htm

See the recent Chronicle article reporting on the recently released Babson Research Group report, Opening the Textbook: Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education 2015-2016 .

Wayde Oshiro head librarian of Leeward Community College posted a great FAQ about the Textbook Cost: $0 note that you may see in some campus Class Availability lists. Leeward, Kapiolani, and Honoulu Community Colleges are posting this information for courses that faculty have identified as Textbook Cost: $0. This is great information for students and is one piece in making higher education more affordable for students.

Here is the link to Billy Meinke’s slides for his presentation Creative Commons, the Web, & how OER are the way forward, https://www.bit.ly/techlogic-OER. Slides for Sara Rutter’s talk, A Faculty Survival Guide to Open Educational Resources are on slideshare at http://go.hawaii.edu/PL. Both talks were part of the Center for Teaching Excellence’s TechLogic 2016 programming.

An interesting open access article by John Hiton III  Open educational resources and college textbook choices: a review of research on efficacy and perceptions ; Educational Technology Research and Development; DOI 10.1007/s11423-016-9434-9  reviews research on the perceptions of students and faculty of using OER in higher education courses.

Eight years ago a student editor called for transparency in textbook pricing.

Scanned Ka Leo issues (UH Manoa student newspaper) are available in our open access Scholarspace back to the first issue in 1922.

Here is the link to download the full report and/or the executive summary: OER & University of Hawaii Assessment Survey.

Beginning in the spring of 2014, the University of Hawaii (UH) Outreach College and the Information Technology Services joined efforts to promote the use, selection, and creation of OER across the UH System. Because the use of OER is still in the early stages, the University of Hawaii Open Educational Resources Team felt it was important to learn how and why instructional faculty and staff across the UH System wanted to interact with OER. Beth Tillinghast, librarian and project leader for ScholarSpace (our digital commons) created, distributed, and analyzed the survey, which was sent to UH faculty electronically in Spring 2015.

Just released on November 18th, Foundations for OER Strategy Development written by Nicole Allen (SPARC), Delia Browne, Mary Lou Forward, Cable Green (Creative Commons) and Alex Tarkowski reviews the last decade or so of Open Educational Resources and provides guidance on next steps.  See http://www.oerstrategy.org/home/read-the-doc/  for the document or read here via Google Docs http://go.hawaii.edu/0B .

Educause compiled survey data into this infographic –of interest is the statistic that 65% of surveyed faculty support the idea of OER.  Since OER depends on digitally delivered instructional materials, it is also interesting to note that 91% of students surveyed have laptops and 92% have smartphones, thus enabling them to access online instructional materials.

The Center for Teaching Excellence/Faculty Mentoring Program has uploaded videos of three OA at Manoa talks held the week of October 19th:

Talks by Pam Wilson, journals manager for the University of Hawaii Press and Kathleen Luschek (OA advocate and formerly Senior Production Coordinator for the Public Library of Science (PLoS) can be seen here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl3b8I5JKNM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuJJvZRLRYQ

Richard Rath, Manoa Digital Arts and Humanities, gave an interesting talk about using GitHub as a collaboration tool:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIk8cceAiy8

Katherine Fisher, Publishing Services Coordinator at the University of Hawai‘i Press, writes about the publishing services that the UH Press can provide faculty who want to create OER that are copyedited and have a professional layout:

Thanks to Sara Rutter for inviting me to post about the University of Hawai’i Press’s new publishing services arm. I’m excited to learn about the innovative educational resources and research projects underway around UH, and I hope UH Press Publishing can help get some of them ready for students and teachers to use. In this post I’ll answer a few questions you might have about UH Press Publishing Services. I’m also happy to answer additional questions in the comments.

How can UH Press Publishing Services support OER projects?
We can assist UH faculty and other authors who want to write or edit an open textbook but lack the time or knowledge to copyedit, proofread, typeset, and create digital forms of their work. We can also help to make out-of-print books available again for use online and in classrooms (provided that prior publishing contracts have lapsed or rights have reverted to authors).

What can UH Press Publishing Services do?
Our services cover the full range of tasks involved in turning a manuscript into a print or digital book, from editing the text to manufacturing the books (or generating the epubs, as the case may be). We can prepare files for use on most platforms and facilitate deposit in OA repositories for long-term access and preservation. We also provide print and digital distribution support for select projects. While we most often work on books, we can help produce other types of OER as well.

How much does it cost?
The program operates on a cost-recovery basis, meaning that we charge the author or sponsor a fee to cover the staff time and production expenses involved in completing the project. This frees up the Press to support experimental projects, books with a limited market, or materials meant to be freely distributed, because we don’t have to make up our costs in sales. Depending on the complexity of the project and the range of services requested, the fee may range from $500 to several thousand dollars. Typically funding is provided by a grant, a sponsoring department or institution, a fundraising campaign, or the author directly.

What can you do with the book?
Anything you want! All rights remain with the author of the work (we encourage the use of Creative Commons licenses). You own the content and the digital files, so once the production fees have been paid, you can release your writing into the public domain, give away print copies of the book or sell them at cost, place a digital download in an OER repository or on your website, or distribute the title through a print-on-demand service like CreateSpace.

What are the advantages of working with UH Press Publishing Services?
There are many companies out there providing publishing services, and you might find that one of them is the best fit for your project, but we do have some unique advantages. Most simply, we offer local, in-person project management assistance—I’m the current campus-based consultant—for busy authors who don’t have time to coordinate each step of the process with vendors and don’t wish to manage their projects remotely. UH Press is a nonprofit publisher serving other nonprofit and educational organizations, and our goal in setting prices is to offer the best services possible and cover our costs without a significant markup. Finally, our expertise in publishing academic work and our connections in the world of scholarly communication mean that we are prepared to produce the types of projects coming out of the UH community, whether monographic or pedagogical, traditional or experimental.

To learn more or propose a project, contact me at kefisher@hawaii.edu.