The University of Hawaii at Manoa undergraduate curriculum committee of the Physics Department have adopted an OpenStax College Physics textbook for their non-calculus Physics 151 and 152. Cost savings for approximately 120 UH Manoa students in 12 sections will be more than $20,000 (the cost for last year’s textbook was $167).
This announcement went out to UH Manoa faculty yesterday morning. Please consider reviewing an OpenStax College textbook if you are a UH Manoa faculty member.
Outreach College will provide a $200 gift certificate to the UH Bookstores for each accepted review. To participate in the review process you must be a full-time active faculty member of UH Manoa, associated with a department for which the textbook you are reviewing might be used in courses offered by the department.
If you are interested in reviewing an OpenStax College textbook for Outreach College, please apply here: http://wp.me/P5VkWx-k2. When you are
invited to review the textbook of your choice we would like to receive the review within a month. We will be accepting applications through December
31, 2015.
The process for reviewing the textbooks in the repository is provided here: http://go.hawaii.edu/XN. We ask that you enter your review using
the online rubric in the repository.
The review will have a CC By license, meaning that anyone may use your review as long as they provide attribution to your work. Your review will
posted on the oer.hawaii.edu site, shared with relevant curriculum committees and instructional faculty, and will be shared with other institutions and organizations working on OER.
An inspiring example of collaborative OER creation is provided in this article [https://www.simonsfoundation.org/features/foundation-news/marathon-editing-brings-new-rigor-to-wikipedia-physics/]. At an American Physical Society meeting in June in Columbus, OH (The Ohio State University) the APS and the Simons Foundation brought together experts for an edit-a-thon to create new articles and make existing Wikipedia physics articles better. In a 3-hour session, 24 physicists joined three group leaders who were expert Wikipedia editors. Examples of articles edited or created in this intense session are, Speed of Light and Quantum Feedback. The article notes that the editors found The Wikipedia Adventure to be a useful tutorial for editing Wikipedia articles.
The much acclaimed copyright online course out of Duke University is now completely asynchronous and accessible whenever you want to begin. See Copyright for Educators & Librarians to begin. The instructors are noted experts in working with copyright in creating educational materials, Kevin Smith (Duke University), Lisa Macklin (Emory University), and Anne Gilliland (University of North Carolina).
A blog post on the American Enterprise Institute site from Mark Perry of the University of Michigan Flint campus provides recent costs of the most expensive textbooks used at that campus. The data were collected by Matthew Wolverton, an electronic resources librarian at UM Flint. See http://go.hawaii.edu/lw for the full post by Perry. One of the charts shows the most expensive average textbook costs by discipline, ranging from $147 to $260. Students generally take more than one class a semester, making their out of pocket expenses potentially out of reach. Perry posits that the inflation in cost of textbooks is an aspect of an economic bubble and unsustainable given initiatives such as OpenStax , offering free and high quality textbooks at no cost to students.
Open SUNY, an ambitious project by SUNY Press to bring out open educational resources as open textbooks offers a way to volunteer your skills. Check out the page http://textbooks.opensuny.org/volunteer-with-ost/ for more information. The currently available open textbooks can be viewed at http://textbooks.opensuny.org/category/available-now/ and the exciting list of forthcoming books is at http://textbooks.opensuny.org/category/forthcoming/.
Nicole Finkbeiner of OpenStax College at Rice University gave groups of faculty and instructors at Manoa, Honolulu CC, Kapiolani CC, and Leeward CC an overview of the amazing contributions OpenStax College is making to higher education through open textbooks.
To review the webinar go to OpenStax College 2015 July 10.
An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education posted today at http://chronicle.com/article/In-Students-Minds-Textbooks/231455/ provides more reason to adopt open educational resources.
“A survey of undergraduates on 23 campuses by the National Association of College Stores, expected to be released on Thursday, found that students spent an average of $563 on course materials during the 2014-15 academic year, compared with $638 the year before.” The article goes on to indicate that students are opting out of purchasing required materials. However, “a separate survey of professors on the same campuses, meanwhile, found that they almost never see the course materials as optional.”
From Junie Hayashi:
Just a reminder for everyone interested in learning more about free texbooks and resources developed and peer-reviewed by educators. Please join us for a special webinar and discussion on Open Educational Resources (OER) presented by the Faculty Mentoring Program at Outreach College and OpenStax College. Other venues for the webinar include:
OpenStax College is a leader in developing no-cost quality, peer-reviewed learning materials for higher education. The presenter will be Nicole Finkbeiner, Associate Director, Institutional Relations at OpenStax College, Rice University. Sara Rutter, Open Educational Resources Librarian, Outreach College will host a discussion following the presentation. The library and EMC staff will also be on hand to answer your questions about getting started with OER for your classes.
Watch a short video about OpenStax
Explore OpenStax College algebra, biology, chemistry, economics, physics, sociology, statistics textbooks.
The Faculty Mentoring Program, Outreach College, and OpenStax Collection,
Rice University present:
OpenStax College Webinar on Open Educational Resources (OER)
Friday, July 10, 2015
12 noon to 1:15 p.m.
Kuykendall 106 Events Room
Note: Librarians at Kapiolani (contact Sunny Pai), Leeward (contact Junie Hayashi), and Honolulu Community Colleges (contact Carol Hasegawa) are holding simultaneous satellite events at their campuses.
Join us for a special webinar event by Nicole Finkbeiner, Associate Director of Institutional Relations, OpenStax College, in Kuykendall 106 Events Room. Outreach College’s Open Educational Resources Librarian Sara Rutter will facilitate a discussion after the webinar.
This is a wonderful opportunity to meet faculty who share your interest in using open textbooks to help
students afford higher education. Learn about free textbooks and resources developed and peer-reviewed by educators.
Please register online at
www.fmp.hawaii.edu/OnlineReg.html.
I gave a talk at the Spring meeting of HLA on Saturday. Here are slides and a link to the handout.
The BC Campus Open Ed Open Textbook Summit held May 28-29 last month now has slides and videos of the presentations. Go to http://otsummit.bccampus.ca/livestream/ to enjoy the inspiration and information provided by these talks.
This refers to a webinar that took place April 28, 2015. An announcement was posted on this site on April 16, The Learning, Business, and Moral Case for Open Educational Resources and Open Policies.
The Internet, increasingly affordable computing and bandwidth, open licensing, open access journals and open educational resources (OER) provide the foundation for a world in which a higher education can be a basic human right. Governments and foundations are supporting this shift with a move to open policies: requiring public access to publicly (and foundation) funded resources. Dr. Cable Green, Director of Global Learning at Creative Commons, provides an overview of open licensing and OER, and discusses specific examples where institution, provinces / states, nations and foundations have moved the default on funding from “closed” to “open.” He also explores new OER projects that are pushing open education further into the mainstream.
View the video or use the link under the video window to download the video file. You can download the accompanying slide deck by clicking here.
Both the recording and the slides are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
Susan Wood
Susan Wood, Professor CC of English, was the first at Leeward CC and in the UHCC system to create an open, online course for English 100: Composition I, which provides students with zero textbook cost, and allows anyone to re-use and re-mix her materials under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. With assistance from the Leeward CC Library, Susan found and used Open Educational Resources (OER) and her own content for the content modules. Rachael Inake, from the Educational Media Center worked with Susan in planning and developing the content modules, putting the content in a weekly modules format using Google Sites, and publishing it as a template site for other Leeward CC ENG 100 instructors (or anyone) to re-use and re-mix under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Susan also created a companion Laulima course site for instructors to copy to use with the weekly modules site. Susan and Rachael also created an Instructor’s Guide to help instructors put the course together.
The following is a guest post from Susan Wood.
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I was fortunate to be granted a sabbatical for Spring 2015. Part of the project that I proposed in my sabbatical application was to create an online ENG 100 course using Google Apps for Education that would be available for lecturers (or anyone) to use if they were assigned to teach an online ENG 100. After that project was approved, I was approached by both Kay Caldwell and Leanne Riseley and asked to consider creating the course using Open Educational Resources (OER). I knew very little about OER but have always used textbook cost as a major factor when choosing a textbook, so I decided it would be a worthwhile addition to the project. I did not realize at that point what an adventure I would have in the world of OER.
My first exposure to OER was a video on the Leeward CC Open Educational Resources Guide. In the video, which has since been replaced by Jayne Bopp’s wonderful video, an instructor in social sciences effusively talked about how she decided textbooks were too expensive for her students, so she found a fantastic OER textbook, pasted the link to the textbook into her course website, and proceeded to teach her course from this free resource. She made it sound so easy… all I needed to do was find the perfect OER textbook for ENG 100 and I would be on my way!
However, after weeks of searching and reading, I realized that there was no perfect ENG 100 textbook. I did find some OER ENG 100 textbooks, but some were really long and cumbersome, some were poorly written (ironic, I know), some didn’t cover the range of material we cover in ENG 100, and some were incomplete. It was then I realized I would have to create the course using a re-mix of content from several of the textbooks.
My next step was to pick the best of the content from the textbooks I found. I bookmarked the three textbooks that had material that I thought would best fit in a Leeward CC ENG 100 course, and then I set to work. I wrote an outline of the course and then proceeded to search through the OER textbooks and pull materials that I then revised as needed to fit the course objectives.
Collecting course content was a mostly enjoyable process because I got to explore what others teach in first-year writing courses. It was also professionally invigorating to read through so many different approaches to teaching first-year writing. At times, though, collecting content was frustrating when I could not find what I needed– so I had to create some content myself. Luckily, I had Rachael Inake to help me with the technical aspects of creating Google Slides, YouTube videos, and PowToons, and I was able to use these tools and more to create content. All in all, the experience of choosing, re-mixing, and creating OER was a very positive one.
The ENG 100 course is now finished and I am very pleased with how it turned out. I am excited to use the course for the first time this summer and will use it again in the Fall. I am also really excited that my students don’t have to buy a textbook. In past semesters, some students would go for weeks or even the entire semester without a textbook because they could not afford all of the textbooks for all of their courses. I am thrilled that I can now offer a course that does not burden students with the cost of a textbook. OER makes that possible.
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Below are a few screenshots of the ENG 100 OER course materials.
Screenshot of week 7’s module
Screenshot of ENG 100 Laulima site
Screenshot of the ENG 100 OER Instructor’s Guide
Susan’s materials available for accessing, copying, re-mixing, and re-using, under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license:
We are applaud Susan’s hard work and effort in creating this valuable resource for Leeward CC faculty/lecturers and students, the UH system, and the OER community!