OER

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.

Ka Lā of Honolulu Community College, the student newspaper ran an article in August in support of OER as a solution to student textbook cost woes. The article, Textbook costs frustrate students, but relief could be around the corner, by Jason Mar and Jackie Liu (August 2015) quotes UH OER librarian Carol Hasegawa, “Student support is needed to show administration that this matters so that they’ll put more effort and funding into the program.” See the full article on page 5 at http://issuu.com/mleidemann/docs/ka_la_aug._2015 .

Student advocacy for their own education at UH campuses is the key to improving the student experience and to supporting faculty to change their course materials to more affordable options.

U.S. Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), Al Franken (D-MN) and Angus King (I-ME) introduced legislation October 8, 2015, the Affordable Textbook Grant, to support the creation of shareable textbooks for higher education. In the House of Representatives, U.S. Representatives Rubén Hinojosa (D-TX) and Jared Polis (D-CO) introduced legislation in the House.  A post  on Senator Durbin’s blog at http://go.hawaii.edu/Hz provides more information about the proposed legislation. 

The book noted by Senator Durbin in the post as an exemplar of open textbooks is Sustainability: a comprehensive foundation by Tom Theis and Jonathan Tomkin of the University of Illinois. The book has been used by more than 60,000 students in MOOCs and in traditionally delivered courses. The legislation proposes competitive grants to support faculty in creating open educational resources.

There are a couple of blog announcements about the forward movement of a open licensing policy for projects funded by the U.S. Department of Education. See the Creative Commons post by Cable Green at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/46345 and the post by the Association of Research Libraries Open Education Director, Nicole Allen, at http://www.sparc.arl.org/blog/us-education-department-proposes-open-licensing-policy-part-goopen-campaign .  The policy discussion has centered around K-12 education but should also affect grant funding in higher education.  Creative Commons will lead training workshops on licensing material for re-use thus increasing the overall awareness of CC licensing.

An article in the Minneapolis based Star Tribune http://strib.mn/1WcKQH9 provides a description of the Open Textbook Library, which provides peer reviewed textbooks for introductory university courses, hosted and curated by the University of Minnesota Library. One of the big changes in textbook publishing according to a source from the American Association of Publishers is the move to reformat textbook material into computer interactive course management packages that students purchase. This is creating a major challenge to OER initiatives in that it may not be sufficient to replace a print textbook with a free text; OER also needs to address the learning tools that provide students and instructors with immediate feedback in problem solving.

Kathleen Luschek, a technical writer with a great deal of knowledge and experience working with the Public Library of Science journals teamed with Pam Wilson, journals manager for the University of Hawaii Press to talk about Open Access and journal publishing on Wednesday Oct. 21.  Their slides are available together at http://go.hawaii.edu/KH .

Here is the link to Billy Meinke’s slides from his presentation on Creative Commons licensing yesterday for Open Access Week http://slides.com/billymeinke/cc-oaweek-2015#/ 

Here is the link to Sara Rutter’s slides on OER at UH http://www.slideshare.net/SaraRutter1/open-educational-resources-amp-open-access

The session was also video recorded and we will provide the link when available.

The Chronicle of Higher Education picked up an article in the Orange County Register  http://www.ocregister.com/articles/bourget-688288-math-book.html describing the trouble a faculty member ran into when he decided to assign  less expensive ($76 and free) textbooks for a mathematics class that traditionally used a text co-authored by the department chair ($180).  Conflict of interest, tradition, and lack of awareness of the financial impact on students , are all presented in this story.  The faculty member is grieving the reprimand he received.  It is hoped that this will be a win for putting the student first when making textbook choices.

Lane Fischer, John Hilton, Jared Robinson, and David Wiley,  have a recently published and much anticipated paper that reports on the impact of OER on student success in higher education courses.  See the open access article at:

Fischer, Lane, et al. “A Multi-Institutional Study of the Impact of Open Textbook Adoption on the Learning Outcomes of Post-Secondary Students.” Journal of Computing in Higher Education (2015): 1-14. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12528-015-9101-x .

The study compares student success in courses that used no-cost open digital textbooks with student success in courses with traditional textbooks based on three criteria, 1) student completion of courses, 2) grades, and 3) number of classes taken during and after semesters in which OER were used. The results indicate favorable outcomes for  students who had OER assigned.  Students in courses that used OER  performed as well as students in courses with traditional textbooks on comparable exams.

The Open Education Conference registration is open with early bird pricing until Sept 30. This is an international conference that is inspiring in its future thinking and practical idealism. See hhttp://openedconference.org/2015/ for more information. Hope to see you there!