I'm Audrey Lundahl, an instructional design partner in Teaching and Learning with Technology.
This presentation will introduce you to open educational resources, as well as open educational
practices or open pedagogy.
We will start by defining these two terms.
Then each presenter will discuss their approach to and experiences with using and creating open educational resources,
and how this practice has influenced their teaching. Open Educational Resources: OERs,
teaching and learning materials that are licensed in a way that makes them available at low or no
cost to students. Examples of teaching and learning materials can include textbooks, as
well as lesson plans, quizzes and other teaching resources. Switching some or all course materials
to OERs can increase access for many students. Open pedagogy is an access-oriented commitment to
learner driven education. It is also the process of using tools and building architectures for
learning that allows students to shape the public knowledge comments of which they are a part.
Open pedagogy might look like co-creating course policies, rubrics or even schedules with students,
or replacing traditional course assignments in which only the instructor may see the students
work with assignments that have a larger audience impact and legacy. This could involve students
writing or editing articles in Wikipedia, writing op-ed pieces instead of another research essay,
creating brief instructional videos instead of giving another classroom presentation,
or annotating, updating or even authoring open textbooks. In short, open pedagogy is a set
of pedagogical practices that include engaging students in content creation,
which makes learning more accessible. Hi, I’m Michael Raisinghani from the
College of Business and I was going to talk to you today about the open access journals,
from an editorial perspective. I'm the editor in chief of the international journal for web-based
Teaching and Learning Technologies. But more importantly, I wanted to talk about some of
the common misconceptions in access journals and why it would be important to understand the
advantages and the disadvantages, the pros and the cons of the various open access journals.
There are more than 10,000 open access journals published in 136 countries.
Last I checked. And despite this, there are so many misconceptions about open access journals.
You should check carefully whether the journal in question allows self-archiving and if yes,
under what conditions. Your choice should be based on the quality of the journal
review. And the processing duration, the services they offer and the open access fees. By services
that they offer, just use again the example of the journal I mentioned earlier, IJWLTT for instance,
there is online hosting, there's archiving, there's digital tools, which I use support the
manuscript management and review process. There's online hosting, there's third party software,
for instance, plagiarism checks. There's editorial support, which includes the manuscript
tracking the communications, submission, guidance checks, and then the communications with authors
and reviewers all the promotional support. You also want to make sure under the open access,
all the articles are published under a Creative Commons license. And therefore, the authors or
the funding body will pay a one-time article processing charge to offset the costs of all
the activities associated with the publication of the article, manuscript. Good quality, open access
journals that have a rigorous peer review process. And this means the articles quality, the validity
and relevance have been assessed by independent peers within the field. Those would be obviously
the ones who would be considered reliable and probably should target as your publishing outlet.
And even if it's in a hybrid platform where it's published an open access repository, those would
attract more downloads have more citations and attention compared to those published
behind a paywall. By paywall, I mean, the ones that as a subscriber subscription model
paid for either by an individual or the institution, the library, for instance.
Overall, I think it does benefit researchers, institutions, nations and society as a whole
to have the open access. By the same token, it's important to understand
that you may want to gravitate to journals that do have waivers for the less developing countries or
authors from those less developing countries. Once my journal the IJWLTT does waive for less
developed or underdeveloped countries, and also has a discount for, in fact, just this morning,
there were papers from Russia and then there was a $500 discount offered to the APC instead of the
$1500, that's normally charged for a developed country. Now, keeping this in mind, even the
wealthy universities could only afford to pay a proportion of the world's research literature.
So for institutions, in poorer countries, this proportion is tiny or even non-existent. So, at
the beginning of this millennium, more than half the research-based institutions in the poorest
countries had no current journal submissions, and over 20% had an average of two subscriptions.
So that's the reason I'm a proponent of this open access. So glad we're having this discussion.
And just want to make you aware that this closed access or subscription access, or
toll access does pose a problem and hence is open access may be a better model
for those that are unable to afford these services. And I think want to also clarify another
point, which was unclear at first to me. I want to make sure everybody's clear on this. Proponents
of that move to the open access argue that this will benefit science and society in general. Well,
part of the remit of non- or not-for-profit organizations, which fund research may be
the full dissemination of results. But even where research is publicly funded,
taxes are generally not paid so that taxpayers can access the research results, but rather,
so that society can benefit from the results of that research. For example, in the form of new
innovations, whether it's in medical research, or computing technology, or a software application,
or something to the educational context, using technology. The funding for scientific research
also comes from a variety of sources. For instance, in countries such as Australia
and New Zealand, around 80% of the R&D funding comes from the public purse,
while in Japan and Switzerland, only about 10% is government funded. So it's therefore
important, and that’s not necessarily the case, that taxpayers fund most scientific research.
So, it varies from one country to the other. So, with that, I want to summarize, in the
interest of time, some of the brief positive and negative aspects of publishing, open access.
First of all, free for all, the big advantage free for all, because the core idea of open
access is the basis of this key advantage. The articles are freely available for anyone
who wishes to read them. And particularly the people in developing underdeveloped,
or newly industrialized nations were made, they may not have the infrastructure to pay for the
subscription. So, it helps with the dissemination of knowledge. And it benefits society overall,
the disadvantage is the publication fees, especially if there's no funding for it, no
budget for it. And while the end user doesn't have to pay to read an open access article, someone
somewhere has to pay for the cost of publication. And often it is the responsibility of the
author, or perhaps to the employer, or research grant to cover these costs. I think that certainly
discourages some to move to that open access model. So that's one of the disadvantages.
The Advantage two is increased readership. It's something that open access up publish sooner
than the articles and non-open access journals. I believe the cycle time for review went down to
two weeks for the first review from the three to four-week model. And that's just to accommodate
the shorter cycle time not compromising on the rigor just want to clarify, it's mostly cycle time
reduction was planned based on the dissemination of this and hopefully publication at a faster
pace, especially in a field like technology where that's partly the focus of the journal technology
for teaching and learning so that that becomes important that we get the ideas across sooner,
particularly in this pandemic, they're published sooner, and then the open access articles also
reach a broader audience than articles in non- open access journals. And then the increased
number of readers can convert into an increased number of citations for the author. So open
access enhances that visibility and the impact of one's own work. As open access articles are
downloaded and cited more frequently than journals from articles from non-open access journals.
Disadvantage two is lack of quality control. And I alluded to this earlier
when with some of the predatory journals could skip the peer review completely,
just in order to rake in the publication fees, the APCs. But the quality open access journals, they
do not yet have that and so, don't necessarily subscribe to that view, but they don't have the
established reputation as traditional journals. So while not a problem for reputable publishers,
some argue that open access models incentivize journals to publish more articles. Again, journals
have to cover their costs and when a large portion of their revenue comes from publication fees,
they maybe encouraged to publish more articles with a negative impact on quality. So that's one
of the reasons I cite that as a lack of quality control. Advantage Three is access for researchers
in developing countries, which I mentioned earlier this helps get the knowledge disseminated
faster and broader across a broader audience. The disadvantage is the sustainability. So
open access publishing is yet not cheaper than the current costs of licenses and therefore maybe a
costly affair. So some argue that traditional paid access models ensure that the publishers
are adequately compensated or for substantial role that they play. I want to leave you with
this question. Can open access models sustainably support the research publication infrastructure in
the long term, but by long term, say five years and beyond? And I guess only time will tell.
Thank you, again for your time and attention. Enjoy the rest of the conference. Bye.
Hi, I am June Levitt, an Associate Professor of the Department of Communication Sciences and Oral
Health. Inspired by Dr. Feyten's announcement in early 2020 and motivated by the efforts of
the biology colleagues, I started working on my Open Educational Resources last spring
when the pandemic started. Before going into my experience, I want to clarify some terms used
around open resource education. We hear a lot of abbreviations all over.
OER stands for Open Educational Resources. And OEP stands for Open Educational Practices. As
the word indicate Open Educational Resources: OER, are teaching materials in the public domain.
Open Educational Practices, or OEP includes all OER, and other materials developed by anybody.
For example, OEP includes the students’ projects made available to the public. They
are both within the scope of the Open Education landscape to make education accessible for all.
My import is limited to OER textbook productions for now, the broader step toward OEP sounds
fantastic. However, I believe that proper Quality Control Protocol should be in place to proceed
into that stage. Now, let me share my own OER experience with you. I teamed up with a colleague
who could work on weekends and weekday nights with me on this project. We found the OpenStax series
of OER textbooks extremely helpful. OpenStax is part of Rice University, and its books cover
core curriculum subjects. They allow anyone to remix and use part or all of their textbooks.
There are many derived textbooks from the OpenStax series. I teach specialized courses in the study
of communication sciences and disorders. My courses are either on scientific topics,
or disorders topics, I decided that the scientific topics are suitable for OER.
The first project was anatomy and physiology textbook, for futures speech language
pathologists, we could use information in the OpenStax, anatomy and physiology, biology,
and psychology textbooks. From a total of about 4000 pages of these books, we decided to extract,
compile and write supplemental parts for our field to make OER, anatomy and physiology textbook.
Also, we need more visual materials relevant to our field. We contacted our renowned scholar’s
website to receive permission to use some of the images, not only obtaining consent for use,
but the webmaster also sharpened images for us. We updated the initial version of our OER textbook
with refinement and additional information. The OER textbook Edition 2, is now available for
anyone at two public OER libraries. to-date 95 TWU students use this OER textbook over two semesters.
The commercially available textbook used for this course in the past cost $251.75.
So that unit price times 95 students resulted in a total savings of $22,966.25.
The average rating of the students of this book by a 10-point Likert scale is 9.03. With
a standard deviation of 1.12. We do not intend to compete against commercially available textbooks.
By providing free OER materials, we want to make higher education accessible.
The project was challenging because unlike the subjects in the core curriculum,
we needed to search for the information from basic science materials,
it was time consuming. Also, we needed to develop a workbook to go with the textbook.
The content was reliable because we based mainly on the OpenStax books
that are peer reviewed under Rice University's quality control. Yet, I found over 40 errors,
including typos and concept errors in these OpenStax books. Like many other printed materials,
human errors are unavoidable, and we need to continue keeping our sharp eyes on any material. I
reported these errors, and the OpenStax committee agreed to revise them in the future edition.
Let's talk about the benefit. We could customize some materials to go along with the lectures.
We could remix and rephrase the book to make it easy for the students to read.
It seems that students share the ownership of the book to make the best use of it. Taken together
OER development is possible out of core curriculum subjects. TWU has excellent resources to help us
develop OERs, including our library staff, Teaching and Learning with Technology staff,
and I am happy to be added to our OER toolbox. Let's expand our OER inventory for our students.
Hi, my name is Amanda Zerangue. And I am the manager of digital services
at the TWU libraries. One of my favorite parts of my job is helping all instructors at TWU and
answer any questions they may have about Open Educational Resources and how to get started.
So now that you've heard from faculty who are using OER, and open access resources
to inform their pedagogy and support students, you may wonder, how can I start and who can help
me? And that's where the library comes in. So, while available OER content has grown
exponentially in the past decade. Locating our OER materials, especially for those higher-level
courses may still be a pretty complex search. Also, particularly for those higher-level courses
an entire textbook may not be available that you can slot in seamlessly into your course.
Searching for OER is not a one stop shop. But please know that we are here to help and support
all TWU instructors who are interested in incorporating,
adopting or creating OER in their classes for their classes.
So how can we help? What specifically can we do to support you? We have formed teams so our
library team can support and help with creating a spreadsheet or list of available OER in your
subject area or for a specific course and share this list with you for you to review and determine
if this will best support your students. We can help answer any copyright questions you may have.
For example, is this an OER that I can reuse in any way that I want? Is this online resource
actually an OER, or is it protected under traditional copyright? Things along those lines.
Licensing, when you transition your course to OER, you will be thinking quite a bit about licensing,
for instance, how is this content that I want to reuse licensed? And how do I want to license
my own work? And we can help you with that. Many of us particularly those of us who were
involved in grant work for OER, are required to make the OER content that we have created
available on a global level. And we can help you do that with our own institutional repository,
and also other OER repositories across the nation. So and most exciting for many of us as a library
may be able to help provide a small stipend to support your course redesigned to include
OER for your students. Perhaps you are looking for grant opportunities in the OER arena.
We will share the state and federal opportunities that we are made aware
of and do anything in our ability to support your application, as far as OER goes and OER content.
Please know that that I'm here to support you. I would love to help you and helping
answer any questions about OER for your courses. Thank you and I hope to hear from you soon.
Thanks for watching. Please contact Teaching and
Learning with Technology with any questions or comments.