Archive for the ‘Open Educational Resources’ Category

Everything Old is New Again: Textbooks, The Printing Press, The Internet, and OER

Sadly, as Audrey Watters has frequently noted, it might be impossible to find a field of endeavor outside educational technology where more of the participants are so utterly ignorant of its history. David Wiley Blog

Teaching and Learning Without a Textbook

Given the upsurge of textbook costs, college students increasingly expect universities and instructors to offer alternatives to traditional textbooks. One textbook alternative is using open educational resources (OER). While OER unquestionably save students money, the question remains whether the adoption of OER (instructional materials) is aligned with open pedagogy (methods). This study investigated 46 undergraduate […]

How the university library can help students save money

The university library is a central hub connecting nearly every facet of a campus, and it is supported by students’ tuition. In the library, we asked ourselves what we could do to defray costs for students while also removing financial barriers to reading and learning. The answer lay right at our fingertips, with the millions […]

Wide Open Voices: Experiences of OER Course Developers

As the affordability of higher education dominates the spotlight, open educational resources (OER), low cost, and free-to-student materials are widely offered as a solution. This paper outlines the experiences of course developers who contributed to a large-scale OER initiative, including training, knowledge, effort, and satisfaction of course development support services. Online Journal of Distance Learning […]

Open Video Repositories for College Instruction: A Guide to the Social Sciences

Key features of open video repositories are outlined, followed by brief description of specific sites relevant to the social sciences. Although most were created by instructors over the past 10 years to facilitate teaching and learning, significant variations in kind, quality, and number per discipline were discovered. Economics and Psychology have the most extensive sets […]

Online Education for Public Health Capacity Building in Low- to Middle-Income Countries

People’s Open Access Education Initiative (Peoples-uni, http://peoples-uni.org) aims to contribute to improvements in the health of populations in low- to middle-income countries by building public health capacity via e-learning at affordable cost. We describe experience over nine years of the initiative, including the development and delivery of a Master of Public Health (MPH) programme in […]

California’s showdown with Elsevier inspires US campuses

The University of California’s hard-line bid to push publishing giant Elsevier towards open-access models is attracting widespread interest at other US universities where librarians are considering following suit. Times Higher Education

New Twist in Federal Funding for OER

UPDATED: Education Department apparently disregards congressional instructions for spending 2019 money, dividing $5 million between Arizona State University and Chippewa Valley Technical College. Inside Higher Ed

The Professor Who Quit His Tenured Job to Make Podcasts and Lecture Videos

What’s life like after quitting a tenured job as a professor to become a freelance educator, making video courses and podcasts for a living? That’s one question we had for Kevin deLaplante, who did just that when he left Iowa State University in 2015 to focus on running his Argument Ninja Podcast and teaching courses […]

Exploring Initiatives for Open Educational Practices at an Australian and a Brazilian University

This paper explores some key developments in Open Educational Practices (OEP) in higher education in Australia and in Brazil. More specifically, it focuses on the analysis of two individual universities: the University of Tasmania, in Australia; and the Federal University of Paraná, in Brazil. They are both public and mostly face-to-face universities trying to engage […]