Published in 2021, This document is intended to support authors, teachers, professors, librarians, and all open educators in evaluating when and how they can incorporate third party copyright materials into Open Educational Resources to meet their pedagogical goals.
Completed August 2021, this free, self-paced, online course that provides an introduction to many aspects of OER and their use in higher education. The entire course may be completed for CEU credit.
In the OFAR program, first piloted in spring 2021, participating faculty learned about anti-racism, open educational resources, and open pedagogy in a course entitled Open for Anti-Racism. Ninety percent of participants indicated that their teaching practice improved. Faculty employed three key strategies: incorporating student voices to include non-mainstream perspectives and points of view; co-create materials with students for an anti-racism module; integrating inclusive media (images, data, videos, podcasts, etc.) to illustrate and explicitly discuss racism, oppression, privilege, and healing.
ISKME showcases how their community of educators rapidly responded with relevant Open Educational Resources (OER) to meet the needs of the moment.
The Fall 2020 academic semester saw a shift in the proportion of higher education faculty teaching online, driving a transition of existing courses and educational materials into digital formats, according to a survey of faculty conducted by Bay View Analytics. Survey results also show that while the level of awareness of OER grew for the fifth straight year, OER adoption rates remained stable. The results reflect responses from over 3,200 faculty and department chairpersons. The report shows improvements in faculty satisfaction with OER textbooks and an increased reliance on digital materials to meet online instruction demands.
Cambridge University Press recently struck dozens of open-access publishing deals with U.S. institutions, convincing many libraries to abandon their traditional journal subscription arrangements for the first time.
Works published in 1925 were expected to enter the public domain in 2001 until congress extended the copyright term to 95 years. 1925 is a significant year in literary and cultural history, works include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, silent film star Buster Keaton in Go West, and music including the jazz standard Sweet Georgia Brown and songs by Gertrude “Ma” Rainey.
The U.S. Department of Education will have another $7 million in grants for Open Textbook Pilot projects between now and September 30, 2021. Under instructions from Congress, the Department is directed to run a new competition in 2021 with the same terms as 2020’s, including a minimum 60 day application period.
The annual Open Education Conference was held virtually in November with more than1,500 attendees from over 70 countries. After founder of the conference stepped down last year, it was organized and led by volunteers from the open education community. The conference was held over five days of with over 200 live meetings and pre-recorded sessions about open educational resources, open pedagogy, and open education initiatives. All recorded sessions will be openly available.
Pressbooks, a publishing platform for many openly licensed books, has introduced a searchable directory of all its publications. The directory searches the books metadata and can be filtered by subject, license, network, language, publisher, word count, number of H5P activities and more.
4,000 students across 80 institutions were surveyed in fall 2019 to see how high textbook costs affected them.
This year, Saginaw Valley State University is participating in OpenStax’s Institutional Partner Program, joining a cohort of colleges and universities advocating for the use of affordable, open educational resources (or “OER”). SVSU was chosen to join the 2020-21 cohort of partner schools alongside eleven other colleges from around the country.
We’re excited to be able to bring our the SVSU community more information, support, and resources around OER use and adoption. If you are new to OER, check out OpenStax's information sheet that covers the basics of understanding and finding open resources. The partnership program also offers free access to OpenStax Tutor courseware for all students.
Let us know if you have any questions, and we look forward to sharing more OER training and resources with you throughout the year!