Open Education: Resources and Services

There is a national growing movement surrounding open educational resources and open pedagogical practices that decrease overall student expenses by adopting course materials that are free or low cost. Furthermore, we can enhance student learning by inviting them to participate as knowledge creators for the greater good, surrounding key issues within standard coursework.

The River Campus Libraries offer a series of resources and services where instructors and students can learn more about the movement, engage in the available materials, and take action by rethinking standard ways to deliver and participate in their coursework.

Quick links:

• RCL Open Educational Grant Program
• Open Education Week 2021: Zero Cost Heroes
• What does it mean to be Open?
• Videos from the Open Education series on RCL's YouTube channel
• Learn how others are going Open
• Getting Started
• Contact Information

Open Education Week 2021: Zero Cost Heroes

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What does it mean to be Open?

Open can mean many things—open access, open source, open educational resources (OER), and open pedagogy—and all are distinct forms of open content. The libraries’ Open Scholarship Libguide, Sustainable Scholarship webpage, and these introductory presentations on OER,  Open Pedagogy, and Open Access Publishing will help you begin exploring.

The 5 Rs and Creative Commons licenses are key to understanding OER, and with a deeper dive, these following resources can help place context to finding, evaluating, modifying, and engaging with OER:

• An Introduction to OER (playlist of brief videos)
• Look through resources to understand the issues and take inspiration from what others are doing
• Chapters to provide examples of these approaches
• Events/resources to develop understanding and engage in the conversation
  • Join the University of Rochester Community in ensuring student access to textbooks by making the ACT Commitment.
  • Apply for an Open Textbook Pilot Grant

Videos from the Open Education series on RCL's YouTube channel

Learn how others are going Open

Interested in seeing models of how OER and Open Pedagogy work in a college classroom?

• Open Pedagogy Approaches: Faculty, Library, and Student Collaborations, a collaborative UR open publication (and OER!), lays out multiple case studies to explore.
• This Open Oregon webinar recording can further provide a snapshot of the motivations, processes, and examples involved in developing the book.
• See Jon Holz (Biology) and Moriana Garcia (Science & Engineering Librarian) discuss their River Campus collaboration.

There are numerous OER repositories that can be helpful to you. For example:

Interdisciplinary Repositories

• OER Commons - Most helpful for K-12 teachers, can search/filter by standards, subject areas and education level
• MERLOT - Curated referatory of nearly 100,000 OER, with a wide range of material type and education level (pre-K through professional)
• OASIS - User-friendly referatory for college level OER, including interactive simulations, primary sources and more
• Mason OER Metafinder (MOM) - A federated search for OER content that spans many OER repositories as well as primary source collections

Textbook Repositories

• OpenStax - Peer-reviewed and includes textbooks suitable mostly for high schools and undergraduate 100 level courses, over 40 textbooks available.
• LibreTexts - Peer-reviewed, interactive and easily editable and embeddable into LMS systems, over 300 textbooks available.
• Open Textbook Library - Peer-reviewed, suitable for upper level undergraduate or graduate level courses, over 800 textbooks available.

Primary Source Collections

• Project Gutenberg - Over 600,000 ebooks mostly in the public domain, great for compiling an anthology
• HathiTrust - A partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. Log in with UR credentials to access the full text.
• Internet Archive - A non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.

Disciplinary or Multimedia Repositories

• Open Oregon - Includes a comprehensive listing of open image resources

• YouTube - Search for Creative Commons licensed materials by using the filters after completing a video search

• Free Music Archive - Contains hundreds of openly licensed and royalty free music tracks

• PhET, Online Resources for Science Laboratories, and LabXchange (Harvard) - Provide interactive simulations for science and math

• CK-12 - OER for K-12 educators

Ideas Surrounding Open Pedagogy

• Open Pedagogy Notebook - A repository of ideas and assignments led by Open Pedagogy champions Rajiv Jhangiani and Robin DeRosa
• List of Crowdsourcing Projects - For instructors interested in involving students with global work that adds to our growing, collective knowledge
• DS106 Assignment Bank - Shared prompts, assignments, and examples surrounding digital storytelling
• Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives - An open public resource made up of stories from people sharing their experiences learning to read, write, and generally communicate with the world around them. Contributed stories can be in text, video, audio, or a combination of formats.

Browse through some of these repositories to see what OER exist, where there are gaps, and what could benefit from professional review and use case modification and assessment.

Getting Started

Unsure if your coursework will benefit from going open? Stacy Katz and Jennifer VanAllen of CUNY’s Lehman College wrote this chapter – Evolving into the Open: A Framework for Collaborative Design of Renewable Assignments - that walks readers through the steps of moving from a disposable to renewable framework.

Furthermore, there are some great resources that can walk you through the thought process of open pedagogical practices.

• Open Pedagogy Project Roadmap
• Open Pedagogy Incubator

Start a conversation with your Subject Librarian (contacts linked below) who can ask prompting questions, brainstorm ideas, and offer vital lessons to support your transition.