Open Education 2017

Providing world-class management education in today's global environment is an ongoing challenge. Web- based Learning Management Systems (LMS) embrace many options for presenting content and interacting with students in both individual and collaborative setting, which thus becomes an important OER asset. LMS based hybrid and online programs are well-suited to meet the changing landscape of management education since they provide instructional content at a time, location and pace convenient to the student. The challenge of student learning assurance represents a key success factor in both hybrid and online programs especially in an open educational context. The purpose of this presentation is to highlight how Web-based systems like LMSs can support the goals and objectives of open education with a special emphasis on sharing, gratitude, and hope.

Let's spend some time considering the full learning environments of faculty and learners when adopting OER and open pedagogy. A teacher doesn't have time to manage content, assessments, and homework across 3 systems. Forcing a learner to handle different systems for each class causes unnecessary stress and overhead to their semester. We can make this easier with open integration standards.

Sometimes you need to move between platforms and you don't want to have to redo all the work you put into customization. Or possibly even lose all the content! Your course should be portable regardless of whether you're using a custom local system, a common open source project, or an EdTech vendor's platform. We'll cover common portability standards and how you can understand the impact any given platform will have on your ability to migrate.

We'll discuss a practical approach to discovering OER, combining it with other OER and non-OER and then delivering it to students via the LMS.

Learn about the new G Suite for Education, formerly Google Apps for Education, and how it can be integrated with Open Educational Resources. We will explore the free resources provided by Google and how to harness them for use with OERs in both classroom and professional settings. With uses ranging from collaborative documents to live hangouts, the G Suite provides a number of efficient, effective, and free tools to allow students to interact locally or remotely, synchronously or asynchronously.

Pressbooks is an open source book publishing platform, used by a growing number of Open Textbook projects.



In this talk, Hugh McGuire, founder of Pressbooks, will talk about why Open Textbooks offer such exciting technical possibilities for Pressbooks. He'll give an overview of the Pressbooks development roadmap, with a focus on Open Textbooks-specific features.



At Pressbooks, our primary objective is to build new features and improvements to meet the needs of the open textbook publishing community, and our roadmap is evolving accordingly.



In this talk, Pressbooks founder Hugh McGuire will talk about Š—“Pressbooks as a platformŠ—, with thoughts about a long-term technical vision for Open Textbook infrastructure, including:



1. Finding and Š—“cloningŠ— openly licensed Pressbooks books

2. APIs and Š—“service layersŠ—

2. Version control and feedback to original authors

3. Accessibility

5. Improving the web book interface

Open Up Resources and Illustrative Mathematics have designed a middle school math curriculum, and build a custom content management system and authoring environment. The system allows for a number of output formats, including print-ready PDF, HTML, and Common Cartridge for learning management systems.



The goal in creating the system was to be able to deliver OER to districts regardless of their technology readiness. Districts who need print can get print and districts who want a digital format have several to choose from.



While this approach has been successful, there are clearly tradeoffs that have implications to the broader OER community. For one, developing a content management system (or even adapting an existing one) is a resource-intensive project. And perhaps more importantly, this multi-platform approach can muddy the capability of downstream users to revise and remix the content.

We recently described the OER World Map as a Š—“project in its adolescenceŠ— [1], meaning that after two years of development it has reached a state, in which it starts to provide user value without having achieve full maturity yet.



One indicator of the growing acceptance of the platform is the increasing number of cooperations with other initiatives. The presentation will provide an update on several activities, which we will drive forward in 2017:



1) OERInfo: Germany started its first major OER program [2] at the end of 2016. As part of program, OER World Map participates in the generation of the Š—“Informationsstelle OERŠ—, a central information website on OER. One outcome will be a Š—“Country Map InterfaceŠ—, which shifts the focus of the platform to the national community. After successful implementation, we will provide this functionality for other countries as well.



2) Lighthouses: In preparation to UNESCO`s second OER World Congress we are planning to implement a Š—“lighthouse functionŠ— [3], which will allow users to like initiatives, which have proven to provide sustainable value. By doing so it will be possible to identify good practise examples, which can serve as role models for countries or institutions new to OER.



3) Cooperation with OEC: One of our current projects partnering the Open Education Consortium is to use the OER World Map as a tool to support ongoing OEC activity like the Year of Open, a CCCOER members map and Open Education Week. During the course of the project, automatic data import as well as the display of World Map elements in OEC websites will be refined and extended.



The presentation will also give an overview of the roadmap of its way to Š—“grow upŠ— in the near future!



[1] http://www.slideshare.net/JanNeumann4/oer-world-map-adolescence-of-a-community-platform

[2] https://oerworldmap.org/resource/urn:uuid:3f11cdbd-a74a-4aa4-83b3-b4148bfdbe82

[3] https://github.com/hbz/oerworldmap/issues/1128

Lumen's Waymaker platform provides faculty with email alerts about students who are struggling in the course. These emails provide teachers with a simple path to acting on this information. Teachers can act by sending a personal email to the student or by sending a pre-written email tailored to their particular needs.

Information was tracked to better understand faculty behavior with these email nudges, including whether they opened the email nudge or not, whether they sent a message to a student, and whether they enabled or disabled notifications for nudges. Teachers can also choose whether they would like to send a "coach" response or a "regular" response. A coach response is motivating and encouraging; a "regular" response simply relays the facts and invites the students to act.

In order to investigate the effectiveness of these nudges on student behavior and achievement, all student data was tracked as they interacted with resource pages, prior learning assessments, formative assessments, summative assessments, and instructor emails. Using observational study methodologies, we analyzed the data to determine what effect these teacher and student nudges had on student behavior and student achievement.

We'll discuss a practical approach to discovering OER, combining it with other OER and non-OER and then delivering it to students via the LMS.

Learn about the new G Suite for Education, formerly Google Apps for Education, and how it can be integrated with Open Educational Resources. We will explore the free resources provided by Google and how to harness them for use with OERs in both classroom and professional settings. With uses ranging from collaborative documents to live hangouts, the G Suite provides a number of efficient, effective, and free tools to allow students to interact locally or remotely, synchronously or asynchronously.

Pressbooks is an open source book publishing platform, used by a growing number of Open Textbook projects.



In this talk, Hugh McGuire, founder of Pressbooks, will talk about why Open Textbooks offer such exciting technical possibilities for Pressbooks. He'll give an overview of the Pressbooks development roadmap, with a focus on Open Textbooks-specific features.



At Pressbooks, our primary objective is to build new features and improvements to meet the needs of the open textbook publishing community, and our roadmap is evolving accordingly.



In this talk, Pressbooks founder Hugh McGuire will talk about Š—“Pressbooks as a platformŠ—, with thoughts about a long-term technical vision for Open Textbook infrastructure, including:



1. Finding and Š—“cloningŠ— openly licensed Pressbooks books

2. APIs and Š—“service layersŠ—

2. Version control and feedback to original authors

3. Accessibility

5. Improving the web book interface

Open Up Resources and Illustrative Mathematics have designed a middle school math curriculum, and build a custom content management system and authoring environment. The system allows for a number of output formats, including print-ready PDF, HTML, and Common Cartridge for learning management systems.



The goal in creating the system was to be able to deliver OER to districts regardless of their technology readiness. Districts who need print can get print and districts who want a digital format have several to choose from.



While this approach has been successful, there are clearly tradeoffs that have implications to the broader OER community. For one, developing a content management system (or even adapting an existing one) is a resource-intensive project. And perhaps more importantly, this multi-platform approach can muddy the capability of downstream users to revise and remix the content.

We recently described the OER World Map as a Š—“project in its adolescenceŠ— [1], meaning that after two years of development it has reached a state, in which it starts to provide user value without having achieve full maturity yet.



One indicator of the growing acceptance of the platform is the increasing number of cooperations with other initiatives. The presentation will provide an update on several activities, which we will drive forward in 2017:



1) OERInfo: Germany started its first major OER program [2] at the end of 2016. As part of program, OER World Map participates in the generation of the Š—“Informationsstelle OERŠ—, a central information website on OER. One outcome will be a Š—“Country Map InterfaceŠ—, which shifts the focus of the platform to the national community. After successful implementation, we will provide this functionality for other countries as well.



2) Lighthouses: In preparation to UNESCO`s second OER World Congress we are planning to implement a Š—“lighthouse functionŠ— [3], which will allow users to like initiatives, which have proven to provide sustainable value. By doing so it will be possible to identify good practise examples, which can serve as role models for countries or institutions new to OER.



3) Cooperation with OEC: One of our current projects partnering the Open Education Consortium is to use the OER World Map as a tool to support ongoing OEC activity like the Year of Open, a CCCOER members map and Open Education Week. During the course of the project, automatic data import as well as the display of World Map elements in OEC websites will be refined and extended.



The presentation will also give an overview of the roadmap of its way to Š—“grow upŠ— in the near future!



[1] http://www.slideshare.net/JanNeumann4/oer-world-map-adolescence-of-a-community-platform

[2] https://oerworldmap.org/resource/urn:uuid:3f11cdbd-a74a-4aa4-83b3-b4148bfdbe82

[3] https://github.com/hbz/oerworldmap/issues/1128

Research indicates students find open materials favorable, but there is no research regarding students' perceptions of the faculty who use open materials. In this small exploratory study, we examined college students' perceptions of faculty members based on their textbook use. Twenty-three participants read two passages--one about an instructor using an open textbook and another using a traditional copyrighted textbook--and rated each instructor on a range of characteristics through closed- and open-ended questions. Participants rated each professor on the characteristics of kindness, knowledgeability about their subject matter, enthusiasm, patience, encouragement, and creativity on a scale from 1 (a lot/very) to 5 (not at all). Participants also rated how likely they were to take a course with each professor, also on a scale of 1 (very likely) to 5 (very unlikely). Open-ended questions asked for justifications for each closed-ended response (On what basis did you make your judgment? ). T-test results showed that participants rated the faculty member using an open textbook as having higher levels of kindness, encouragement, and creativity than the faculty member using a traditional copyrighted textbook, and were more likely to want to take a class with the faculty member using an open textbook. Participants frequently cited personal characteristics, teaching styles, and textbook cost as positive characteristics of faculty who used open textbooks. Although a small study, these findings suggest that students find value in professors who use open materials, as it may reflect personal qualities, such as kindness and creativity, that students believe these professors possess. Limitations and future directions, including a larger sample size, different passages, and improved research method approaches, will be discussed, as well as the additional implications these research findings have on open textbook use in college classrooms.

In a recent blog post, David Wiley observed that "Our fixation on [OER] discovery and assembly also distracts us from other serious platform needs – like platforms for the collaborative development of OER and open assessments (assessments are the lifeblood of this new generation of platforms), where faculty and students can work together to create and update the core materials that support learning in our institutions." [source: https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/4892]

In this presentation, Steel Wagstaff (from UW-Madison) and Hugh McGuire (founder of Pressbooks) will provide an update on recent work they've undertaken to transform Pressbooks (an open-source book publishing tool) into a OER platform which we believe will go some distance towards meeting some of the 'serious platform needs' that many of us in the field have identified over the past decade. We will share some of the guiding principles which have directed our work, provide an update on exciting recent developments, and share a roadmap for future development, partnership, and use cases. We will also demonstrate how this enhanced version of Pressbooks allows users to collaborate in the construction of interactive activities and a range of formative assessments, natively supports robust annotation behaviors, and is capable of generative detailed learning analytics regarding learners engagement with the text (including their reading practices, engagement with media, annotation behavior, as well as their interaction with assessments and other interactive elements of the text).

We will conclude our presentation with a discussion of problems and challenges we've identified for future development and extend an invitation to interested listeners to both use and contribute to our efforts.

How can we provide instructors with the resources and tools they need to easily create OER in Higher Education that will actually be adopted? What barriers exist for faculty and how can we remove them so open education is easy and enticing? In the North Carolina State University Libraries, we are leading an IMLS-supported investigation into the need for and ideal components of a subject-specific, simple, flexible, and scalable toolkit for coursework adoption for a specific discipline - psychology. This research will lead to a partnership with the UNC Press to develop an Open Textbook Toolkit that leverages library and press expertise that provides a one stop shop for those interested in creating OER. Join us to learn more about the initial planning and implementation, as well as a sneak peak at early results from research supporting the Open Textbook Toolkit!

A number of tools and technologies have been developed to support and enhance open educational resources. Some of these tools and technologies are designed to make adoption of OER easier for the faculty member, while others have the potential and have been proven to have positive impacts on student success. Many of the providers of these tools and technologies have new funding models designed to protect the tenets of OER related to access to materials on day one as well as after the class has ended.

The Maricopa Community Colleges have addressed this influx of new funding models with the development of an OER Enhancement Fee that is charged with tuition, only when an …OER Enhancement' is being provided. This session will provide information on how the fee came to fruition, challenges with implementing the fee and some of the strategies used to make it a success and institutionalize its use in the schedule building process.

Additionally, the presenters will request participation from attendees in sharing how they are addressing these new funding models so attendees can leave with multiple strategies to investigate further for their institutions.

Curating OER is messy! Each new course brings a new collection of lib guides, websites, spreadsheets, course maps, and piles of post-it notes. Have you ever found the perfect resource and had nowhere to use it, or needed a resource you remember seeing, but couldn't remember which lib guide it was in?

You can save your sanity, and your time with free, easy to use, online tools. In this workshop you will see ways to adapt online pin boards, web clippers, and pivot tables to collect, organize, collaborate, and share. You will take home links to online resource collections, plus tips for replicating and adapting the tools to meet your school's needs.



Librarians, faculty, and instructional design teams can benefit from having a central repository of OER resources that can be used across disciplines. This can be achieved at no cost, built collaboratively, and easily shared. Clean up the mess of research with simple curation!

Using CORE, the nonprofit open-access repository at the center of Humanities Commons, as a case study, this presentation looks at the potential role of the disciplinary repository in the promotion, discovery, and dissemination of open educational resources. A socially networked repository, CORE allows users who upload relevant materials to immediately notify their subdisciplinary communities of interest of the upload, and to add those materials to a community's library on Humanities Commons. How, this presentation asks, might a socially imbricated repository enhance the discoverability of open resources uploaded there? How does the existence of spaces to discuss the creation, adoption, and remixing of open educational resources on the same platform as the resources themselves aid that adoption and use? Finally, does the fact that these resources are located on the same system academics use to share their research and other scholarship enhance or detract from their discoverability and use?

The Libretexts is an OER collaborative platform to enable dissemination and evaluation of new education developments and approaches, with an emphasis on data driven assessment of student learning and performance via a freely available online infrastructure. The Libretexts was recently expanded to 12 pseudo –independently operating and interwoven libraries covering 12 academic fields to function as a central platform for the construction and implementation of post-secondary OER textbooks. Since its inception eight years ago, the LibreTexts has been exponentially growing and is the most visited chemistry website in the world with 30 other participating campuses and over $3M of student textbook savings to date. This presentation addresses our recently expansion efforts and the next next-gen phase of development to integrate emerging education technologies into the content.

Despite the growing body of literature on open materials, prior research to our knowledge has not investigated students' perceptions of open versus copyright-restricted textbooks through a direct, comparative approach. Further, there is little empirical investigation on students' perceptions of texts they have not previously seen or used. To learn more about students' perceptions of open textbooks, both as they compare to one another and as they compare to copyrighted textbooks, we carried out a series of studies that examine students' perceptions of these materials, specifically in the area of psychology. In Study 1, we examined college students' perceptions of open and copyrighted textbooks through a single-blind review. In this study, students read hard copies of chapters from open and copyrighted psychology textbooks (one chapter from each type of textbook) and rated the quality of the materials on text clarity, level of engagement with the text, and quality of images, tables, examples, and review questions. Students also selected their preferred chapter and provide a brief justification of their selection. In Study 2 and Study 3, we sought to better understand students' perceptions of open psychology textbooks as they compared to one another (and not compared to copyrighted texts). In Study 2 and Study 3, students reviewed three open psychology textbooks and completed twenty questions from the Textbook Assessment and Usage scale (Gurung & Martin, 2011) for each textbook. Study 2 included two introductory level psychology books and one research methods book, and Study 3 included three introductory level psychology books. Findings for each study will be presented, as well as implications, limitations, and future directions for research on students' review of open textbooks in psychology and open materials more broadly.