Open Education 2017

Tired of using a traditional textbook in my Legal and Ethical Environment of Business course that some students did not purchase and more did not read, I began developing a digital textbook that I have now used in eight sections of the course in the past four semesters. In addition to some original content, the e-book currently has more than 700 links to online readings, videos, websites, and other free open-source web materials that appeal to the learning styles and preferences of today's college students and allows them to personalize their learning. The format and content of the book encourage students to be more self-directed, as it requires them to determine which links to review as they attempt to master the material. To add more interactive content to the book, I have assigned students to create study aids, exercises and assessment tools, as well as Infographics that visually summarize course content. With their permission, I have begun embedding this student work into the book for all users, transforming the initial OER project and moving to a format more aligned with Open Educational Practices. This presentation will discuss the evolution of the e-book and why we selected this format instead of simply adopting an existing OER textbook. While demonstrating the book, I will also show attendees assignments produced by students and embedded in the text, before sharing student feedback on how creating and using these course materials has enhanced their learning experience.

What does open pedagogy look like in practice? Using open pedagogy to frame the discussion, presenters will share how they have designed their courses, Introduction to Sociology and Introduction to Literature, to create meaningful, engaging open learning opportunities for their students. The presenters will share reflections and insights gained from their teaching experiences as well as examples of open practices enabled by Open Educational Resources.

Course development, teaching, and dissemination of academic materials is nothing if not unpredictable when it is executed in a College Prison Program. Around the country, each prison has different rules and every warden and state offer varying levels of support towards the idea of educating individuals who have been convicted of a felony. Lockdowns, funding controversies, access to textbooks outside of class, limited to no access to technology and micro-managing of time can all influence the type of education and assessment that is possible in the development of a college level course in a prison setting. This presentation explores the pedagogical process of building a college course in Sociology that is not only accessible to Prison Inmates but highly-relevant to their specific experiences and, works within the extremely regimented needs of the Prison. Based on the values of accessible education, a pedagogy of inclusivity and a theory of intersectionality, this author will explore ways in which we can compile an archive of sociological and educational materials pertinent to the realities of incarceration. By providing students materials that are relevant to their world and their needs we can create an educational experience that truly empowers students to cultivate their minds; even within a system when all other power in their lives has been muted.

Today's fake news crisis and its connection to media literacy offers an opportunity to explore the concept of open pedagogy. In November 2016, at the height of the election season and in the midst of a national conversation on validity in media, the Stanford History Education Group released a report describing the capacity of students to appropriately interpret digital media. The results indicated an astounding lack of proficiency among students at all levels - far beyond what researchers anticipated. Overall, students in K-12 and higher education may be graduating without the capacity to properly evaluate digital sources of information.

With the rapid growth of digital media as an integral component of communication, students need explicit instruction in media literacy skills. However, institutions of higher education have not determined the means to provide this instruction, and the subject remains unattached to any specific discipline. At the same time, public faith in universities and colleges has dwindled, resulting in calls for educational reform. Students' difficulty in effectively navigating society's digital landscape may add to public concern that higher education isn't doing its job well.

In order to reinstill public faith, academia must embrace a focus on student learning and evidence-based pedagogical practice. An open approach to pedagogy may help the academy answer the public's call for reform. Openness has sustained innovations in the past such as the proliferation of innovations including scientific journals in the 16th century and the world wide web more recently.

Schmidt (2015) has recommended an interdisciplinary approach to media literacy instruction through the integration of brief media literacy tutorials embedded within the content lessons of various courses. In this brief session, three professors will discuss their pedagogical experiences integrating media literacy and OER into instruction.

Open pedagogy is the future of open education because of the potential for an educational community to engage in the creation of the next generation of content while improving student learning. However, building open pedagogy to scale at most institutions has proven difficult, partially because of customized learning experiences and partially because of lack of faculty knowledge about how to support open pedagogy assignments. One way to increase adoption of open pedagogy is to leverage the existing infrastructure and institutional awareness around information literacy. The similarities in goals between open pedagogy and information literacy work represents a natural partnership that open practitioners can draw upon to support the increased adoption of both information-rich and renewable assignments in the curriculum. Panelists in this session will discuss a librarian's perspective on building programmatic support for open pedagogical practice, similar to how libraries have built programmatic support for information literacy. With a focus on scholarship of teaching and learning and open educational practices, we'll demonstrate how the work of open education practitioners and librarians is both complementary and necessarily bundled. When our professional, ethical, and teaching practices are united, open pedagogy can be better organized to scale.

Linda Williams, Faculty OER Lead at Tidewater Community College will share her experiences as an OER Champion for the Z Degrees at TCC. After leading TCC's OER initiatives since 2013, Professor Williams has gained insight into what it means to be an OER advocate. Whether you are the champion or trying to identify potential champions at your institution, this session will provide key characteristics and traits that make faculty advocates successful. Professor Williams will also share the successes and challenges of leading faculty driven OER adoption initiatives, including recruiting, managing and supporting faculty adopters. Participants will leave this session with information that can be immediately applied to their own OER initiatives, regardless of their scope or scale.

Open Educational Resources (OER) provide openly licensed alternatives to commercial instructional materials. Proponents of K-12 OER suggest that their benefits include cost savings, increased access, improved quality, and increased teacher professionalism or empowerment. While the small body of K-12 OER research is growing, perceived benefits of K-12 OER usage have not yet been thoroughly proven. The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand whether certain potential benefits were being realized by a group of secondary teachers using open science textbooks. In surveys and interviews, teachers were asked to describe their classroom practice before and after adopting an open textbook, including practices relating to openness. Teachers were also asked to rate the quality of the open textbooks they were using and textbooks used previously. Early analysis suggests that while teachers appreciated the flexibility and low cost of their open textbooks, adoption of open textbooks did not greatly impact classroom practice, nor promote open practice. The researcher will present findings from the study and lead a discussion about the implications for educators, researchers, and the future of open textbooks.

Developers of OER courses in the sciences are challenged by how to provide relevant, open laboratory content to students. The presenter will share how he overcame that challenge by creating a fully online OER version of BIO 100IN- Biological Concepts. He will share how he first altered an Open Stax textbook to include regional content, and how he created a series of open labs where students utilize common household items and processes to conduct in-home experiments. BIO 100IN is one course in the online, OER AA Liberal Arts degree pathway PCC faculty and staff are completing as an Achieving the Dream grantee.

When a large public university set out to offer an alternative textbook grant program, they weren't sure who would apply, and for what reasons. What they weren't expecting was such a varied response for why people felt compelled to join this call to action. For instance, USU's Professional and Technical Writing program has a demonstrated commitment to social justice. Using an OER not only fulfills programmatic commitments to social justice through open access, but would enable this professor to integrate supplemental readings without students feeling as though they are investing in a textbook that goes unused part of the term. A professor teaching a broadcast journalism course was seeking to create a video integrated text to push the boundaries of a traditional textbook, more in line with such a video dependent subject. A third was interested in creating a book on social media case studies. The link between all of these disparate courses is that the professors reveled in the idea of sharing and opening up their courses or having their books being published with an open license so that further elaboration and collaboration could occur, thus increasing the quality of each resource. What's the key to furthering these types of initiatives at other college campuses? Tapping into the stories of the faculty members and hearing from them about whether these newly created resources have enabled innovation in the classroom and opened the doors to learning.

As a profession, academic librarians are accustomed to collaborating with faculty and assisting them with locating quality content for their courses and their own scholarly endeavors. Librarians have also been leaders in the open access movement, advocating for faculty to publish in green or gold standard academic journals, which foster the open sharing of scholarly information. It is logical, therefore, that this group of professions is being called upon to assist in the navigation of these new(ish) open waters of locating, evaluating and creating OER. A significant challenge exists, however; how are librarians being educated and supported (or not) to successfully lead faculty through the creation and use of OER with respect to copyright?

Copyright infringement is a serious crime, and many academics have a distorted misconception that all educational use is fair use, when in fact, it is not. While academic librarians are taking on additional responsibilities to support and endorse its faculty as consumers and creators of OER, are they actually qualified to do so without formal copyright training and support? Many universities lack institutional copyright policies, which further leaves librarians in the dark with no clear guidelines other than their own interpretation of the law. Even for the few individuals of whom have had some level of training in copyright, navigating and applying the law when assisting faculty with OER can be a daunting, stressful, and labor-intensive task.

This presentation will touch on the limited literature, discuss real examples of librarians struggling to navigate copyright law when working with faculty, and offer some suggestions for academic librarians to consider and take back to their own institutions. Most importantly, I hope to spark dialogue amongst participants to raise awareness of this lack of support and training academic librarians receive from their institutions who are starting to heavily promote the use of OER.

Critical information literacy, the metaliteracy movement, and trends toward curating open access content all point to the ways in which The Library is "opening." Librarians are moving beyond the building, beyond the corporate-dominated information industrial complex, and beyond teaching to the CRAP test. Despite this shift, librarians often receive requests for instruction sessions and materials that reflect old, outdated approaches to what librarians should do and what libraries should "own." Furthermore, the focus on teaching students how to find "academic articles," while relevant for disciplinary research, ignores the economic and social inequalities outside the ivory tower. In this session, learn about the paradigm shift in librarianship and information studies and what it means for how you work with librarians at your institution, and teach your students.

Reducing textbook costs and adopting OER became one of the strategic objectives for the 2015-2021 University of Hawaii System Strategic Plan. The System is comprised of 7 community colleges and 3 universities. Librarians were instrumental in bringing the OER conversation to the grassroots level. Librarians leveraged contacts throughout the University of Hawaii System to create a system-wide volunteer UH OER Team that includes librarians, instructional designers, and instructors. The team serves as an advocacy and information-sharing group for all campuses. The tradition of collaboration and information-sharing inherent in the library profession provided a foundation from which OER could take hold in the university system.

Librarians and instructional designers at the two largest community college campuses, Kapiolani and Leeward, established independent OER initiatives on their respective campuses. In summer 2015, these two campuses together received a joint sum of $100K in innovation funding to develop OER on their respective campuses. The two-campus team of three librarians and one instructional designer focused on professional development as the key strategy for increasing faculty awareness of OER and for encouraging adoption. Differences in campus infrastructure and culture resulted in differences in how OER adoption took place. We will highlight the unique challenges that community college librarians experience in their effort to promote OER on their individual campuses. We will also discuss the role of the librarians across this system to make OER a priority across all campuses.

Our campus did not have a formal OER program until November 2016. Since then, a team from our Libraries launched two OER advocacy initiatives focused on students and instructors, respectively. This presentation will show how we drew on resources from the broader OER community to "bootstrap" our program in a short period of time. Specifically, we will discuss the formation and composition of our team, the resources we used to plan and develop our initiatives, practical challenges and lessons learned from program implementation, preliminary results from a student survey on textbook affordability, and our plans for future program development.

For our student-focused initiative, we partnered with our Student Government Association to organize two #textbookbroke tabling events during Open Education Week 2017. We provided a number of interactive activities to encourage student participation, including an engagement board and a short survey. With 350 students participating, this proved to be a very effective way to raise student awareness about OER and gather data on the impact of high textbook costs at our institution.

Concurrently with #textbookbroke, our team also implemented an Alternative Textbook Grants program to support instructors in their efforts to replace commercial textbooks with more open, affordable alternatives. Successful applicants received $1000 in grant funding as well as support from our team on material selection, copyright and licensing, and instructional design. Early projections suggest that the first round of grantees could save students up to $41,419 in textbook costs in the first year after implementing their alternative textbooks.

By sharing about the experience of launching these initiatives, we hope to provide both inspiration and a practical roadmap for colleagues at campuses that are just getting started with OER, as well as helpful data and points of comparison for those at institutions with more developed OER programs.

Librarians are integral change agents in education, particularly higher education. From being gatekeepers to what is in the library to the adoption of new methods of research. When it comes to Open Educational Resources, emerging research (Bueno-de-la-Fuente, Robertson, & Boon, 2012; Jensen & West, 2015) illustrate the centrality of libraries and librarian. In other words, in academia, if OER is to continue to grow, the role of the library and librarians will continue to hold significant value. Responding to diverse sets of stakeholders, librarians are challenged with teaching about teaching and instruction on instruction (Detlefsen EG, 2012). Well prepared to navigate the needs of these user groups, OER librarians require specific instruction for the specialized world of open educational resources.

In keeping with the theme of the conference (Sharing, Gratitude, and Hope), we propose to share a librarian guide to new pedagogy developed with the goal of advancing OER in the academy. The goal for this undertaking was to provide a practical guide for librarians as they traverse the landscape of open educational resources for pedagogical optimization. We aim to "share because we are grateful for what others have shared with us" in developing this guide "and we share because we hope to help to others" interested in engaging in similar projects.

Pedagogical experts agree that the communication of Learners has changes that have yet to be unveiled. Using the concept of WEB DuBois, the veil of the learner foreshadows the learning that is taking place. This presentation will identify the evolution of pedagogies with a brief history then focus on the current strategies of the learning design field. The librarians role in promoting access, affordability, and student success through the use of open textbooks is limited only by their agency, the goal of the guide is to empower academic librarians to navigate the emerging field of OER.

The Digital Polarization Initiative, or DigiPo , is an attempt to build student web literacy by having students participating in a broad, cross-institutional project to fact-check, annotate, and provide context to the different news stories that show up in our Twitter and Facebook feeds. The effort is spearheaded by Mike Caulfield.

As a project that pushes students and faculty from a dozen different institutions into a single wiki community it forms a potential model for future cross-institutional open pedagogy work. As a project that focuses on the problems of our current "post-truth" moment, it shows ways in which open pedagogy -- the student and faculty production of openly licensed and published materials -- addresses concerns in ways that traditional pedagogy cannot.

Mike Caulfield will discuss the aims of the project, some of the sticking points of implementation, as well as how the pedagogy carries forward the best ideas of past open pedagogy projects to meet new challenges. Early assessments of the effort will be shared.

Spoiler alert: he will also attempt to recruit your class into the project. You have been warned.

The LCC Open Learn Lab is a domains-of-one's-own project in a community college aimed at supporting the 5 R's and open ed practices. DoOO at teaching-oriented schools such as CC's (as opposed to research/grad uni's) face particular challenges. Faculty are so teaching focused and so not-research focused, that pitches about creating own scholarly identity or authoring your own stuff aren't effective. In addition, CC faculty are so time-crunched (80% are struggling adjuncts & full-timers teach 32 cred hr loads/yr) that there's very little time for learning/exploring tech. To such faculty, domains and cPanels are fantasy talk. They need a short time-spent-learning-to-useful-impact cycle. They need innovations they can adopt in this class, this semester, RIGHT NOW.

Many faculty are receptive to OER-as-free textbooks. We extend that into remixing, sharing, and open ed practices through on-ramps or migration paths. Sophisticated techies can take the fast lane to their own WP multisites and domains. For the less tech savvy, we have a selection of tools/sites that create something useful for their classes on their own sites before having to fully understand WordPress or cPanel. They can grow and move along the on-ramp.

These quick-launch tools/sites are packages of themes/plugins/lyouts tailored to certain pedagogical uses. They play nice with the LMS. One of our most popular is simple course site for students to write-in-public . Faculty who start with this often then want to move to student blogs with RSS syndication to course hub designs.

We are building what we call packages or widgets : pre-formatted WP sites with set plugins/themes tailored to specific pedagogical needs. Think SPLOT with pedagogical suggestions. Our latest effort is a virtual lab notebook that pushes results to student sites.

The last part of this session will engage attendees in a discussion of strategies for better sharing such resources across schools, especially smaller, resource-str

We will share our graphic open framework that creates instructional web comix using APIs, github, google sheets, graphics curation, and creative writing .

While detailing how this project began at #opened16 with the goal of sharing playful and meaningful exchanges centered on domain literacy, we aim at engaging others to adapt and use our framework in their own praxis and/or classrooms.

Our session will focus on practical implementations of how making web comix can open learning opportunities for audiences in and out of formal learning environments.

Adoptions and student savings are great outcomes of Open Educational Resources, but what OER really does for a community is provide freedom to do even more! Four leaders of OER programs will discuss how they took quality, already-existing OER content and utilized the freedom of open licensing to create and manage meaningful projects that go beyond the original textbook. Examples will include ancillaries, courseware, regionalization, and modification of OER.

In many ways, the last few years have brought great attention to the role of the woman in our society, especially in the workplace. The debate surging around wage equity in many countries can be traced back to the type and quality of learning experiences available to women. In short, the more we can do to ensure that women of all ages and all interests have access to affordable, high-quality, career-directed education, the better. Open education can play a key role in accomplishing this task.

Open education touches everyone, especially when it enables high-quality learning opportunities that shape people's lives. Through our work with non-profits, woman-centered community organizations, and open online learning opportunities, we've had many opportunities to hear and be touched by women's stories: stories about how open education has played a role in their own transformations, from personal to professional.

In this session, the presenters will share stories of women greatly affected by the availability of open education. Key themes of accessibility, cost, and impact will be highlighted. And moments of thankfulness and (hopefully!) inspiration will be given breath in our open education discussion.

What happens when colleagues share with one another, even across academic disciplines? This presentation will tell the story of an open education practice that has spanned three instructors, two disciplines, and multiple college departments.

In May of 1969 students in the Obi Society, the first advocacy organization for students of color at Tacoma Community College, published a list of 11 demands related to equity and diversity. As part of their campaign to bring equity to the institution, the Obi Society would stand on a rock in the campus commons to give speeches in support of their mission. In Summer of 2014 a part-time teacher happened upon this story while talking with the college archivist. That conversation spurred the What Would You Stand on a Rock For? assignment.

In the three years since the first person wrote the first lines attempting to build this open pedagogy project, it has been revised, remixed, and adopted by three instructors in two different disciplines. Not only that, the project has spurred a campus-wide discussion about honoring the efforts of the Obi Society.

Through the power of sharing, two part-time faculty members leveraged the support of the college archives, marketing, Media Services, and Vice President's office to build an open education practice that helped build awareness about the Civil Rights Movement at our community college, opened a larger discussion about the history of equity at our institution, and inspired students to demand commemoration of an important moment in the growth and development of our urban campus. We will discuss how this early attempt at open pedagogy grew into a larger expression of student voice that invites the whole campus community to show gratitude for the efforts of TCC's first Black Student Union, the Obi Society.

Openness is a process that requires and benefits from critical reflection. We believe that facilitating and stimulating critical discussion/debate about the contours and direction of the open education movement (OEM) is essential to its flourishing. In this spirit, the proposed session is intended as a space for participants to unearth and critically explore timely, perhaps uncomfortable questions that may not be at the surface of what we are doing as individuals or as collaborators within the OEM. The facilitators in this session do not have answers. Rather, we host an unconventional, interactive format designed to expose difficult topics and support innovative interventions. The session format supports both in-person and virtual (online) attendees working together on outlining and discussing pressing ethical questions in the OEM. This session allows participants to engage in a critical conversation that is liberating, paradigm challenging, constructive, and inspiring.