Opening Up Education: Textbooks, Resources, Courseware & More

Opening Keynote: Open to Change: Situating OER in Global Higher Ed

As more faculty and institutions embrace Open Educational Resources, questions arise about the effects of this for higher education. Are students more or less successful when OER are used? How are faculty viewing teaching and learning with open content? How are institutions making OER part of their everyday practice? Are policy makers taking notice? We will explore questions of impact of OER and Open Education en route to situating OER and open education in the context of global higher ed.

Lessons & Learnings from the Gates Foundation’s Investments in Open Education within US Higher Education

A brief overview of the extent and rationale for some of the Postsecondary Success’ strategy’s investments in open education in US higher education and some of the key learnings and lessons from these investments.

Creating and Assessing OER Materials

This session explores the process followed in working with faculty to adopt, adapt, and author OER Materials. Specific parts of the process that will be discussed in greater detail include OER's role in hybrid course design, methods of peer review for newly created content, and various ways to measure the impact of OER in higher education.

Delivering Open Access Monographs

Open Access monographs attract a much larger and more diverse readership than non-OA publications, allowing top quality research to be accessed and engaged with by many more people than ever before. But Open Access publishing is much more than just providing a free pdf download option - it is also about enabling re-use and sharing of the content, and these properties are likely to be even more powerful and transformational than 'just' providing free access to read the content. Engaging with open technologies in the conception and design of the book enables entirely new methods of research to be explored, and entirely new distribution systems to develop. It is these new objects and objectives for monographs which are likely to be the most exciting and disruptive components of this new publishing process. In this session Rupert Gatti will draw on experiences at Open Book Publishers to look at some of the new processes and publications Open Access enables, how these are challenging existing conceptions and distribution systems for scholarly monographs, and emerging business models for the sustainability of these new publishing processes.

Delivering Open Courseware

Open Textbook and Online Learning Materials

Content Camp: A Collaborative Assessment Model from Ohio State

Ohio State’s Affordable Learning Exchange has consistently seen access to publisher test banks as a common hurdle to adoption of open textbooks. This presentation will present a novel solution to leverage the intellectual, technical and instructional resources available through the Unizin consortium. Content Camp assembles instructors in various disciplines from the Unizin and Big 10 Alliance consortia to collaboratively author, review and share test banks for wide distribution. We will start with a brief overview of our ALX initiative, including project overviews and savings goals, then outline our Content Camp project, including the development of shared course objectives, question design and support and recruitment models, and will update attendees on our progress and next steps.

Challenges and Barriers to be Addressed

A recent Cengage study based on interviews with industry experts and a survey of over 500 participants showed that four percent of higher education instructors use OER as primary materials. Further, the data projects that the number of OER users may grow to as much as 12 percent over the next five years. There is no doubt the use of and interest in OER is growing but there are obstacles. Building and creating pedagogically sound courses is challenging and there are ways institutions and educational technology companies can work together to provide students with quality learning experiences that are accessible and affordable.