We are excited to launch the OAER @ Wells Task Force! The team is made up of faculty members and staff from Long Library and Accessibility Services. Our discussions and initiatives focus on ways that we can improve student success at Wells and make textbooks more accessible.
Open Educational Resources are teaching and learning materials that offer users (1) free and unfettered access and (2) 5R legal permissions to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute them. They can be used to replace traditional, expensive learning resources.
From the Open Education Group, http://openedgroup.org/review
From Hiram College Library, https://library.hiram.edu/oer
Don't believe us about the benefits of OERs? Feel free to read for yourself, and then get in touch to let us know your thoughts.
Ainsworth, B., Allen, A., Dai, J., Elder, E., Finkbeiner, N., Freeman, A., Hare, S., Helge, K., Helregel, N., Hoover, J., Kirschner, J., Perrin, J., Ray, J., Raye, J., Reed, M., Schoppert, J., & Thompson, L. (2020a). Introduction. In S. Hare, J. Kirschner, & M. Reed (Eds.), Marking open and affordable courses: Best practices and case studies. Mavs Open Press. https://uta.pressbooks.pub/markingopenandaffordablecourses/front-matter/introduction/
Appedu, S., Elmquist, M., Wertzberger, J., & Birch, S. (2021). Inequitable impacts of textbook costs at a small, private college: Results from a textbook survey at Gettysburg College. Open Praxis, 13(1), 69-87. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1295590
Beile, P., deNoyelles, A., & Raible, J. (2020). Analysis of an open textbook adoption in an American history course: Impact on student academic outcomes and behaviors. College & Research Libraries, 81(4), 721-736. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.81.4.721
Clinton, V., & Khan, S. (2019). Efficacy of open textbook adoption on learning performance and course withdrawal rates: A meta-analysis. AREA Open, 5(3), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858419872212
Clinton, V., Legerski, E., & Rhodes, B. (2019). Comparing student learning from and perceptions of open and commercial textbook excerpts: A randomized experiment. Frontiers in Education, 4(110), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2019.00110
Colvard, N. B., Watson, C. E., & Park, H. (2018). The impact of open educational resources on various student success metrics. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 30(2), 262–276. http://www.isetl.org/ijtlhe/pdf/IJTLHE3386.pdf
Engler, J. N., & Shedlosky-Shoemaker, R. (2019). Facilitating student success: The role of open educational resources in introductory psychology courses. Psychology Learning & Teaching, 18(1), 36-47. https://doi.org/10.1177/1475725718810241
Griffiths, R., Mislevy, J., Wang, S., Ball, A., Shear, L., Desrochers, D. (2020). OER at Scale: The Academic and Economic Outcomes of Achieving the Dream’s OER Degree Initiative. Menlo Park, CA: SRI International. https://www.achievingthedream.org/resource/17993/oer-at-scale-the-academic-and-economic-outcomes-of-achieving-the-dream-s-oer-degree-initiative
Grinias, J.P., & Smith, T.I. (2020). Preliminary evidence on the effect of an open-source textbook in second-year undergraduate analytical chemistry courses. Journal of Chemical Education, 97(8), 2347-2350. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.0c00293
Van Noorden, R. (2013). Open access: The true cost of science publishing. Nature, 495, 426–429. https://doi.org/10.1038/495426a
Zhao, Y., Satyanarayana, A., & Cooney, C. (2020). Impact of Open Education Resources (OER) on Student Academic Performance and Retention Rates in Undergraduate Engineering Departments Paper presented at 2020 Fall ASEE Mid-Atlantic Section Meeting, Virtual (hosted by Stevens Institute of Technology). https://strategy.asee.org/36048
NEW! Susan H. Greenberg in Inside Higher Ed reports that student spending on course materials has gone down in recent years. Read more here: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2023/06/16/student-spending-course-materials-falls-decade-low
"According to the College Board, the average undergraduate student should budget between $1,200 and $1,300 for textbooks and supplies each year. That’s as much as 40% of tuition at a two-year community college and 13% at a four-year public institution.
For many students and families already struggling to afford a college degree, that is simply too much – meaning more debt, working longer hours, or making choices that undermine academic success."
From Student PIRGs, https://studentpirgs.org/campaigns/make-textbooks-affordable/
We at Wells College want to make the college experience better by working to minimize these additional costs.
NEW! Learn more about the benefits of OERs from Loleen Berdahl and Heather Ross at University Affairs: https://www.universityaffairs.ca/career-advice/the-skills-agenda/be-open-to-using-open-educational-resources-in-your-teaching/
OERs can benefit many members of the college community.
How learners benefit:
How the OER originator can benefit:
How other staff and users can benefit:
How educational institutions can benefit:
From Jisc, https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/open-educational-resources/stakeholders-and-benefits
The term “open” has been heavily used in the past decade or more and can come with multiple interpretations: open access, open source, open textbook, open pedagogy … In general, “open” within these contexts implies unlimited, free, public access with the ability to manipulate and transform the educational content.Within the educational realm, we see even greater nuances of “open” in terms of how the access to and adapted creation work together. Our book aims to shed light on multiple definitions and how they are applied in a variety of learning experiences.Chapters provide case studies of library-teaching faculty collaborations that explore the intersecting roles and desired outcomes that each partner contributes toward student learning in an open environment.
There is no shortage of scholarly research that reflects the growing importance of open education, whether referring to issues surrounding access to education (formal, informal or postformal); different copyright licencing regimes (e.g. Creative Commons); alternative forms of educational delivery such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), or alternative pathways to learning, curriculum development and delivery and/or assessing and accrediting learning. So what can another publication add to our understanding of open education? It has become clear that thinking in terms of the binaries of 'open' versus 'closed' can no longer account and do justice to the wide range of possibilities and the varying factors that destabilise some definitions and practices. In Open(ing) Education: Theory and Practice, the authors therefore map 'open' as emerging from a dynamic network or ecology of often mutually constitutive factors resulting in a range of possibilities. The chapters in this book provide us with glimpses of open, opening, and opened, with none of these being permanent states of affairs, but rather contingent, serendipitous, often uncertain, and fluid. This book is unique not only with regard to its variety of approaches to mapping the various possibilities between open and closed but also with regard to the global spread of its many contributing authors.
Many in the world of scholarship share the conviction that open access will be the engine of transformation leading to more culture, more research, more discovery, and more solutions to small and big problems. This collection brings together librarians, scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and thinkers to take measure of the open access movement. The editors meld critical essays, research, and case studies to offer an authoritative exploration ofthe concept of openness in scholarship, with an overview of how it is evolving in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia;open access publishing, including funding models and the future of library science journals;the state of institutional repositories;Open Educational Resources (OER) at universities and a consortium, in subject areas ranging from literary studies to textbooks; andopen science, open data, and a pilot data catalog for raising the visibility of protected data.This landmark collection will help readers understand the open access movement, open data, open educational resources, open knowledge, and the opportunities for an open and transformed world they promise.
Open access has transformed the traditional way of scientific communication. Open repositories and open access journals provide large and free access to articles, theses and dissertations, reports, working papers, proceedings and books but also to other unpublished items, multimedia files and raw data. Fifteen years after the landmark Budapest Declaration, this book invites the reader to a critical assessment of the concept and the reality of open access, with a special attention to its impact in the countries of the Global South. The success of open access for the dissemination of scientific information cannot be denied. Yet, the growing numbers of OA journals, articles and books should not keep the scientists and librarians from a critical posture towards the reality beyond figures and statistics. Most publications on open access give the impression that there are only benefits and no alternatives to open access. It is time to abandon this blend of marketing, politics and technology-driven ideology and to return to a more scientific and critical stance. This book brings together seventeen short critical studies of scientists and librarians from different continents, all interested in open access, most of them supporting and accompanying the open access projects and initiatives since many years, each one with the motivation to better understand (and make understood) the ongoing transformation of scientific communication.
Sponsored by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), this one-of-a-kind book demonstrates the best tools, resources, and techniques for discovering, selecting, and integrating interactive open educational resources (OERs) into the teaching and learning process. The author examines many of the best repositories and digital library websites for finding high quality materials, explaining in depth the best practices for effectively searching these repositories and the various methods for evaluating, selecting, and integrating the resources into the instructor's curriculum and course assignments, as well as the institution's learning management system.
