Hello!
(Apologies for the cross-posting)
The team at Babson Survey Research Group is out today with a report on the use of OER in higher education. The study is based on responses of over 2,700 faculty and there are a number of helpful findings. Inside Higher Ed also published a very positive piece about the findings here: [ https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/12/19/more-faculty-members-are-usi… | https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/12/19/more-faculty-members-are-usi… ] . And The Chronicle of Higher Education published a story on the findings: [ https://www.chronicle.com/article/Use-of-Free-Textbooks-Is/242086 | https://www.chronicle.com/article/Use-of-Free-Textbooks-Is/242086 ]
Key Findings Include:
* Faculty awareness of OER has increased, with 29 percent of faculty reporting that they were “Aware” or “Very Aware” of open educational resources, up from 25 percent last year and 20 percent the year before.
* Graphic #1: Increase Awareness
*
Large enrollment introductory undergraduate courses have adopted openly licensed OpenStax College textbooks at a rate (16.5 percent) equivalent to that of commercial publication adoption.
* Graphic #2: OER & Traditional Textbooks
*
A majority of faculty classify cost as "Very important" for their selection of required course materials. * OER can be as successful as commercial alternatives.
* Faculty report equal levels of satisfaction with OER OpenStax materials and traditional textbooks.
Thanks!
Amanda
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Amanda Coolidge, MEd
Senior Manager of Open Education
BC campus | connect.collaborate.innovate.
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I am trying to tidy up a student/faculty project made possible by the UNBC OER Development Grant https://www.unbc.ca/centre-teaching-and-learning/oer-development-grant and thought I’d put this question out in the event anyone else has encountered this type of challenge.
I have an extensive Organic Chemistry workbook (with solutions) that is a new ancillary resource for an adapted Organic Chemistry opentextbook.
All the chapters in this workbook correspond to the chapters in the adapted open textbook.
There previously was no associated workbook for this resource. The faculty member assembled questions for all the chapters and worked with a student to confirm all of the solutions.
The problem is … the student completed all of these solutions on paper and then scanned the entire workbook into a PDF.
This is a great resource, but I really think it the solutions need to be provided as markup rather than images.
I have chemfig https://ctan.org/pkg/chemfig working with ShareLaTex https://www.sharelatex.com/learn/Chemistry_formulae but I expect having a student complete the markup for all of these chemistry diagrams (hundreds) may not be possible as the learning curve will likely be too to ask of a student. Even if I did find a student capable of taking this on, I expect it would take many hours over months to complete.
I also have been exploring using Binder https://mybinder.org/ and Jupyter Notebooks for this http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/gist/greglandrum/4316430. This is a great option for ensuring shareable/editable markup, but again there is a learning curve for this that may be prohibitive for most students.
I really feel like markup should be generated for these diagrams to avoid creating hundreds of images. I feel that generating the markup will allow easier adaptation/editing of the resources, but at the same time aware that there is a significant learning curve involved for the person taking this on.
Anyone working with rending diagrams with markup? If so, what worked/failed?
Cheers ~ Grant
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Grant Potter
UNBC Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology
http://unbc.ca/ctlthttp://twitter.com/unbc_ctlt
Dear colleagues,
As you may be aware, BCcampus recently launched a monthly award for Excellence in Open Education. The first award went to Dr. Irwin DeVries (TRU-OL) and the second went to Tara Robertson (Mozilla, formerly CAPER-BC). We wanted to challenge each institution to nominate one or more of their colleagues for this award. Award criteria and the nomination form are available at: https://open.bccampus.ca/call-for-nominations-awards-for-excellence-in-open…
See also:
https://bccampus.ca/2017/11/07/award-for-excellence-in-open-education-irwin…https://bccampus.ca/2017/12/05/award-for-excellence-in-open-education-tara-…
The second update I wanted to share is that we recently launched two COEPs (Communities of Open Education Practitioners), for Physics and Psychology. The idea behind creating these groups is to facilitate collaboration and sharing among like-minded disciplinary colleagues across different institutions, both within and beyond BC. This might, for example, involve proposing and peer reviewing revisions to within specific open textbooks, sharing ancillary teaching resources, or even helping identify the need for/collaboratively developing additional open educational resources.
These groups are designed to be informal and, importantly, your level of involvement is entirely up to the individual. So, for example, an instructor may choose to draw on shared resources for their own teaching and assist colleagues by reviewing a newly-discovered open textbook. Or they may choose to propose the development of a question bank to support an open textbook, recruit collaborators, and apply to BCcampus for funding to support their project.
In each case, we have created a Google Group to facilitate communication (this functions like a private listserv) and a private Hypothes.is group to facilitate sharing of annotations within specific open textbooks (click here if you are unfamiliar with social annotations).
Anyone interested in joining a COEP should send an email to opentext(a)bccampus.ca. They will then be added to the Google Group and receive the link to join the private Hypothes.is group. Please feel free to share this email with interested colleagues.
Thank you very much for your support of open education.
On behalf of the BCcampus Open Education team,
Rajiv Jhangiani
Rajiv Jhangiani, Ph.D.
Advisor, Open Education
BCcampus | connect.collaborate.innovate.
200-555 Seymour Street | Vancouver BC V6B 3H6
Email: rajiv(a)bccampus.ca | www.bccampus.ca
Twitter: @thatpsychprof
