OER Info to Display During Open Ed Week

[Kristin Whitman]

Hi all,

 

Oregon Tech is hosting an Open Ed Week event where we’re going to give students the opportunity to fill out thank-you cards to their faculty who use free/affordable textbooks.  One of my colleagues asked me to put a simple PowerPoint together with OER facts that she could display on a TV monitor to auto-rotate during the event.

 

Here’s what I put together (pre-marketing – they’re going to add nice branding and graphics and so on).

 

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1P901YFjCL7GrVo9X9uAN60vJsctSWt20ZdMN7IK5B0I/edit?usp=sharing

 

I was just wondering if anyone had any suggestions for other useful OER facts to share? And thought I’d make it available in case anyone else wants to do something similar!

 

Thanks!

 

Kristin Whitman

Library Director, Portland-Metro Campus

Phone:  (503) 821-1258 

Book an appointment with me

 

[Jonathan Poritz]

This is a great slide deck to show some wonderful OER facts!

To this great list of fantastic advantages of OER, when I am talking to folks about the advantages of OER, I often add

• When a course uses OER, students have free first-day access to the materials they will need to succeed in the class, as well as the legal permissions to copy and keep them in whatever form they want, as long as they want after the course is over, in case they will be useful later on (unlike so many e-textbooks these days which are rented for a limited time),
• When a professor uses OER for a course, they have the legal permissions to modify that resource to cover exactly what they want to cover in the class, to correct any typos or other small or large mistakes, and to add timely new material that likely is not yet in commercial textbooks.

You might also consider on slide 4 expanding the scope, since OER are not just online, and not just textbooks -- although they do certainly include free online textbooks!  So a free (and openly licensed) piece of software that students use in a course might be an OER (I used to teach a course which a lot of engineering students took that used the program Octave, which is a free/open replacement for Matlab -- and Octave is definitely an OER, when used in a class!), or a physical workbook that is given to students when working in a lab might be an OER, even though not electronic, if it has an open license on it!  So sometimes talking about OER as something like "OER are resources used for teaching and learning which are distributed with a license that allows zero-cost and unfettered access, copying, and modification -- which includes free, online textbooks but can also be pieces of software, physical books and handouts, audio and video, etc."

best,

Jonathan

[Ash Barber]

Hi Kristin,

Thank you for sharing your slides. They are great! I was floored by the stat on Slide 3 (900% increase in textbook costs). I was wondering where this stat came from? 

Also, a suggestion for your slide deck: You may want to add that OER:

• Can be very interactive
• Can be great vehicles for Universal Design for Learning
• Can address issues of inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility

Kind regards,

Ash

[Kristin Whitman]

Hi Ash and Jonathan,

 

The chart came from Jonathan Poritz’s website, as shared by Amy in a recent SPARC thread. Here's the chart and here's the page for context. 

 

It does raise the point that I really should have attributed the chart which I will do now :)

 

The slideshow is really too simplistic as a tool for communicating all of OER’s definitions benefits, since I imagine students will only glance at it briefly during the activity, but I think they would definitely be interested in the accessibility and DEI benefits, as well as the point about first-day access! I often really struggle to reduce OER to soundbites that are “portable,” details that students could easily pass on to others.

 

Thanks to all for the suggestions, everyone!!

 

Thanks!

 

Kristin Whitman

Library Director, Portland-Metro Campus

Phone:  (503) 821-1258 

kristin...@oit.edu

Book an appointment with me

 

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[Ashleigh Barber]

Thanks for the info, Kristin.

 

Best of luck with the slides – I agree it’s very tricky to distil OER concepts into bite-sized pieces.

 

Kind regards,

 

Ash

 

Ash Barber | Academic Librarian | she/her | Hear my name

Library Services | City West Campus | Adelaide SA 5000

OER Fellow of the Libraries of the Australian Technology Network (LATN)

ASCILITE Australasian Open Educational Practice Special Interest Group (OEP-SIG)

(: +61 (08) 8302 4439 | *: ashleig...@unisa.edu.au |  Chat with me in Teams |  @AshTheLibrarian

CRICOS Provider Number 00121B

I would like to acknowledge the Kaurna People as the Traditional Owners of the unceded Lands on which I live and work and pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging.

[Jonathan Poritz]

It's true: you've set yourself a very hard task, to make something attractive, interesting, and informative, which can be understood in a glance!

best,

Jonathan

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openoregon/938b6e979fbf412080a95bf8267d3d92%40unisa.edu.au.

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 Jonathan Poritz's current contact information is
  always available at www.poritz.net/jonathan

[Jonathan Poritz]

(Oh, and the data for that graph are from a Bureau of Labor Statistics time series on textbook costs, and another on the overall CPI.)

[Kristin Whitman]

Thank you for making such a clean and easy-to-understand graphic, Jonathan! I bookmarked it when Amy shared it on the SPARC listserv because when I saw it, I thought “ooh, this will definitely come in handy!”

 

Thanks!

 

Kristin Whitman

Library Director, Portland-Metro Campus

Phone:  (503) 821-1258 

kristin...@oit.edu

Book an appointment with me