Tag Archives: #OER

Open Educational Resources Directory for Courses at UVic

ePublishing Services, UVic Libraries is pleased to announce the release of our OER by Discipline Directory. This reference book, which will be updated as new resources are identified, lists a wide range of Open Educational Resources (OER) that may be adopted for courses at UVic. It acts as a referratory where the name of a resource, a link to where it can be accessed, its license, and then a short description of it are provided.

Our Directory is adapted from the BCcampus Open Education OER by Discipline Directory, which was edited by Lauri M. Aesoph and Josie Gray and uses a CC BY 4.0 license. We are grateful to the editors for all their hard work in putting this resource together, and for allowing others to share and adapt their material.

The OER by Discipline Directory project complements the Libraries’ advocacy efforts and aligns with its Strategic Directions. By identifying and using OER in their classrooms, UVic instructors can assign quality course materials while providing cost-free solutions for students. These savings improve students’ access to affordable, quality education, and are closely aligned with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals #4.

New Title: Learning from our Past

Learning from our Past is a new release published by the University of Victoria Libraries ePublishing Services. It can be downloaded for free on UVicSpace

cover for Learning from our Past textbook

This middle school learning resource focuses on the history of livelihoods and lifeways in the Banda District of Ghana, West Africa. Today a rural district in west central Ghana, Banda has long been a crossroads of trade and a place where people from different backgrounds settled and formed communities. The fascinating history of how Banda area people interacted with neighbouring communities, responded to changing climate, and drew on local knowledge and resources to sustain their families comes from studying archaeology, oral histories and textual sources. Among the topics covered in this open-access resource are trade and the effects of global connections on rural life; the science and innovation behind local industries like potting and metallurgy; the role of weaving as a technology that transformed local materials into valued goods; and the range of ways in which people provided for their families through farming, fishing and hunting. The resource combines background information with suggested hands-on activities that support learning. The resource is available in English and in Nafaanra, which is one of several languages spoken in the Banda District.

Authors

Allison Balabuch is a PhD candidate in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Victoria. She earned her degrees from the University of British Columbia – a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations and Political Science and a Bachelor of Education – and the University of Victoria – a Master of Arts in Curriculum and Instruction. She has been a French Immersion teacher for 25 years in British Columbia and England. Her teaching and research are centered on project-based learning, arts-based learning, land-based learning, and interdisciplinary studies in the classroom. Her current research is focused on community-based and interdisciplinary collaboration with the goal of improving and decolonizing educational systems and pedagogy.

Dr. Esther Attiogbe is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Professional Studies Accra. She holds a PhD in Adult Education and Human Resource Studies from the University of Ghana. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Administration and Master of Philosophy in Administration from the University of Ghana. Esther did her Post-Doctoral Fellowship with the University of Ghana in collaboration with the University of Victoria, Canada. She teaches at both graduate and undergraduate levels. Her research interests are in the areas of higher education management, adult learning and human resource management. Her teaching philosophy is underpinned by the concept of gameful learning where learners and instructors collaborate and interact to make the learning environment interesting, engaging and personalized. With a passion for educating the youth, she is involved in youth programmes in her community. She is an Associate Member of the Chartered Institute of Human Resource Management, Ghana.

Dr. Ann Stahl is a Professor in the University of Victoria’s Department of Anthropology who earned her M.A. in Archaeology from the University of Calgary (1978) and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley (1985). She is an anthropological archaeologist whose long-term research has focused on how daily life in rural West Africa has been reshaped over centuries by involvement in global exchange networks. Funded by a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Development Grant (“Improving African Futures Using Lessons from the Past,” 2018-2022), a recent project involved collaborations with partners in Ghana and the University of Victoria Libraries to develop sustainable and accessible digital heritage resources that help communities to sustain place-based relationships and foster knowledge revitalization (Banda Through Time). Her most recent work, supported by an SSHRC Connection grant, has involved collaborations with educators to enhance the role of heritage-based knowledge in classroom learning. She has held faculty positions at Binghamton University in New York (1988-2008) and University College London’s Institute of Archaeology (1985-1988) and her work has been funded over the years by the British Academy, the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the National Geographic Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the British Museum’s Endangered Material Knowledge Programme. She is editor of a key text on African archaeology (African Archaeology. A Critical Introduction, 2005, Blackwell), co-editor with Andrew P. Roddick of a multidisciplinary collection, Knowledge in Motion. Constellations of Learning across Time and Place (2016, University of Arizona) and author of Making History in Banda. Anthropological Visions of Africa’s Past (2001, Cambridge University Press). Her most recent book, Archaeology. Why It Matters was published by Polity Press (2023). She is the 2020 recipient of the University of Victoria’s REACH Award for Excellence in Knowledge Mobilization and a Faculty of Social Sciences Lansdowne Distinguished Fellow (2020-2023).

Translator – English to Nafaanra

Mr. Sampson Attah is a resident of Banda-Ahenkro, Banda District, Bono Region, Ghana. He is a member of the community-based Banda Heritage Initiative and a long-time contributor to work of the Banda Research Project (1986-2011), which studied the archaeology and history of Banda’s global connections. From the mid 1980s to the early 2000s, Mr. Attah worked as a Ghana Institute of Linguistics, Literacy and Bible Translation (GILLBT) translator and he is a strong promoter of indigenous language literacy and revitalization of Nafaanra, which is among Ghana’s at-risk minority languages.

New Title: Toward a Moral Horizon

Toward a Moral Horizon: Nursing Ethics for Leadership and Practice edited by Rosalie Starzomski, Janet L. Storch, and Patricia Rodney is a new release published by the University of Victoria Libraries ePublishing Services. It can be downloaded for free on UVicSpace: https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/13021

This third edition of Toward a Moral Horizon: Nursing Ethics for Leadership and Practice will assist nurses and all health care providers to take up the challenge of embedding ethics in health care practice, education, research, and policy at all levels—from local to regional to global. In the current, complex health care environment, more nurses are engaging in graduate studies to enhance their knowledge and expertise in providing necessary leadership in all health care settings. As a result, there is a growing need for an advanced nursing ethics text, and so this book is targeted towards graduate-level and upper-level undergraduate nursing students, as well as nurses in leadership roles—providing a much-needed resource for these groups.

This edition was written during a period when the COVID‑19 pandemic caused a health care crisis in Canada and around the world, provoking what the authors of one of the chapters called “a clarion call for change” in health care provision. The pandemic brought the fault lines of the Canadian health care system to the forefront of awareness, and profoundly affected patients, families, communities, as well as nurses and other health care providers. In addition to the influence of the pandemic, society is in the midst of rapid growth in science and technology. Now, more than ever, nurses need to use nursing ethics when developing their moral compasses for leadership. In this book, the writers focus on ethical knowledge for advanced practice nurse leaders to effect change and improve moral climates in nursing research, education, practice, and policy settings. They focus on social justice and equity as essential values of nursing ethics. Several chapter authors describe ways that nurses can press for improvements in the health care of vulnerable people who may be lacking access to quality health care: for example, Indigenous people, older adults, those who are coping with mental illness, substance use challenges, and those who have a disability. Social justice and equity issues are also explored in a chapter on global health.

This book is structured in three sections, comprised of 22 chapters written by Canadian experts in ethics. In the book, authors map the moral climate for health care and nursing ethics and describe theory related to nursing ethics. They illuminate the use of nursing ethics in diverse populations and with people at all stages of life; and apply nursing ethics to new developments in health care issues and technologies. Educators will be able to bring the content of this book alive with Ethics in Practice scenarios and reflective questions for students that are located in each chapter. Many chapters also include figures or appendices showing models and guidelines that can be used to assist with ethical decision making.

This third edition includes several new chapters, including a chapter on nursing ethical theory as distinct from bioethics, as well as chapters related to people with disabilities, Indigenous health ethics, nursing leadership, and digital health technology. Many topics covered in previous editions are revised and updated. For example, the updated chapter about health care at the end of life now includes an in-depth discussion of medical assistance in dying (MAID). Further updates are included in the areas of research ethics in nursing; the development of the Canadian health care system; nurses as moral agents, and the problem of moral distress; the application of nursing ethics in caring for patients at all stages of life; home health care ethics; ethical issues in biotechnology, and the broad areas of public health ethics and global health ethics. Chapter authors model the use of inclusive language in their writing as applied to gender diverse people and people with disabilities. Extensive references and resources are provided for readers at the end of all chapters.

This edition is cutting-edge as the authors recognize the importance of inclusive language, since language affects attitudes towards people and the way they are treated. In particular, chapter authors in this text model the use of inclusive language in their writing as applied to gender diverse people and people with disabilities.

This third edition is an open access, online publication, meaning that the book is accessible to all with no cost to the readers. This online publication also allows for new features, including two videos, with their accompanying transcripts, where listeners will gain a personal understanding of the contributors’ perspectives. In one video, Indigenous nurse scholars form a traditional circle online, as they discuss nursing ethics from their Indigenous perspectives. The other video showcases two nurses with expertise in digital health technologies in conversation with the book’s editors.

It is the hope of the editors that readers of this third edition will step boldly into shaping the future of health care by becoming more engaged in ethical practice, and becoming more confident in their leadership roles in health care. The content of this text can contribute to the knowledge needed for nurses to make ethical choices knowingly and wisely, so they can demonstrate moral imagination and moral courage in the face of challenges that confront them at all levels of the health care system.

Editors

Dr. Rosalie Starzomski is a professor emeritus at the University of Victoria School of Nursing. She is a graduate of Dalhousie University with a Bachelor of Nursing, the University of Calgary with a Master of Nursing, and the University of British Columbia (UBC) with a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Nursing. Her research, practice, teaching, and publications are focused on health care and nursing ethics, organ donation and transplantation, nephrology, biotechnology, end-of-life care, and advanced nursing practice. She is an advanced practice nurse leader in nephrology and transplantation, and for a number of years, was an ethics consultant at the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority and committee chair for several ethics committees. Dr. Starzomski is co-editor of three editions of the book Toward a Moral Horizon: Nursing Ethics for Leadership and Practice.

Dr. Janet (Jan) Storch is a professor emeritus at the University of Victoria School of Nursing. She earned her degrees from the University of Alberta: a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, a Master of Health Services Administration, and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Sociology. Dr. Storch has been a scholar in health care ethics and nursing ethics since the mid-1970s. She was a professor in the Health Services Administration program at the University of Alberta and developed and taught courses on the history and values of the Canadian health care system. Dr. Storch is a former dean of the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Calgary, and a former director of the School of Nursing at the University of Victoria. She is co-editor of three editions of the book Toward a Moral Horizon: Nursing Ethics for Leadership and Practice.

Dr. Patricia (Paddy) Rodney is an associate professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia School of Nursing. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the University of Alberta; a Master of Science in Nursing from UBC; and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Nursing from UBC. Dr. Rodney worked in critical care nursing at St. Paul’s Hospital, where she had the opportunity to learn about—and later teach in—a rapidly evolving area of clinical nursing practice. She came face to face with ethical challenges regarding end-of-life decision making for patients and their families, and witnessed the moral distress experienced by nurses and other health care providers. This fostered her lifelong interest in nursing ethics and health care ethics. She is a co-editor of three editions of the book Toward a Moral Horizon: Nursing Ethics for Leadership and Practice.

Mobilize Your Knowledge!: An Introduction to Creating Open Textbooks using Pressbooks

Presenter: Liam McParland (University of Victoria)

Are you a UVic faculty member who is interested in creating/adapting and disseminating accessible educational resources? This workshop will introduce you to Pressbooks – an open source, online authoring and publishing platform.

By the end of the workshop, you will be able to:

- Create and build an e-text
Create accessible headings, tables, and footnotes
Insert accessible media into your material

When: Wednesday, December 7, 2022
Time: 2:30pm – 3:30pm (Pacific Time – US & Canada)

This is an online event. Event URL will be sent via registration email.

New Title: Cultivating Feminist Choices

Cultivating Feminist Choices: A FEminiSTSCHRIFT in Honor of Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres edited by Brigetta M. Abel, Nicole Grewling, Beth Ann Muellner, and Helga Thorson is a new release published by the University of Victoria. It can be downloaded for free on UVicSpace: https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/13021 or purchased from the UVic bookstore: https://www.uvicbookstore.ca/general/browse/uvic+publications/9781550586794

This book is a Festschrift in honor of Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, written by several former graduate students, whom she supervised over her years as professor of German Studies at the University of Minnesota, and some of her colleagues and collaborators. The book pays tribute to Joeres’s influence on the German Studies profession as well as to her influence on the contributors’ lives and the feminist choices they have made. Dr. Joeres is known for her feminist scholarly contributions to women’s writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, including her book Respectability and Deviance: Nineteenth-Century German Women Writers and the Ambiguity of Representation (U of Chicago Press, 1998), and her collaborative feminist editing practices as editor of both Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and the Women in German Yearbook.”Together with Angelika Bammer, she edited a volume On the Future of Scholarly Writing: Critical Interventions (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015) that navigates the terrain of academic writing practices and calls for a focus not only on what scholars write but on how they write it. Because of her critical interventions in the realm of academia in general and feminist studies and German studies, in particular, as well as her influence on the lives of the next generations, this book will be of interest beyond those who know her personally.

Editors

Brigetta (Britt) Abel is Associate Professor of German Studies and Director of Writing at Macalester College (St Paul, MN). She is a lead author and co-project director of Grenzenlos Deutsch, an open-access, collaboratively produced online curriculum for beginning German, which is funded in part through a digital humanities advancement grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Nicole Grewling is an Associate Professor of German Studies at Washington College (Chestertown, Maryland), where she has taught language, literature, and culture courses since 2011. Her research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century literature and culture, portrayals of America in German literature, travel literature, and the exotic. Her work focuses particularly on German colonial fantasies and German relationships to their others, especially their love for Native Americans.

Beth Ann Muellner is a Professor of German Studies in the German and Russian Studies Department at the College of Wooster, where she has taught language and culture courses
since 2004. Her research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century autobiographical writing, photography studies, museum studies, and interdisciplinary approaches to literature.

Helga Thorson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria in Canada, on the traditional lands of the Lekwungen peoples. Her
research focuses on a diverse range of topics, including modernist German and Austrian literature and culture, Scandinavian studies, gender studies, history of medicine, foreign language pedagogy, and Holocaust studies.

Open Education Week: Featuring Why Write? English 135 Textbook

Presenters: Dr. Sara Humphreys & Dr. Erin Kelly (University of Victoria)

Why Write? is an Open Education Resource (OER) textbook created primarily for students enrolled in UVic’s largest Academic Writing Requirement course, ATWP135: Academic Reading and Writing. What makes this OER special is not just that it’s specifically designed for first-year composition courses; it explicitly takes into account anti-racist pedagogy, needs of Indigenous students, and Canadian perspectives while building upon the latest research and developments in the field of writing studies. Not simply a style handbook, documentation guide, or introduction to rhetoric, this text offers a holistic perspective on what it means to be a writer in the context of Canadian higher education institutions. The holistic, organic content of the textbook is a result of the equally holistic, organic working relationship between the Academic and Technical Writing Program, the Centre for Academic Communication, and Learning and Teaching Innovation Support and Innovation. Our presentation will discuss the working and learning communities Open Education projects build both in terms of our own experience and more broadly. We argue that the Open Source projects break down institutional barriers and siloing, producing rich resources and relationships.

When: Tuesday, March 2, 2021
Time: 12:00pm – 1:00pm (Pacific Time – US & Canada)

This is an online event. Event URL will be sent via registration email.

New Title: As if they were the Enemy

As if They Were the Enemy: The Dispossession of Japanese Canadians on Saltspring Island by Brian Smallshaw is a new release published by the University of Victoria. It can be downloaded for free on UVicSpace: https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/12244

On 22 April 1942, the CPR ship, the SS Princess Mary, was docked at the wharf in Ganges on Saltspring Island. The 77 Japanese Canadians taken away to camps in the British Columbia interior that day were among the over 22,000 who were forced into internal exile, and less than a year later, had their property liquidated against their will. Eleven properties on Saltspring were sold, some to the Soldier Settlement Board, and others at auction, including the largest belonging to Torazo Iwasaki that ended up in the hands of the local agent of the Custodian of Enemy Property. In the 1960s Iwasaki took the government to court in an effort to get his property back in a widely publicized case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. He lost his case, but this book argues that though the government was operating under the War Measures Act, the liquidation of Japanese Canadian property was a breach of trust, and the illegal application to Canadian citizens of a law governing the property of enemies.

Brian Smallshaw has a master’s degree in history from the University of Victoria. His interest in trans-Pacific history dates from his period of residence in Asia. He lived for many years in Japan prior to moving to Saltspring Island in British Columbia. His current studies centre on the dispossession of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War.

Creating Inclusive and Accessible OER

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries’ (CARL) Open Education Working Group wants to share this opportunity for you to engage with the following professional development opportunity around Open Education. Further webinars will be announced very soon.

How to Create Inclusive and Accessible OER

http://www.carl-abrc.ca/news/free-webinar-inclusive-and-accessible-oer/

Date: October 16, 2019
Time: 10am PST | 1pm EST

Registration: https://carl-accessible-oer-webinar.eventbrite.ca

Please note that although this presentation will be in English, slides will be made available in both English and French.

In this webinar, we will talk about how to design OER so they are more inclusive and accessible for all students. This will include an overview of the technical considerations of digital accessibility. For example, what are the minimum technical requirements that ensure students with print disabilities can access and navigate through the resource? We will also look at how inclusive design practices can help us create educational materials that are more versatile and useful for students. For example, what does an accessible resource look like for a student with no personal computer? Or a student with a learning disability that makes reading difficult? Ultimately, students can be very different from each other, and what may work for one student may not work for another. But by designing for those differences, we can create educational materials that are more useful, powerful, and accessible to all.

Presenter’s Bio
Josie Gray is the Coordinator of Collection Quality on the Open Education team at BCcampus. She manages the B.C. Open Textbook Collection and provides training and support for B.C. faculty publishing open textbooks in Pressbooks. Josie has been learning about and teaching accessibility best practices in OER for three years and has recently started her MDes in Inclusive Design at OCAD University.

If you have any questions, please contact Erin Fields, CARL Visiting Program Officer for Open Education (erin.fields@ubc.ca) or Lise Brin, Program Officer at CARL (lise.brin@carl-abrc.ca).

More information about CARL OEWG can be found on the CARL Open Education webpage.