Tag Archives: #OER

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.

Open Education Resources – New BC professional learning guides to support Indigenization, decolonization, and reconciliation

“Pulling Together” Series

“Pulling Together” is open professional learning series developed for staff across post-secondary institutions in British Columbia. These guides are the result of the Indigenization Project, a collaboration between BCcampus and the Ministry of Advanced Education, Skills and Training. The project was supported by a steering committee of Indigenous education leaders from BC universities, colleges, and institutes, the First Nations Education Steering Committee, the Indigenous Adult and Higher Learning Association, and Métis Nation BC. These guides are intended to support the systemic change occurring across post-secondary institutions through Indigenization, decolonization, and reconciliation. Published under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International Licence 

Titles Include:

Pulling Together: Foundations Guide

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Pulling Together: A Guide for Curriculum Developers

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Pulling Together: A Guide for Teachers and Instructors

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Pulling Together: A Guide for Leaders and Administrators

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Pulling Together: A Guide for Front-Line Staff, Student Services, and Advisors

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Some Open Textbooks for Business

Here are some examples of resources available to you:

Business Ethics (OpenStax)

  • Business Ethics is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of the single-semester business ethics course. This title includes innovative features designed to enhance student learning, including case studies, application scenarios, and links to video interviews with executives, all of which help instill in students a sense of ethical awareness and responsibility.

Communications for Business Professions – Canadian Edition by Business Faculty from Ontario Colleges and eCampusOntario Program Managers (CC-BY-SA)

  • This textbook–adapted from Business Communication for Success–offers a comprehensive, integrated approach to the study and application of written and oral business communication. This edition has significantly reduced the size and scope of the original publication, added Canadian examples, and features a spectrum of current and relevant Canadian business communication topics.

Fundamentals of Business – Canadian Edition by Business Faculty from Ontario Colleges and eCampusOntario Program Managers (CC-BY-SA)

  • This Canadian adaptation is based on Fundamentals of Business and includes Canadian content including examples and statistics. This introductory business textbook covers a variety of topics such as: The Foundations of Business, Economics and Business, Ethics and Social Responsibility, Business in a Global Environment, and more.

Introduction to Business (OpenStax)

  • Introduction to Business covers the scope and sequence of most introductory business courses. The book provides detailed explanations in the context of core themes such as customer satisfaction, ethics, entrepreneurship, global business, and managing change. Introduction to Business includes hundreds of current business examples from a range of industries and geographic locations, which feature a variety of individuals. The outcome is a balanced approach to the theory and application of business concepts, with attention to the knowledge and skills necessary for student success in this course and beyond.

Introduction to Financial Accounting – Third Edition by David Annand, Athabasca University (CC-BY-NC-SA)

  • This third edition is an update of this popular book, based on International Financial Reporting Standards. The textbook is accompanied by many ancillary resources including a student solutions manual and workbook.