Tag Archives: open education

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.

2022 OTESSA Conference

OTESSA-flyer

We are excited to announce that the second international conference of the Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association (OTESSA) will be held ONLINE at the Congress of the Humanities and the Social Sciences between May 16-20, 2022 with co-chairs: Aras Bozkurt (Anadolu University, Turkey), Terry Greene (TrentU, Canada), and Kathy Snow (UPEI, Canada).

Please visit otessa.org for more information. We welcome submissions pertaining to educational technology, online learning, blended or hybrid learning, multi-access learning, open education, digital and open scholarship, and intersections where technology and openness intersect with education, society, or scholarship.

We were pleased to be approaching 200 participants this year already and thank BCcampus, eCampusOntario, CampusManitoba, LearnQuebec, Trent University, and the University of Victoria for supporting OTESSA as we build and grow. We are on a growth trajectory and are excited to welcome more into our community!

Our call for proposals is closed, but we did save some space for late additions on a first-come/first-reviewed basis until they are full. More information can be found on our OTESSA Conference Submission and Proceedings website.

We support both research-oriented and practice-oriented sessions. Although not required, we have options for short papers to be submitted for review and published in our proceedings (see 2021 Proceedings Issue) or full papers for publication in our new OTESSA Journal. Please check out Volume 1 Issue 1 and Volume 1 Issue 2 of our journal from 2021. All of our publications are open access.

Visit our OTESSA 2022 Conference Website to learn more about our program and wonderful line-up of speakers:

Keynote speakers: Martin Weller (Open University, UK), Sherri Spelic (American International School Vienna), Maha Bali (American University in Cairo), Brenna Clarke Gray (Thomson Rivers University).

Invited speakers: Enilda Romero-Hall (UTampa, USA), Jess Mitchell (OCAD, Canada), Beyhan Farhadi (York University, Canada), Lyn Trudeau (Brock University), sava saheli singh (University of Ottawa/QueensU, Canada), AJ Boston (Murray State University), Verena Roberts (UCalgary, Canada), Terry Anderson (Athabasca University, Canada), Tony Bates (Ryerson & CDLRA, Canada), Stephanie Moore (University of New Mexico, USA), Matt Bower (Macquarie University, Australia), Nadia Naffi (Université Laval), Trevor Mackenzie (Greater Victoria School District), Sadik Shahadu (Dagbani Wikimedians User Group & Art+Feminism), and Simon Collin (Université du Québec à Montréal)

Our social program includes Gurdeep Pandher of the Yukon running an online Bhangra dance class, Jon Dron of Athabasca University performing music with song, Kendra Coupland facilitating a mindfulness session, and Dr. Jones (alias for one of our favourite edtech people) who will be here as a DJ arranging beats for us! We will also facilitate cohorted social pods for the conference, so you can connect, network, and debrief with others in the OTESSA community!

You can see our welcome videos coming out on the @OTESSA_org Twitter account on #OTESSA22 hashtag with early ones found here:

Martin Weller’s Welcome Video,

Maha Bali’s Welcome Video, and

Gurdeep Pandher’s Welcome Video!

We added an extra day on May 20 with workshops and an unconference/edcamp event to enjoy.

JOIN US!  Sign up today on our Member Info page.

OTESSA-flyer-8.5×11-v4Information on Fees and Registration are available on our OTESSA Conference website. We support all Black or Indigenous persons with free registration for both Congress and OTESSA. We support additional equity-deserving groups and all those for whom these fees are too much. Please contact us and we will break down barriers together.

Open Education Week 2022: March 7-11

Open Education Week 2022 is being held internationally from March 7-11. It is celebrated every year as a community-built forum to raise awareness and highlight innovative Open Education successes worldwide. It was first launched by Open Education Global in 2012.

OE Week gives practitioners, educators, and students the chance to learn more about open educational practices and be inspired by the amazing work that is being done by the community across the world.

What is Open Education?

According to a definition from Opensource.com, Open Education is a philosophy about how individuals should generate, distribute, and build on knowledge. Open education advocates believe that everyone around the globe should have access to excellent educational experiences and materials, and they strive to remove obstacles to that aim. High monetary costs, outdated or expired resources and legal restrictions that limit collaboration between students and educators are examples of such hurdles. A collection of different definitions of Open Education can be found here.

Which core concepts behind Open Education bring the idea to life?

  • Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching, and sometimes research resources that have been published under an open license (such as Creative Commons) or that are part of the public domain. No technological or copyright-related barriers should exist to freely reuse, revise, remix, retain, and redistribute OERs (the 5Rs).
    While the roots of OER reach back further, the term was established during a UNESCO forum in 2002. To this day, UNESCO remains one of the most important contributors to the evolution of OER and has issued its Recommendation on Open Educational Resources, which is the world’s only international framework for establishing norms in this field. Promoting Open Education, especially OER, is also part of UNESCO’s efforts to meet the United Nations Sustainability Goals. Find the UNESCO definition for OER and detailed information on their commitment in that area here.

  • Open Pedagogy is a concept that aims to open up the entire teaching, learning, and study experience, not only through the use of OERs but also by challenging established methods of knowledge creation. By using dynamic, open, and innovative methods, students, hand-in-hand with instructors, liberate themselves from the role of passive consumers of lectured “chalk and talk” content and become an active part of the educational process, for example by creating a textbook together with their instructor over the course of a semester.
    It is important to note that the Open Education movement did not     invent alternative pedagogical approaches but can draw on many groundbreakers in this area. What is new in this context are the chosen methods and the strong association with the Open philosophy.

What are Indigenous perspectives on Open Education? Which resources address the relationship between Indigenous ways of Teaching, Learning and Knowing and Open Education?

Indigenous ways of knowledge building and sharing can be fundamentally different from Western approaches. The desire to (re)open access to knowledge and education for all only emerges from a predicament created by a Western claim to education and educational resources as a potentially marketable good and means of gaining distinction and power, which may not necessarily be found in Indigenous practices around knowledge creation, retention, and sharing.

The white paper Community First: Open Practices and Indigenous Knowledge by Skylee-Storm Hogan and Krista McCracken offers a first perspective on the relationship between Open Education and Indigenous Knowing and emphasizes that this relationship needs to be reflected on more, as the Open Education movement gathers momentum around the world.

UBC hosted The 6R’s of Indigenous OER: Re-imagining OER to Honour Indigenous Knowledge and Sovereignty, an online talk about the relation of Indigenous Knowledge Systems and OER on March 10 as part of OE Week. Find the recording of that session here.

Pulling Together: A Guide for Curriculum Developers by Asma-na-hi Antoine, Rachel Mason, Roberta Mason, Sophia Palahicky, and Carmen Rodriguez de France is a companion on the Indigenization of curricula and other educational contexts, that was developed as a collaboration between Royal Roads University, University of Victoria, and Arrive Consulting. It is part of the Pulling Together series, a set of professional learning guides stemming from a project on the Indigenization of post-secondary institutions in B.C.
The series is available as OER in the BCcampus Open Textbook Collection, each in a variety of formats.

What role does Open Education play in the UVic community?

Awareness of and advocacy for Open Education is widespread among stakeholders on UVic Campus.

  • An overview of Open Education and Open Educational Resources (OER) is being provided by the Office of Scholarly Communications at Uvic Libraries. 
  • UVic awards OER grants, to foster the adoption, adaptation or creation of Open Educational Resources (OERs). The aim is to replace existing textbooks or other educational resources with OERs that will be useable not just at UVic, but other post-secondary institutions, bringing down prohibitive barriers like high cost along the way.
  • The University of Victoria Student’s Society (UVSS) is providing a template for an advocacy letter, ready to be sent out to professors and lecturers to inform them about the benefits of OER. Read more about the initiative here.

Where can resources around Open Education be found?

Events for Open Education Week

The OE Week website lists a large number of events being organized around the globe. 
Events hosted in BC, sometimes with a provincial focus, are being listed on the BC Campus website. Some archived events of note include:

This blogpost was created adapting material from the following sources, which are licensed under a Creative Commons license:

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.

Featured research: Emergency remote education and COVID-19

A global outlook to the interruption of education due to COVID-19 pandemic: Navigating in a time of uncertainty and crisis

By Aras Bozkurt, et al.

Two UVic researchers are co-authors on this open access paper: Valerie Irvine and Michael Paskevicius.

Abstract:

Uncertain times require prompt reflexes to survive and this study is a collaborative reflex to better understand uncertainty and navigate through it. The Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic hit hard and interrupted many dimensions of our lives, particularly education. As a response to interruption of education due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this study is a collaborative reaction that narrates the overall view, reflections from the K-12 and higher educational landscape, lessons learned and suggestions from a total of 31 countries across the world with a representation of 62,7% of the whole world population. In addition to the value of each case by country, the synthesis of this research suggests that the current practices can be defined as emergency remote education and this practice is different from planned practices such as distance education, online learning or other derivations. Above all, this study points out how social injustice, inequity and the digital divide have been exacerbated during the pandemic and need unique and targeted measures if they are to be addressed. While there are support communities and mechanisms, parents are overburdened between regular daily/professional duties and emerging educational roles, and all parties are experiencing trauma, psychological pressure and anxiety to various degrees, which necessitates a pedagogy of care, affection and empathy. In terms of educational processes, the interruption of education signifies the importance of openness in education and highlights issues that should be taken into consideration such as using alternative assessment and evaluation methods as well as concerns about surveillance, ethics, and data privacy resulting from nearly exclusive dependency on online solutions.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
This article was originally published at:
10.5281/zenodo.3878571
Bozkurt, A., Jung, I., Xiao, J., Vladimirschi, V., Schuwer, R., Egorov, G., Lambert, S. R., … &
Paskevicius, M. (2020). A global outlook to the interruption of education due to COVID-19
pandemic: Navigating in a time of uncertainty and crisis. Asian Journal of Distance
Education, 15(1), 1-126. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3878572.

To read more, visit UVicSpace

 

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.

Applying for an Open Education Resource Grant

Applying for an Open Educational Resource (OER) Grant

Thursday, May 2, 2019
12:00 – 1:00 PM

UVic Libraries – Digital Scholarship Commons (DSC)

Thinking about replacing expensive undergraduate texts or materials with open, freely accessible, and customizable alternatives? The 2019 UVSS Grad Class Executive, the LTSI, UVic Libraries, and University Systems has collaborated to offer a new Open Educational Resources (OER) grant to help instructors create or use OERs in their courses. Attend this info session for more information about OERs and how to apply. Application deadline is May 23, 2019.