The iOER Handbook

Webcast recording.

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"Serving Social Justice & Pedagogical Innovation with Open Educational Practices"

"Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 52 different sources and contains 155,375 records."

"There are multiple indicators which suggest that completion, quality, and affordability are the three greatest challenges for higher education today in terms of students, student learning, and student success. Many colleges, universities, and state systems are seeking to adopt a portfolio of solutions that address these challenges. This article reports the results of a large-scale study (21,822 students) regarding the impact of course-level faculty adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER). Results indicate that OER adoption does much more than simply save students money and address student debt concerns. OER improve end-of-course grades and decrease DFW (D, F, and Withdrawal letter grades) rates for all students. They also improve course grades at greater rates and decrease DFW rates at greater rates for Pell recipient students, part-time students, and populations historically undeserved by higher education. OER address affordability, completion, attainment gap concerns, and learning. These findings contribute to a broadening perception of the value of OERs
and their relevance to the great challenges facing higher education today."

Open educational resources (OER) are gaining increasing popularity. And as an active member in what advocates define as the “open education movement,

Open Education 2018 Symposium -- March 2018 -- Virginia Tech

All events are free and open to the public

"Open Educational Resources (OER) are any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license.  The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt, and re-share them.  OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video, and animation" (Definition by UNESCO).

Algorithms can help faculty discover and select open educational resources for a course, map the concepts covered in a particular text, generate assessment questions and more.

As more schools use open educational resources, school librarians find that their roles as digital content curators are expanding or being redefined.

"We want the OSP to become a platform for curricular exploration and research and are eager to support a wide range of secondary uses and users."

At a friendly yet spirited debate, last month over the pros and cons of open educational resources, publishers and OER advocates agreed on at least one thing: The "old" textbook market is broken.

The movement is also aiming to reimagine and democratize learning technologies.

"Quality and the cost of course materials for students emerge as the key factors that drive the decisions of college faculty about textbooks and other course materials. And although the movement to digital course content seems inevitable and a majority of the surveyed faculty express interest in adaptive technologies for their courses, it is also clear that college and university faculty have real concerns about some of the proclaimed instructional benefits of going digital."

"The Northeast Regional OER Conference Committee, along with Lumen Learning, is excited to announce the upcoming Northeast Regional OER Summit, a multi-state collaborative event for new and experienced OER advocates offering the opportunity to learn and share effective practices in awareness building, implementation, collaboration, strategy, and research."

A number of higher education institutions will be participating in Open Education Week, an annual awareness campaign for free and open educational opportunities. Launched in 2012, the event attracts hundreds of contributors from nearly 50 different countries and participants from more than 130 countries.

"Instructional Designers and computers don't see content in the same way. Where designers see lessons, modules and assessments, computers see headings, paragraphs and sections. Computers can't see how educational content is different from any other content on the web. Until now. Using RDF technology, created by Google developers, the OER Schema is made. OER Schema is a vocabulary of terms that define and relate the integral parts shared by OER content across the web. Now, computers can see the lessons, modules and assessments in a way that relates to how Instructional Designers think about OER."

This guide is maintained by NOVA librarians to assist faculty with OER initiatives and sources to locate OER materials.

The following book review was sent to the Journal of College Student Retention for consideration: Shank, J. D. (2014). Interactive open educational resources: A guide to finding, choosing, and using what’s out there to transform college teaching.