Open Education (OE) Week is a free global event coordinated by the Open Education Consortium that is meant to raise awareness about Open Educational Resources (OER) and general open education practices. To read more about OE Week, please visit the Open Education Week website.
Here at Geneseo, we wanted to share a few highlights, resources, and events that you might find interesting.
4 Items of Note
The work to be done in open education
OER use is growing and more research is available about the use, benefits, and impact of OER. Last year the first issue of the Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education was published, which covers many topics of interest including student perceptions and roadblocks to authorship. One article of note, the McCoy-Simmons article on “OER State Policy Discourse” calls for expanding the narrative around and researching OER’s potential impact on inequities in higher education: “Current evidence suggests that access to free and widely available OER materials can have a greater impact on student outcomes and success rates for students of color (Colvard et al., 2018; Nusbaum et al., 2020), but more studies with disaggregated data are needed. By naming the racial inequities in higher education and the positive impact of OER on students of color, policymakers can signal that collecting data beyond basic cost savings metrics is an important measurement of OER success (Stone, 2012).”
OER and anti-racism
On that note, another relevant read is the Journal of Multicultural Education’s Special Issue “The Intersections of Open Educational Practices and Equity Pedagogy” and the Open for Anti-Racism course highlighted in that same issue. The course is aimed at educators and ”allow(s) participants to explore anti-racist Open Pedagogy in their own contexts.” The curriculum aims to answer four key questions: 1. What is Antiracism? 2. What are Open Educational Resources and how can they support antiracism? 3. What is Open Pedagogy and how can it support antiracism? and 4. How can you create an antiracism action plan?
Making it count
Another area of open education that has seen progress this past year is advocacy for including learning materials and OER in Tenure & Promotion practices. The American Historical Association recently published a guide for members to broaden their definition of scholarship and is working to provide resources for evaluating more diverse forms of scholarship for tenure and promotion. This will hopefully be a precedent for other disciplines to explore ways to include nontraditional scholarship in considerations of promotion. This effort builds on valuable past work from the DOERS3 collective to provide general guidelines towards the same end.
OER to support the whole student
Lastly, the 2022 Open Education Global Best OER award winner Liberated Learners is a great resource to provide to students or integrate into your own curriculum. Even better, Liberated Learners is co-designed and co-created by students! Meant for post-secondary students, Liberated Learners ”…is a comprehensive and dynamic guide which supports learners with everything from video production and personal finance, to sleeping habits and imposter syndrome. It is split into four modules: The Learner – about study habits and motivation, The Technologist – about understanding necessary tech tools, The Navigator – about time management, wellness, and navigating your program/institution, and The Collaborator – about working with others, allyship, self-advocacy, and networking.”
Open Education Events
This week is chock full of interesting events. We’ve highlighted a few below. Explore the full schedule of events on the OE Week website.
Monday March 6th at 1pm: “Customizing an Online OER Textbook on the LibreTexts Platform for Math Courses like Calculus or Differential Equations” with Paul Seeburger, Professor of Mathematics, Monroe Community College: Join the presentation: https://tinyurl.com/LTOEW2023-1
Tuesday March 7th at 11am: “Creative Commons Licenses: the basics” with Rachel Becker from Madison College Libraries. Reserve your spot at their website.
Tuesday March 7th at 2pm, the UC Davis Library is hosting the presentation,’“A Call for Reparative Justice in Open Education Labor” by Professor Jasmine Roberts-Crews for Open Education Week 2023. Registration is required.
Thursday March 9th at 11am: “Open Educational Resources in Tenure & Promotion” through Southern Georgia University. Register here.
Friday March 10th at 5pm: “Harnessing the Resilience Within” with Mays Imad. In this 90-minute session, Mays Imad will draw on the neurobiology of learning to examine the intimate relationship between equity, radical hospitality, and trauma-informed education. More information about the talk can be found at Open Oregon’s website, or register here.
