BLOG: Current Happenings in OER

Nearly two-thirds of faculty members view textbook affordability as a top priority for their universities, according to the annual Faculty Watch Report.

The survey, released Thursday by the National Association of College Stores, found that 63 percent of faculty cited textbook affordability as a top priority, up from 57 percent in 2021.

The report also found that faculty use of e-textbooks nearly doubled over the last seven years, hitting 68 percent in 2023, up from 37 percent in 2016. However, print remains the most commonly used form of textbook, with 72 percent of faculty using print materials last year.

Are you a concerned citizen, a librarian, or a lawmaker who wants to support equitable contracts for libraries in your community? Check out E-Books for Us, a new advocacy hub for communities to support libraries.

Show your support for equitable terms for libraries!

• Sharable comix by the artist Kenny Keil

• Ways to promote and follow our model legislation

• Fun, interactive games and quizzes

• A bullet journal and coloring book for purchase

Find out more

Read about the accomplishments of our library consortium's textbook affordability initiative, PALSave in their annual report:

I’m writing to share the latest PALSave Program report 4 to Lilly Endowment Inc., covering the period of July 1, 2023, to December 31, 2023.

In this reporting period, we reached cumulative savings of $2 million and published two new open textbooks (Linear Transformations on Vector Spaces – An Introduction to Linear Algebra and An Open Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms).

The American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) published a new resource, Making the Case for Open Educational Resources, which is designed to assist OER advocates in their work to craft persuasive presentations, publications, and arguments as they promote OER. The graphics can be freely downloaded and shared for use in presentations and advocacy but will also be informative to faculty looking into adoption.

Exciting opportunity for DePauw faculty members, as members of the Open Education Network, we have access to Manifold:

Open Education Network: Manifold: Community Pilot

We're piloting a community experiment to leverage Manifold for open educational practices and publishing. All Open Education Network (OEN) community members are invited to access Manifold through March 2025, and possibly beyond. If we discover that the community finds it useful, there is the potential for Manifold to be a benefit for institutional members at no additional cost.

Manifold is an open source publishing workflow, developed in collaboration between the CUNY Graduate Center, the University of Minnesota Press, and Cast Iron Coding. People use Manifold in a variety of ways, including to publish open educational resources, create open pedagogy projects, and as an open repository/curation tool. You can form public and private reading groups as well.

If you are a member of the OEN community and would like to begin creating on Manifold, learn more here.

Manifold Community Meetup and Demo

If you'd like to see a demo of the new features, including the ability to edit within Manifold, the Manifold team is hosting a Community Meetup on Wednesday, January 17 at 12 pm 
Central. Registration is required. 

As always, thank you for your work creating and sharing OER.

The Graduate Center of the City University of New York is pleased to announce a call for participants for the Summer 2024 Open Education Publishing Institute: Collaborative Knowledge and Social Justice, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grant program and hosted by GC Digital Initiatives and the GC Teaching and Learning Center. We hope you will assist us in circulating this Call for Participants to anyone who might be interested in applying. 

The three-week hybrid institute will take place in person June 12th-14th, 2024 at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, and virtually via Zoom June 17th-27th, with virtual follow-ups in August and January (more details below). Participants will receive a lump-sum award of $4,200 that will cover travel, lodging, and per diem expenses for the in-person sessions and overall participation in the institute. To learn more about the institute, please visit the OEPI website.

Centered on social justice and inclusion of diverse perspectives, the Open Education Publishing Institute (OEPI) provides an opportunity for the development of Open Educational Resource (OER) publications that harness the energy of the digital humanities and the capacity of interactive digital publishing to empower students as co-creators of knowledge. Emphasizing active learning, place-based scholarship, and an engagement with new forms of digital publication, the OEPI seeks projects that incorporate historically marginalized knowledges, with a particular focus on projects that go beyond providing free course materials to those that actively engage students as co-producers of open, public-facing resources. The OER created in this institute will include a means for students to contribute to or build out the publication. Through this work, we will support the creation of innovative OER, and also help participants think through how to model open pedagogy and inclusive learning at their own institutions. 

We encourage applications from adjunct, part-time, and full time professors and staff from a range of disciplines and institution-types. We especially seek applicants from Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, Native-Serving Institutions, and community colleges, and we encourage potential applicants to get in touch with any questions they may have. 

The Open Education Publishing Institute will be supported by a faculty and staff with expertise in open digital publishing and open pedagogy. Participants will build their projects on Manifold,  The CUNY Academic Commons (or similar WordPress platforms), or a combination of both platforms. Manifold is a digital publishing platform collaboratively created by the CUNY Graduate Center, the University of Minnesota Press, and Cast Iron Coding. The CUNY Academic Commons, founded in 2009, is a WordPress-based publishing and networking platform that enables users to create interactive, multimedia-rich websites and digital projects.

The OEPI was designed in connection with Brown University Library's “Born-Digital Scholarly Publishing” training institute, which will also be offered in Summer 2024 and which supports development of interpretive projects and digital publications that aim to diversify resources and expand audiences for DH scholarship. Applicants who are working on digital monographs should consider the Brown Institute; applicants interested in creating OER and teaching materials may be best suited for our institute.

Examples of types of projects participants might create 

Sample OER projects on the CUNY Academic Commons and Manifold include:

• Let My People Know: An archive-based project that digitizes archival materials to provide new entry-points for engagement through collaborative annotation and the addition of multimedia resources

• Black Diasporic Visions: (De) Constructing Modes of Power: A collection of multimodal resources curated with students.The project brings together course materials and includes reflections and resources created and curated by students 

• Linguistic Landscapes: Unpacking Language Hierarchies: This project collected a series of oral histories and accompanying public-facing art projects developed in a first year community college Linguistics course.

Additional project models can be viewed on the Open Education Publication Institute website.

 Successful Proposals Will Include: 

• A description of the OER to be created during the Institute

• A description of how the OER will be used in a Fall 2024 or Spring 2025 course

• Concrete ways that students will contribute to, or co-produce, the OER project

• The representation of marginalized knowledges, voices, or perspectives

• A commitment to the principles of open pedagogy

• A plan to use the OER to model open pedagogy at the participant’s institution

Open Education Publishing Institute Schedule & Details  

From June 12th-14th, 2024 participants will attend sessions at the CUNY Graduate Center on pedagogical approaches in the Digital Humanities, teaching strategies that empower students as knowledge creators, and the technical aspects of developing and managing digital humanities projects on open platforms. From June 17-27, participants will work with staff to scope and develop their projects via workshops, co-working sessions, and affinity discussion groups. In August 2024, each participant will meet with a staff member at least twice as they develop their project and present their work at an end of summer project kickoff and peer feedback meeting. Finally, participants will share their experiences with their implemented projects in an Institute Showcase in Spring 2025.

The Institute is hybrid and designed to provide robust support in phases: 

• Welcome and Pre-Meeting June 5th (Online)

• Three-day Intensive June 12th-14th, 2024 at the CUNY Graduate Center (In-person)

• Virtual Sessions June 17th-27th (Online)

• Two Individual Support Meetings August, 2024 (Online)

• End of Summer Project Kickoff & Peer Feedback Meeting August 5 (Online)

• Showcase & Shareback Spring 2025 (Online)

Compensation

Fifteen OEPI participants will receive a lump sum $4,200 stipend to cover travel, lodging, and per-diem expenses. Attendance is required at all in-person and online events. 
Eligibility

• Faculty from all disciplines whose projects contribute to knowledge in the humanities are eligible to apply

• Full-time, Adjunct, and Part-Time faculty are eligible to apply

• Applicants should be planning to teach with the developed materials in Fall 2024 or Spring 2025

• Applicants should have previous experience creating digital projects or OER materials

In order to be accepted into this year’s program, participants must be able to receive compensation for services rendered in the U.S. To pay the designated $4,200 stipend, we are required to provide the CUNY Research Foundation with (1) a U.S. social security number or an Individual Taxpayer ID (ITIN), and (2) a routing number and an account number to a U.S. bank. If you are unable to provide this information, we are not able to accept you into the program.

How to Apply

By March 1, 2024, please complete the linked application form and upload a single PDF named “OEPI-lastname.pdf” with the following:

• A brief CV (no more than 2 pages);

• A statement (~500 words) that offers:

  • A description of the OER to be created during the Institute

  • A description of how the OER will be used in a Fall 2024 or Spring 2025 course

  • Concrete ways that students will contribute to, or co-produce, the OER project

  • How your project represents marginalized knowledges, voices, or perspectives

  • Your commitment to the principles of open pedagogy

  • A plan to use the OER to model open pedagogy at the participant’s institution

If you cannot upload your file, or have questions about the institute, please email us at oepi2024@gmail.com. Thank you in advance for your interest and for helping us circulate this call. Please don't hesitate to reach out with questions. 

Sincerely,
Matthew K. Gold and Krystyna Michael, Co-Project Directors, on behalf of the project team