BLOG: Current Happenings in OER

The AI Cookbook: Recipes and More from the University of Missouri is an open resource published on August 19, 2024. It offers practical AI strategies for educators, inspired by the University of Florida's work. This toolkit includes AI "recipes" for tasks like crafting learning objectives, generating graphics, and developing rubrics, all with a focus on accessibility, collaboration, and ethical use. Check out the table of contents:

• Introduction
• Getting Started With Prompting
• Creating Course Learning Objectives
• Outlining Course Modules
• Writing Module Learning Objectives
• TiLT Assignment Structure
• Creating a Module
• Writing Discussion Prompts
• Creating Objective Quizzes/Exams
• Creating Assessment Instructions
• Drafting Essay Exams
• Developing a Holistic Rubric
• Developing an Analytical Rubric
• Module Overviews/Wrap-ups
• Role-playing: Scenarios and Case Studies
• Generating Graphics
• Collaboration
• Active Learning Strategies
• Lesson Plans
• Student Study Aides
• Feedback
• Recipe: Assignment Template
• Recipe: Introductory Discussion (Icebreaker)
• Recipe: AI Literacy
• Recipe: AI Debate
• Recipe: AI Tutoring
• Recipe: AI Case Study
• Recipe: AI in Your Career
• Multimodal Prompts
• Prompts and Accessibility
• AI Use and Copyright
• Acknowledgment Generator
• Glossary
• Prompts and Biases
• Prompts and Privacy

“The MIT Press has announced the official launch of the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (OECS), releasing the first 50 articles of this groundbreaking, openly accessible web reference. Developed to spearhead the next generation of exploration in cognition and intelligence, OECS aims to become the definitive resource in the field of cognitive science.

“Building on the legacy of the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, which has served as a cornerstone for researchers and students for 25 years, OECS sets a new standard for comprehensive and accessible scholarly reference. This initiative is generously supported by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the Allen Institute for AI. …”

Click here to read the original press release.

Pressbooks’ collections hub is a space to find great open textbooks to adopt or adapt for the classroom.

Here you’ll find several collections curated by the Pressbooks librarian to celebrate and share examples of excellence in open education. You’ll also see a featured collection that highlights new and important work. All of these books can be found in Pressbooks Directory, an index of over 5,000 free books and other open educational resources.

Featured collection: Student-Led OER

The Student-Led OER collection features open pedagogy projects that empower students to create their own course material. This approach is aimed at increasing student engagement and investment in the course by giving them a sense of ownership. Examples of Student-Led OER include collections of essays, research projects, design portfolios, personal stories, and more. Such projects can be used to benefit future students and faculty, enhance students’ portfolios, gather useful research data, and include greater intersectionality in course materials.

Campus Manitoba is proud to announce the Campus Campus Manitoba Pressbooks Template is ready for public consumption. This resource will now be available on the Campus Manitoba PressbooksEDU Network and in the Pressbooks Directory. The intention for this resource is to provide a framework of best practices from which you can scaffold out your new OER creation or adaptation. 

Whether you’re a novice author or an experienced writer venturing into self-publishing, the “Campus Manitoba Pressbooks Template” provides you with a solid foundation to transform your manuscript into a professionally formatted book that captivates readers and elevates your publication.

The 2024 version of the open textbook Humans R Social Media has been released. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, it includes substantial improvements and great new chapters by the University of Colorado Boulder's Nathan Schneider and University of Arizona AI artist Jacquie Kuru.

About the book: Social media and humans exist in a world of mutual influence, and humans play central roles in how this influence is mediated and transferred. Originally created by University of Arizona Information scholar Diana Daly, this 2024 “living book” edition of Humans R Social Media welcomes additional authors and features contributions by students to help readers understand how we as humans shape social media, and how social media shapes our world in turn. Learn more about our Shared Governance initiative and connect with the authors.

Kalamazoo, Mich.—Western Michigan University Libraries is thrilled to announce the publication of two new open textbooks by Western faculty funded by Open Educational Resources Creation Grants. 

Western students and learners worldwide now have free online access to “Leadership Communication: Principles and Practice” by Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges and Dr. Annette Hamel and “Vida y cultura de España” by Dr. Mariola Pérez de la Cruz. These titles were created with support from the Libraries’ Open Educational Resources (OER) Grants program, which supports the adoption and creation of OER that are free for instructors and students to use, adapt and remix. Although all three authors have previously published books through traditional publishers, these titles are their first published open textbooks. After learning about the OER grants from colleagues, Pérez de la Cruz submitted a proposal for an OER creation grant to turn educational content she had already created into a published open textbook. “I started writing the content ten years ago, so when I started developing the material thinking about its publication in OER—almost two years ago—the most important aspect was already done,” says Pérez de la Cruz. Turning that content into an interactive, freely accessible online textbook will help learners around the globe learn about life and culture in Spain. 

Omilion-Hodges and Hamel, professors in the School of Communication, collaborated to co-author an open textbook on leadership communication.  “The creation of ‘Leadership Communication: Principles and Practices’ will ease the financial burden for several hundred students annually, and that is at WMU alone,” says Omilion-Hodges. Omilion-Hodges has used existing OER in several undergraduate courses to give students access to free course materials and reduce textbook costs. “I have had many conversations with students who need to make the difficult decision to purchase a textbook or pay bills,” adds Omilion-Hodges. “I believe that everyone should have access to high quality content, without it being cost prohibitive. Writing an open textbook allowed me to co-author a textbook that I am proud of and that will allow all students to have access to relevant, data-driven information.” Making their textbook easy to access online also helps students who are learning off campus. “A sizeable contingent of our Leadership students are distance learners, and the OER will be more easily available for them than a traditional textbook,” adds Hamel. 

The Libraries has a long track record of supporting OER on campus, offering grants to adopt existing OER and, more recently, grants to support OER creation like these textbooks. These titles are the first textbooks finished from the OER creation grants. The Libraries has awarded nine OER creation grants since 2022 and anticipates that additional titles will be published in 2024 and 2025. “With publication of these first two books we are really bringing our program to the next level to contribute to the collection of free, high-quality digital textbooks that can be adopted by instructors and students across the globe,” says Michele Behr, scholarly communications and OER librarian. With funding and publishing support from the University Libraries and technical expertise provided by WMUx, grant-funded authors will have the resources needed to create high-quality, interactive open textbooks that support learning everywhere. "Moving into a role as publisher is a very logical move for libraries,” says Paul Gallagher, associate dean for resources and digital strategies. “We are uniquely suited to help save our students money on curricular materials, but more importantly this advances our efforts to make information more open and free to use.”  

"Our students save money and can be more engaged scholars, and our faculty can share their expertise well beyond WMU. It is a powerful new way that we can contribute back to our core mission of supporting teaching, learning and research." 

Full news story is here: https://wmich.edu/news/2024/04/75382

The University of North Alabama Digital Press is proud to announce the publication of My X’s by Alina Stefanescue.

This book is literary non-fiction, and the first in a new imprint developed by Prof. Jason McCall and his students in a publishing internship course. 

Lion Bridge Publishing, founded in 2024, is an in-person publishing internship class at the University of North Alabama (UNA) located in Florence, Alabama. The press is run by UNA students who collaborate in the copy editing, marketing, and design process of each text. Lion Bridge Publishing focuses on open-access publishing as an imprint of the UNA’s Digital Press at Collier Library. Our name is influenced by the pride we have for our University, its mascot, and our hope to connect literary works and people through open-access publishing. We are interested in publishing inspiring works of all genres.

Here's a link to the book: https://una.pressbooks.pub/myxs/ 

Librarians and faculty from Earlham College were recently highlighted for their work with the PALSave program.

The Spring 2024 issue of Earlhamite Magazine details how these individuals are using the program to save students money and create a more equitable system for acquiring and using textbooks.

Read the full story, titled “Next-gen Textbooks,” on the Earlhamite website. You can also access the print edition online.

You're welcome to join us for a free webinar in a couple of weeks!

Creative Teaching Solutions: Open Pedagogy and Student-Centered Learning 

April 16^th, 11:30-12:20pm ET 

Register: https://forms.office.com/r/pLEwLZw3ga  

Our students are looking for classroom experiences that are meaningful, engaging, and empowering. One way to achieve this is to employ open pedagogy, an approach to teaching that prioritizes student-centered learning and the use of open educational resources. Join us for a special guest presentation by Heather Miceli, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at AAC&U and former faculty member at Roger Williams University. Heather will share her own experience with open pedagogy and lots of practical tips for how to integrate this approach to teaching into your classroom. 

North Broad Press, the collaborative open-access textbook initiative between Temple University Libraries and Temple University Press, presents the latest publication: "Zombie Apocalypse: Holy Land, Haiti, Hollywood" by Dr. Terry Rey. Delving into the intellectual and cultural histories of the zombie and apocalypse, Dr. Rey explores their origins and widespread influence, tracing their roots from Haitian Vodou to ancient religious traditions. 

Zombie Apocalypse: Holy Land, Haiti, Hollywood explores the intellectual and cultural histories of two highly influential and essentially religious ideas, that of the zombie and that of the apocalypse. The former is a modern idea rooted in Haitian Vodou and its popular African and European religious antecedents, while the latter is an ancient one rooted in Zoroastrianism and the Bible and widely expanded in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and is arguably one of the most influential ideas in world history. Today the merger of the zombie and the apocalypse has pervaded popular culture, with the zombie surpassing the vampire and Frankenstein as the most prolific monster in popular American consciousness.
 

Drawing on biblical studies, African studies, Caribbean studies, and the sociology and history of religion, Parts I (Holy Land) and II (Haiti) explore the religious origins of these ideas. Part III (Hollywood) uses aspects of cultural studies, literary analysis, critical race theory, and cinema studies to document the (primarily) American obsession with the zombie and the zombie apocalypse.
 

The apocalypse and the zombie have been momentous intellectual, historical, and cultural realities and social forces in both very ancient and very recent human history and culture. As such, Zombie Apocalypse provides a focused analysis of certain fundamental aspects of human existence. It challenges readers to cultivate their critical thinking skills while learning about two of the most compelling notions in human religious history and the impact they continue to have.
 

Terry Rey is Professor and Undergraduate Chair of the Department of Religion at Temple University, where he specializes in the anthropology and history of African and African diasporic religions. His current research projects focus on violence and religion in Central African and Haitian history. Rey developed the Temple course “Zombie Apocalypse: Holy Land, Haiti, Hollywood,” which he began teaching in spring 2020.

New Releases from ROTEL

We’re excited to showcase the latest textbooks from the Remixing Open Textbooks through an Equity Lens (ROTEL) Grant, an initiative of six Massachusetts Public Institutions of Higher Education along with the MA Department of Higher Education funded through the U.S. Department of Education. The mission of this project is to promote textbook affordability, student success, and inclusion, particularly for minoritized students. Rebus collaborated with ROTEL through the Textbook Success Program.

Heritages of Change: Curatorial Activism and First-Year Writing

This resource was created by Kisha Tracy and teams from the TSP July 2022 M-2 Cohort, facilitated by Amy Minervini, Joerdis Weilandt, and Apurva Ashok.

Heritages of Change: Curatorial Activism and First-Year Writing is an OER for students to think about the social changes that were prevalent during the COVID years and remain important in their wake. Heritages of Change is a lens for thinking and writing about these ideas. Through curation and exhibition as an act of activism, students focus on a specific audience with whom they can communicate authentically about this dynamic world.

Why Do I Have to Take This Course? A Guide to General Education

This resource was created by Kisha Tracy and teams from the TSP July 2022 M-2 Cohort, facilitated by Amy Minervini.

Why Do I Have to Take This Course? A Guide to General Education helps students think about why they take General Education courses and what significance they have, individually and as a program as a whole. It allows students the time to contemplate connections, the potential reasons for developing certain learning outcomes and skills, and the applications to other courses as well as their professional and personal lives. 

Statistics Through an Equity Lens

This resource was created by Yvonne Anthony and teams from the TSP July 2022 M-1 Cohort, facilitated by Amy Minervini, Joerdis Weilandt, and Apurva Ashok.

Statistics Through an Equity Lens carries a significant responsibility by presenting statistics through an equity lens. The book encourages further inspection of the ways in which data is collected, interpreted, and analyzed on a variety of social justice issues, such as health disparities, hunger and food insecurity, homelessness, behavioral health (mental health and substance use), and incarceration of males of color. It also attempts to reveal how the misuse of data can reinforce inequities, for example, by stigmatizing people and labeling neighborhoods as high poverty, violent, and having poor educational opportunities.

Shared Voices: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

This resource was created by Demetrios Brellas and Vanessa Martinez and teams from the TSP July 2022 M-2 Cohort, facilitated by Amy Minervini.

Shared Voices: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology is a student-centered cultural anthropology mini textbook built with an equity lens. This text aims to be accessible, interesting, accurate, and centered on marginalized voices. This text is a starting point for any introductory anthropology course recognizing that cultural change is constant and the familiar is cousin to the weird and unusual.

The Math Education faculty at Brigham Young University have created a series of videos to help teach. They are available at Math The World on Youtube. From the description:

Welcome to Math The World, a math project dedicated to bringing real life context to math! 

At Math The World, we are on a mission to answer the age-old student question, "When will I ever use this?" We're here to bridge the gap between theoretical math and real-life applications. Our videos take everyday questions and harness the power of mathematical modeling to provide insightful and meaningful answers.

What makes us different is we are a team of not just Mathematicians but Math Educators. So we don't just know the material but also how to teach it, the common pitfalls students make, and the pedagogy to help empower other teachers to improve their practice!

Highlights

• Faculty became more cost conscious over the course of the pandemic.
• Usage of open educational resources increased by between 10 % and 15 %.
• The percentage of students spending less than $100 a semester doubled to 33 %.
• First-year students are spending the most and saw no savings since 2020.
• More first and second-year students are going without required materials.

Abstract

This article compares the results of a pair of course material surveys for faculty and students conducted before and after the COVID-19 pandemic by academic librarians at a private liberal arts college in the northeastern U.S. Findings indicate that overall students are spending significantly less per semester on required course materials, but some are going without significantly more required materials due to cost. Furthermore, first-year students were not found to be spending any less than prior to the pandemic and, as a result, spent significantly more in 2023 than most of their more experienced peers. The decrease in average student spending corresponds with our findings that faculty became more cost conscious and expanded efforts to make required materials affordable by assigning more OER and fewer materials which they consider to be overpriced or unaffordable. As a result of these and other strategies, by 2023 significantly more faculty had been able to develop courses for which the required materials cost nothing for students. The authors discuss the importance of these and additional findings, placing them in the context of similar surveys and suggesting ways that the data can be used to inform current library practices and future research.

Christopher A. Barnes, Scott Vine, Ryan Nadeau, Assessing textbook affordability before and after the COVID-19 pandemic: Results of student and faculty surveys, The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 50, Issue 2, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2024.102864

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

FROM US FEDERAL POLICY: The U.S. Department of Education is seeking to revise federal regulations related to automatic textbook billing as part of its negotiated rulemaking process. The Department’s proposal would eliminate a provision allowing institutions to automatically charge for books and supplies as part of tuition and fees, which would effectively require “inclusive access” programs to switch to an opt-in model, where students are asked for authorization before they are charged. The proposed change is supported by negotiators representing students, veterans, civil rights organizations, and consumer advocates. The negotiated rulemaking process is expected to last multiple months. Read More>>

• Inside Higher Ed article

Welcome to the Current Happenings blog! I will be sharing interesting news surrounding open education. This recent listserv post from Kwantlen Polytechnic University gives an important perspective on accessibility and the importance of open licensing:

I’m excited to share the following new resource: Developing Organizational and Managerial Wisdom – 2nd Edition (Audio plus text version) by Brad Anderson, an audiobook version of an existing OER. This Pressbook embeds audio recordings in each chapter, provides a playlist of all recordings for uninterrupted listening, and provides links to download the audio files.

Here’s what Brad had to say about this project:

Over the past year, I have realized that most of our students have accessibility issues. Many people’s first reaction to that is doubt, but that, I believe, is because many people still view accessibility through a physical disability lens.                                                        

The student working thirty hours a week who must cross two bridges in rush-hour traffic to get to campus has an accessibility issue. So does the student renting a bed in a house with half a dozen roommates and no dedicated workspace, a student caring for a sick family member, one with mental health challenges, or … you get the picture.

How many barriers might we remove if we made an audio version of textbooks available they could listen to while stuck in traffic? Universal design for learning (UDL) is about giving students options in accessing course material, empowering them to fit learning into the unique considerations of their lives.

A couple of years ago, I created this OER textbook under a Creative Commons licence to reduce barriers to learning. Creating an audio version of that text is a continuation of that effort to reduce barriers.

While there were many challenges associated with developing this audiobook, with some creative thinking and advice from one of KPU’s Educational Media Strategists, we were able to overcome them. Going forward, I am excited to encourage other OER authors to consider creating an audiobook versions, as well as streamlining and improving the process.

Check back for more Current Happenings!

Victoria Peters