BLOG: Current Happenings in OER

Mary Isbell recently launched Searching for Wonder, an openly licensed book designed to help educators create courses where students choose their own texts, priming them to have more personal, powerful, and transformative encounters with literature. Developed over the past year and refined through an open peer review process last spring, the book offers practical strategies to move beyond traditional accountability techniques and give students greater autonomy in their reading. 

Mary is planning another revision for next summer to incorporate courses, assignments, and student projects from colleagues who pilot these methods in their own classrooms. Educators are invited to explore the strategies, adapt them for their own teaching, and share their experiences by emailing Mary at misbell@newhaven.edu.

Summary:

Students aren't reading what we assign despite quizzes, collaborative annotation assignments, and other accountability techniques. But students will read if we give them more autonomy. The resources gathered in this book will help you do that. They'll help you create a course where your students select their own texts, priming them to have more personal, powerful, and transformative encounters with literature.

USask has a new OER: Branching Scenarios: A Guide for Higher Education. This book is designed to provide educators with practical tools and insights to create dynamic, interactive learning experiences. By leveraging branching scenarios, educators can simulate real-world decision-making processes, fostering critical thinking and engagement among students. Their goal is to empower educators to enhance their teaching practices, making learning more immersive and impactful through experiential learning.

Table of Contents:

• About This Guide

• Chapter 1: Teaching with Branching Scenarios
  • 1.1 What is a Branching Scenario?
  • 1.2 Why Teach with Branching Scenarios?: Pedagogical Foundations
  • 1.3 Incorporating Branching Scenarios into the Classroom
  • 1.4 Post-Scenario Strategies: Facilitating Reflection and Discussion
• Chapter 2: Designing Branching Scenarios
  • 2.1 What Makes a Good Scenario?: Defining the Problem
  • 2.2 Mapping Scenarios: Outcomes, Decision Points, and Consequences
  • 2.3 Tips for Writing Effective Prompts and Options
  • 2.4 Considerations for Feedback
• Chapter 3: Development and Sharing of Branching Scenarios
  • 3.1 Choosing the Rights Tools and Platform
  • 3.2 Creating Branching Scenarios with Twine
  • 3.3 Creating Branching Scenarios with H5P
  • 3.4 Integrating Media: Images, Audio, and Video
• Next Steps and Connecting to Supports
   

The latest episode of the Speaking of Open podcast is out! Ash and Mais chat with Dr. Julian Pakay from La Trobe University about ‘What can Open Education do that AI can’t?’ The Speaking of Open podcast highlights educators in Australasian higher ed who are making an impact in the open education field. You can find the show on YouTube, Spotify, and Podcast Index.

Healey Library is pleased to announce the first publication of an open educational resource (OER), supported by the OER Faculty Incentive Grant at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

“Latine Students in U.S. Schools: An Interactive Resource Book for Educators” by UMass Boston College of Education and Human Development Professor Melissa Colón and her doctoral students is the first open educational resource fully created using the support of this grant. In addition to the financial support from the Provost’s Office, authors also collaborated with Healey Librarians, who provided copyright information, assistance finding open access materials, formatting and platform training, and general publication guidance.

This born-digital textbook importantly increases free access to reliable, peer-reviewed educational material about the schooling experiences of Latine youth in the United States. It contributes to the mission of the open movement by expanding the availability of information, especially about historically underrepresented populations. In chapter three titled, “Why an OER Book?” Colón writes, “by providing a free book targeted at educators, I wanted to remove cost-prohibitive factors to learning more about OER and specifically about Latine students in the U.S.” (Colón, 2025).

Read the book here: https://pressbooks.pub/latinestudents/

Abstract: This interactive resource book provides educators with highly curated research, academic scholarship, and community-based materials to better inform and support their work with Latine students, families, and communities. Grounded in critical and culturally sustaining pedagogies (Rendón et al., 2014; Alim & Paris, 2017). This book encourages educators to cultivate a spirit of curiosity, collaboration, and continuous learning, recognizing that serving Latine students well requires both commitment and ongoing inquiry.

We are excited to announce LibreTexts latest innovation in our greater LibreVerse of technologies, the Forge, is officially here. The Forge is an assignment platform specifically built to advance Open Pedagogy and provide actionable insights through integrated analytics. The platform enables instructors to design renewable, collaborative long-form assignments and gives students meaningful opportunities to produce public-facing, openly licensed work. Seamlessly aligned with the values of Open Education, the Forge supports a learner-centered, participatory approach that scales across class sizes and disciplines.

Access to the Forge is available for all LibreTexts verified instructors:

https://forge.libretexts.org

Learn more about how you can integrate the Forge into your classes:

https://libretexts.org/blog/introducing-forge-new-innovation-open-pedagogy

ACRL announces the publication of The Open Science Cookbook, edited by Emily Bongiovanni, Melanie Gainey, Chasz Griego, and Lencia McKee, a collection of lesson plans and activities for supporting openly accessible, reproducible research.  

Open science promotes more transparent, accessible, and reproducible research and extends beyond the sciences, fostering this inclusivity across all disciplines. There are many benefits to practicing open science, including opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration, increased visibility and impact, and enhanced reusability of research.

The Open Science Cookbook provides a wide variety of lesson plans and learning activities for supporting collaborative, transparent, openly accessible, and reproducible research. In five sections, it has something for beginners to more advanced practitioners and for different audience sizes.

• Program Development
• Instruction
• Outreach
• Events
• Collaborations and Partnerships
  Just as freely sharing data and workflows enables key breakthroughs in major fields, sharing open science practices and resources creates an even stronger foundation for this necessary growth at institutions around the world. The Open Science Cookbook offers innovative ways for academic libraries to promote open science through advocacy and education.

University of Northern Iowa's Rod Library is pleased to announce the final publication of a new Open Educational Resource (OER)textbook, Media and Power, by three of our Communication and Media faculty, Bettina Fabos, Christopher R. Martin, and Catherine H. Palczewski. This project was funded by the UNI Textbook Equity Mini-Grant Program.

The book guides students through concepts, content, and exercises that help them develop media literacy by understanding media and power. The authors want students to not only gain the ability to critically analyze the languages and discourses – textual, visual, audio, and code – that people use to create and interpret media content, but also to understand the overarching context: media possess immense power in contemporary societies around the world. Included throughout are class assignment and activity prompts.

This book has already been piloted with students for several semesters, it is the focus of an upcoming international media literacy conference, and there are plans to translate the book into multiple languages. As an OER, permissions are included for translation, adaptation, and distribution, and it is free to all. In addition, the license specifies that adaptations must be shared similarly, thus ensuring more free and open resources enter the scholarly commons on this topic!

The LibreTexts team is pleased to announce the official launch of our Academy Online. Part of our larger Academy Center for Open Instructional Innovation and Professional Development, Academy Online offers a number of professional development opportunities to help grow your open education programs, develop ZTC pathways, and curate OER.

Now available is a series of free, asynchronous courses designed to introduce you to your new favorite all-in-one Open Education toolbox, including an Introduction to LibreTexts: Into the LibreVerse. If you're looking for the perfect way to get started with LibreTexts, this course is for you. Also available now: LibreTexts for Students, designed to help your students get the most out of their OER, and a short introduction to our open homework and assessment platform, ADAPT.

You can find all of our Academy Online courses on our website, and be sure to keep checking back for new content: https://libretexts.org/academy/online.

oertransport Textbooks are a new suite of six openly licensed textbooks which are transforming how transportation planning is taught across the U.S., thanks to an ambitious initiative led by CAPPA faculty members at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) in partnership with institutions in California and Florida. The OER, “Enabling Transportation Planning Professional Advancement”, eliminates textbook costs while delivering high-quality, industry-vetted content to students pursuing sustainable and equitable transportation careers.

Foundations of Business, 2nd Edition [2025] by Holly Jackson, PhD was created for use in Virginia Commonwealth University's BUSN 201, Foundations of Business course which strives to build awareness of corporate social responsibility and ethical business behavior. The practical application of the concepts gained in this course, and through this text, assists students in gaining an integrated awareness of business, while practicing analytical skills needed for their advanced business courses and careers. The second edition contains updates for relevancy, plus a new section on Mentoring.

Ecology for All! by Brouwer, Connuck, Dubniczki, Gownaris, Howard, Olmsted, Wetzel, Whittinghill, Wilson, and Zallek is an ecology text designed in modules so that instructors can choose the pieces that make sense to assign in their context. The textbook covers a wide range of topics including Introduction to Ecology, Evolution, Adaptations to the Physical Environment, various ecological communities, Population Ecology, Behavioral Ecology, Species Interactions, Ecological Succession, Biogeochemical Cycles, Landscape Ecology, Biodiversity, Conservation Biology, and Human Impact on Global Climate among others.