OpenEd20

Proponents of open educational resources are quick to tout how they are accessible for everyone, but this definition of accessible means they are simply free. It does not include making OERs accessible so that anyone with a disability can still consume them. As the open education community seeks to reimagine itself, then we need to ensure that we include everyone. This presentation will discuss a research project that seeks to determine to what extent open textbooks on average meet a number of accessibility criteria based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). WCAG guidelines are an important standard for all online content creators and providers to work toward as they help ensure that disabled consumers can use and interact with online content. The presentation will discuss the results of the evaluation, including the problems most commonly found and which broad categories books were most and least likely to do well in. The presentation will help anyone involved with open textbook creation and adaptation determine where they can focus their efforts to ensure open textbooks are truly accessible for all. The data will also help to establish a baseline for the accessibility of open textbooks that the community can use to assess its own work toward making all open textbooks accessible.


Learning Outcomes:
Participants will: Understand how well open textbooks meet various online accessibility standards and discuss ways to incorporate this knowledge into their work

The nature of college course materials has changed dramatically over the past decade, from print to digital - but that’s nothing compared to the transition to remote learning in 2020. As of the end of August, less than a quarter of institutions will be fully or partially in-person, with even those places scrapping plans as case counts rise. This new normal and uncertainty of the higher ed landscape comes with unique challenges, and open advocates and commercial publishers see a make-or-break opportunity for widespread adoption of their preferred materials as faculty and schools shift to this remote learning environment.

Over the past few months, college textbook publishers have engaged in a massive marketing push to sell institutions on the idea of “inclusive access-” adding an automatic charge for digital delivery of access codes to each students’ tuition bill. The pressures of COVID-19 on institutions and the need for cheaper, ready-to-use digital materials is apparent - but are these partnerships to increase access code sales really in students’ best interest?

A panel of issue experts and on-the-ground open advocates will talk about the basics on this new billing model, the fine print that is in these partnerships, and problems with implementation that further harm student and faculty choice found by the recent USPIRG study Automatic Textbook Billing. Furthermore, panelists will share their successes and steps taken to slow automatic billing programs on R1, regional public, private, and community college campuses - and talk frankly about their setbacks in light of COVID-19. The session will end with best practices on how to respond to common questions on automatic billing, and audience Q&A.

Learning Outcomes:
Attendees will leave the session with an understanding of what automatic textbook billing is, specific concerns with the model before and during COVID-19, and how others across the country have effectively mobilized to limit the negative impact it has on local students and faculty. Attendees will come away with case studies, best practices, and actionable steps to take to reshape textbook affordability programs to better meet community needs.

The OER Discovery Working Group is a newly formed collaborative effort among OER advocates, facilitated by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), involving metadata and cataloging librarians, and relevant specialists in the U.S. and Canada. This group’s focus is to support the community in developing best practices and outline potential next steps for how metadata standards could contribute to platform-neutral discovery of OER.

Members of the OER Discovery Work Group consist of stakeholders from eCampus Ontario, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education’s (ISKME) OER Commons, State University of New York (SUNY) at Geneseo’s Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS), and Mt Hood Community College Library’s (MHCC) OER MARC template. They created a document that translates core functionality across 3 commonly used metadata vocabularies - MARC21, Dublin Core, and Schema.org/LRMI - to meet the specific needs for OER.

This presentation will share the OER Metadata Rosetta Stone (CC-BY), highlight the collaborative process, and welcome discussion with attendees to inform future applications and collaborative developments for the community as a whole.


Learning Outcomes:
Attendees will be able to describe how metadata enables discovery and current needs for OER
Attendees will appraise and critique the OER Metadata Rosetta Stone based on their experiences with OER discovery
Attendees will be able to employ the OER Metadata Rosetta Stone for use at their own institution

The accessibility of publications is critical for learners who rely on screen readers. What happens when an OER you plan to use, remix, or are creating is math intensive and you neither know LaTeX nor the accessibility options involved in presenting machine-readable equations? Issues abound! How can math display in OER be re-envisioned? This highly-interactive presentation builds off of the experiences of six people at three different institutions who met up to discuss their respective math & accessibility journeys, math-intensive OER accessibility failures, successes, and solutions that work for their level of capacity. From the extremely labor-intensive to the “automatic,” this case study-based presentation will aid participants in what not to do, and how re-envision processes and decision points for creating, adapting, and retrofitting OER that contain equations. Participants will have opportunities to share their knowledge regarding tools, solutions, and approaches in a common document and will leave with a tool kit of potential solutions for different electronic environments and platforms.

Learning Outcomes:

• Participants will be able to summarize standards, common issues, and options for displaying, printing, and developing screen-readable math in OER;
• Participants will be able to recall specific issues with math display in OER as these will be connected to particular examples of OER;
• Participants will leave with a tool kit of potential solutions for different electronic environments & platforms.
• Participants will also be able to share their knowledge regarding tools, solutions, and approaches.

In Fall 2018, we adopted an Openstax textbook, Principles of Macroeconomics 2e, in an introductory economic class that enrolls approximately 800 students every academic year. The result of an end-of-semester survey indicated that the students appreciated the use of a free textbook, and the majority of them were overall satisfied with the textbook. However, they wished the book could be more visual, more interactive, and the assessment could better help them learn. With support from an Affordable Learning Georgia grant, we formed a team that comprises of subject matter expert, content and assessment developer, multimedia and web developer, and instructional designer, working together to redesign the textbook. In this session, we will share our experiences of leveraging media, pedagogy, and student collaboration to redesign this textbook. Specifically, we will discuss how the successful transformation of the textbook was accomplished through rigorous application of the following six strategies:

1.Multimedia learning: We employed six research-based principles for multimedia learning as the guidelines for presenting the textbook content.
2.Active learning: We engaged students with frequent self-assessment exercises embedded in the textbook.
3.Practice with feedback: We provided students with instant feedback on both correct and incorrect answer choices when they practiced with the embedded exercises.
4.Students as producers: We believed in the benefits of a student-as-producer approach – students are not only consumers of knowledge but also producers of knowledge. We recruited several students to help with content, assessment, and web design under the supervision and guidance of the project leads. They have had some experience with the course, for example, completing the course as a student, working as a teaching assistant, or a peer tutor for the course. Their perspectives on how a textbook should be designed for students became valuable assets for the project.
5.Peer review: The textbook was reviewed by people who are not involved in the project before it was made available to students.
6.Student feedback: Feedback will be collected from students for future revision and improvement of the textbook.

The redesigned textbook was put into use in Fall 2020, and we are currently collecting student feedback. During this session, we will also share the initial findings of a student survey on the usefulness and effectiveness of the textbook.

Learning Outcomes:
Participants will be able to identify pedagogies, technologies, and strategies for designing and redesigning interactive open educational resources that engage students. They will also be able to discuss how they could adopt and adapt them to their own design and redesign.

Great strides have been made in the creation and adoption of open educational resources.Perceived challenges to finding open educational resources has continued to be a barrier as the number of resources grow. In the Open Textbook Library, the number of open textbooks has increased from just 80 in 2012 to 790 in 2020. However, discovery has become a pain point among advocates and adopting instructors to the degree that commercial textbook publishers are using language in their product messaging that OER is hard to find. State legislation in the United States also focuses on building or examining state repositories to increase discovery.

This panel will explore OER Discovery as a growth area. It will feature a high level discussion about the specific needs and possible solution(s) for finding, storing and accessing open textbooks and beyond. The discussion will also explore challenges, successes, and the silos that exist among initiatives led by the OER community. Panelists are leaders in OER with a history of addressing this barrier and/or lead new projects and initiatives to enhance OER Discovery.

Wally Grotophorst, Associate University Librarian, George Mason University/Mason Metafinder

Creator of the Mason OER Metafinder, Wally will discuss the challenges and opportunities that accompany federated searching for OER content.

Michelle Brennan, OER Information Services Manager, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME)/OER Commons

Michelle leads research and development of information and library services for ISKME’s OER Commons platform and Partner Library Microsites. Michelle will discuss challenges in supporting libraries and librarians in creating and curating OER that meets the unique teaching and learning needs of faculty adopters at a consortial scale.


Karen Lauritsen, Publishing Director, Open Education Network
Karen manages the Open Textbook Library, which offers live MARC records for discovery. This year the OTL worked with OCLC to include its records in WorldCat.

Camille Thomas, Lead, SPARC OER Discovery Initiative and Scholarly Communication Librarian at Florida State University

Camille will discuss working with SPARC to connect with existing leaders (e.g. OER repository directors, metadata librarians, OER researchers and OER advocacy organizations) to leverage the work already being done.


Learning Outcomes:
Attendees will be able to describe how metadata enables discovery and current needs for OER
Attendees may interpret the discussion and employ future action items (e.g. talking points, further discussion) based on insights
Attendees may become better equipped to discuss OER Discovery at their own institutions or organizations

You may not know exactly where the content goes unless you have clues and tools to help you find where it all goes. In this session, we will explore the questions of how to track OER that may help faculty promotion and tenure and solve some of the challenges that surround the OER community. This session will showcase technology tools with analytics tools that will help faculty members create a narrative about their OER content impact. Such tools include utilizing well-known library database tools, social media platform analytics, and other OER repositories to discover such impact.

While there is consensus that OER provides many benefits by lowering costs and increasing access to knowledge, there are some OER issues and challenges that still need to be addressed. How do we know when our OER content has been downloaded, used, or modified? Can we determine when someone violates Creative Commons licensing? The following session will cover why faculty members should consider answering these questions and what strategies can they choose to discover such answers.

Learning Outcomes:
Learners will be able to:
1. discuss issues regarding connect OER content to tenure and promotion.
2. identify databases with analytics to measure OER content usage.
3. use analytics as an enhancement to resumes and CVs.

Encouraging and supporting the adoption and creation of open educational resources demands significant academic labor; however, few studies provide explicit detail about the personnel and costs underlying open education initiatives. This presents a problem for institutions seeking to implement or improve their own initiatives. The lack of transparency about labor also obscures ethical concerns about the agency of the librarians, faculty, students, instructional designers, and other potential stakeholders involved, each of whom occupy varying positions of power and privilege within the academic apparatus. This presentation helps to address that gap through a case study of how Ohio University Libraries have attempted to make its open education initiatives more sustainable and impactful by transitioning from workshops and other labor-intensive activities to collaborations with faculty and students focused on OER creation in which librarians have taken on more of a project management role. We will describe those initiatives and the projects they have yielded, including a student-authored open Hispanic linguistics textbook, student-created test banks to support OER materials for a high-enrollment art history course, and several additional projects in which students have been hired to assist faculty with developing open content. We will discuss the challenges encountered along the way and how our trajectory has helped us to overcome some of those barriers. We will frame our discussion within the context of labor and the ethical implications for open educational practices and open pedagogy.

Learning Outcomes:
Participants will understand possibilities for creating open education initiatives that are more sustainable and focus more on OER creation and open pedagogy via collaboration between librarians, faculty, and students.
Participants will be able to critically analyze the labor implications for their own open education initiatives in order to foster more equitable and inclusive collaborations in support of open education.

NOTE: This session is pre-recorded. It will be streamed live over zoom with the speaker present to answer questions in the chat and after the presentation.

New and experienced faculty members face many barriers when attempting to incorporate Open Educational Resources (OER) into their courses. Research has shown that awareness, funding, time, and institutional supports are factors in faculty using or not using OER. The purpose of this research was to investigate the barriers that business faculty in Ontario colleges face when using OER within their teaching practices and determine if faculty have recommendations to overcome the barriers to using OER.

Based on a review of the literature on OER and the barriers business faculty experience when using OER, a mixed-method approach was used in this research. Potential participants were business faculty in Ontario. Data was collected via a survey and follow-up interviews. Seventy-two respondents from 12 Ontario colleges responded to the survey. Nine participated in follow-up interviews. Respondents were asked about their experiences using OER, the barriers they faced, and solutions to overcome them.

A thematic and cross tabulation analysis of the responses demonstrated that faculty are introduced to OER in many different ways, and institutions have unique approaches to supporting faculty with OER. Faculty experience barriers to using OER, such as no suitable resources, awareness, knowledge, support, institutional processes, and other reasons. Faculty outlined ways to overcome such barriers, including but not limited to improved professional development, creation of new high-quality content, time to create the resources, and enhanced collaboration and networking efforts.

This talk will review some of the research findings and recommendations that were made as a result of an examination of the faculty barriers and solutions to overcome the barriers to using OER.

Please note: the above session description is adapted from the author's Thesis abstract.


Learning Outcomes:
After attending this session, attendees should have an understanding of:

- Barriers faculty face when attempting to use OER;

- Solutions faculty have used, or they believe could be used to overcome the barriers to using OER; and

- Recommended suggestions for decision-makers to support faculty with OER usage.

The current generation of digital courseware, particularly that marketed under the term “inclusive access,” poses a threat to the future of open education. Purporting to address the affordability crisis in academic courseware, publishers have devised an automatic billing model that depends on group-based subscriptions in order to provide to students discounted materials, and, not incidentally, gather a vast amount of student data. The collected data are put to various uses, including product development and learning analytics, the results of which are sometimes made available to the students’ home institutions - most often to the faculty in specific courses – as information about the students’ use of the materials.

This panel will focus on the surveillance and privacy issues inherent in the use of inclusive access products. Students in classes for which the courseware is required are a captive market: if they want to succeed in class, they have no option but to agree to privacy terms that allow for the collection, analysis, and use of their data. Students lose control of their personal identity, with no say in how much to reveal and how much to conceal about themselves and their learning behaviors.

An additional concern relates to diversity and equity. A growing body of evidence reveals the potential danger inherent in big data analysis of exacerbating inequality; for instance, those social groups with the greatest representation in data sets will often see the greatest benefit from data-driven decision-making.

This panel will explore the practical, ethical, and legal dimensions of this issue, helping participants understand the privacy implications of using inclusive access courseware and its importance in the context of open education. Panelists will discuss how the data is gathered and used; what privacy agreements say and don’t say about privacy protection; what role FERPA plays in protecting privacy; how US privacy law enables surveillance-based business models. We hope to generate discussion among the participants on how best to generate and sustain conversations on college campuses about the ethical implications of adopting data-collecting courseware.


Learning Outcomes:
•Understand the implications for student privacy in the use of digital courseware, especially inclusive access products.
•Understand the strengths and limitations of FERPA in protecting privacy.
•Understand surveillance within the context of US privacy law
•Learn how to read and interpret privacy statements that accompany digital courseware.
•Develop strategies for investigating and communicating courseware-related privacy issues at your own institution.

Open education has tremendous potential to build tailored resources that reflect the diverse experiences of students and empower a set of transformative open practices. Like any tool, however, open education can only achieve these ends when resources are intentionally developed by educators with the necessary skills and support. In order for open education to meet its potential, it is clear that educators must have access to the most current and relevant materials even when those materials are protected by copyright. Reliance on copyright exceptions such as fair use and fair dealing is critical for creating the most effective and inclusive materials, a fact well-understood and frequently employed by commercial textbook publishers.

In order to meet these needs in a way that is truly transformative we have developed a Code of Best Practices for Fair Use and Fair Dealing in Open Education. Building on more than 50 interviews and focus groups with creators, publishers, and legal experts in the open education community, we identified areas of need, opportunities for development, and community-recognized values. We have brought these together into a unified resource that explains how fair use and fair dealing can empower educators to live up to our aspirations and build open resources based on pedagogy and inclusivity, unencumbered by legal uncertainty and anxiety.

This session introduces the Code and invites participants to explore the opportunities and challenges it creates. We will lead an interactive discussion about the Code and walk through strategies for applying it to a variety of situations in creating and using OER. We will also describe the way that the Code demonstrates alignment between different systems of law to create a broad set of practices permitted across North America and beyond.

Next, we will invite participants to share their own reflections on the amazing things they can do when empowered by fair use and fair dealing in OER and to discuss how the Code may or may not fit in their own practices. By grounding this discussion in the practices and concerns of participants we hope to make the Code more accessible as a resource and to make it more reflective of the needs of actual practitioners. We hope this discussion can seed ongoing community engagement so that open education can benefit from all of the rights promised to creators under the law.

Learning Outcomes:
In this session participants will:

- Be introduced to and critically explore the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use and Fair Dealing for Open Education

- Share and collaboratively explore use cases as well as opportunities and challenges related to copyright and fair use/fair dealing in open education

- Discuss opportunities for engaging with the work of the Code as open educators and as members of the open community

Because of the explosion of digitized primary source material over the past 20 years, there is a profusion of illustrative material available for authors to incorporate into OER. However, many questions and confusion remain about the use of this material: How much of it is openly licensed and can be incorporated into an open textbook; Is the language around usage consistent across institutions; How much unpublished, published, or public domain versus copyrighted material is utilized; What do current statutes say about the use of unpublished in-copyright materials; What are the benefits of using this material; and What role does fair use play?

This session will explore some of these questions and look at how cultural heritage objects held in libraries, museums, and archives are, or are not, being utilized in the creation of new open educational resources (OER). I will share the results of my recent research on the mechanics behind the use of material found in these institutions and what barriers exist to their wide utilization by OER creators. I will also discuss how utilizing material from cultural heritage institutions can make OER more diverse, inclusive, and relevant to our students.

Through interviews with practitioners and stakeholders such as OpenStax, SourceLab, and History Harvest, as well as an examination of the benefits of classroom use of primary source material, I will share data and information that will be helpful for OER authors, librarians, museum curators, and archivists in their quest to determine how cultural heritage materials can legally be used in the creation of OER.

Learning Outcomes:
1) Understand OER author barriers to the use of primary source material in the creation of OER objects.
2) Learn about the pedagogical benefits of utilizing primary source material in the classroom.
3) Understand how archives manage rights of archival collections with deeds of gift and donor agreements.
4) Guidance for the use of cultural heritage items through copyright and fair use.
5) Explore the connections, or lack thereof, between Digital Humanities, archives, and OER communities.

Bringing open education to any institution is a team effort that requires stamina, support and strategy; not for the faint of heart. Add a geographic location that is considered rural and far from centers of support and the barriers to introducing open education get even more complex.

BCcampus recognized these challenges and in 2019 two open education advisors / regional representatives were hired - one for the northern region of the province and one for the interior of the province. These two regions make up approximately 877,000 square kilometres. In this presentation come learn about the barriers that were revealed, strategies to get around these barriers and lessons learnt so far.


Learning Outcomes:
At the conclusion of this workshop the participant will be able to name three open education barriers common in more rural regions and identify ways of getting around these barriers.

One of the biggest developments to shake the course material industry this year was the failure of the Cengage/McGraw-Hill merger. Proposed in May 2019, the merger would have remade the textbook industry as a duopoly controlled by two massive companies—perpetuating and intensifying anticompetitive behavior that has caused prices to skyrocket over the past three decades. Following widespread opposition mobilized by students, consumer groups, libraries, higher education associations, and members of Congress, the merger collapsed in May 2020 due to antitrust concerns from the U.S. Department of Justice. This came as a reprieve for many open education advocates, as increased consolidation in the traditional industry could have had significant consequences for OER.

This session consists of a collection of resources about the Cengage/McGraw-Hill merger that offers a summary of how the merger failed and what it will mean for open education going forward.

Learning Outcomes: 

• Explain key points about the history of the Cengage/McGraw-Hill merger and how it failed
• Provide a high-level explanation of why competition in the textbook publishing industry matters for the adoption and sustainability of OER
• Identify key antitrust issues to watch out for from the textbook publishing industry in the future