Group Admins
Description
Session Description
Background:
This reflective practice presentation will present a practical case study of initiatives at Queen’s University, Canada, to develop and sustain an open textbook service to support instructors in providing materials that are best suited to their course content, tailored to their teaching, and affordable for their students (Bowness, 2017). Situated within the broader open ecosystem, this new service compliments existing publishing support services provided and maintained by the University Library including an open monographs and journals hosting service for faculty and students wishing to start or flip their journal or monographs to an open model, as well as the preservation and dissemination of faculty papers through the institutional repository.
Telling our OER ‘story’ so-far:
Queen’s Open and Affordable Course Materials Working Group was established in 2017 and underpinned by the principle of reducing barriers to learning for students (Ozdemir & Hendricks, 2017 p.e1) through the provision of equitable, broad access to learning resources. We have ran 2 successful funding rounds providing resources (staff and monies) as well as a range of practical service supports towards both the creation and adaption of open textbooks. This has resulted in the creation of a number of fully open textbooks integrated into high intake courses and emerging curricula areas.
Building towards a sustainable future where ‘open’ resources are integrated into the course creation process, Queen’s is new developing a coordinated action plan for open textbook support across the disciplines that is both achievable and sustainable in the Canadian higher education context.
Key take-always:
Taking a highly practical and experiential approach, this presentation will explore:
• Strategies to engage and incentivise faculty in transitioning to open textbooks and away from commercial ones
• Lessons in project management – facilitating successful OER projects through a coordinated approach
• Maintaining momentum and engagement through a Community of Practice that has something for everyone engaged the teaching and learning process
• Using Pressbooks as a platform for publishing open textbooks – perspectives from the authors and the Library
• Approaches towards developing organisational capacity to support and sustain OERs at Queen’s including integration into planning, governance and budgetary structures at an institutional level.
Audience engagement:
A key component of this presentation will be to solicit the perspective of participants contributing their own experience and learned lessons in developing support services for open educational. This will be achieved through the use of an audience-response system as well as shared stakeholders testimonials in their own words.
Session content
N/A
References
References:
• Bowness, S. (2017). “The Open Education Resources Movement is Redefining the Concept of Online Textbooks”, University Affairs. Available at: https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/open-educational-resources-movement-redefining-concept-online-textbooks/ [Accessed 30 Nov. 2018].
• Ozdemir, O. & Hendricks, C., (2017). Instructor and Student Experiences with Open Textbooks, From the California Open Library for Education (Cool4Ed). Journal of Computing in High Education, 29 (1), p.e1, doi:10.1007/s12528-017-9138-0.
