Join us in the global celebration of the open education movement for Open Education Week, March 6-10, 2023.
Longhorn Textbook Access (LTA). A partnership with the University Co-op designed to reduce the cost of digital textbooks and other course materials for students. Provides faculty support to choose course learning materials.
For information and support for OER course materials, visit OER Guide and learn why it might be a good fit for your course and understand the impacts and benefits.
Inter-Research Science Publisher, Book Series:
Freshwater Biological Association (UK)
From the press release: "The Foundation for Water Research (now part of the Institution of Environmental Sciences) (FWR/IES) and the Freshwater Biological Association (FBA) are pleased to announce the launch of their Freshwater Biology and Ecology Handbook. The unique scientific and charitable roles of the FWR/IES and FBA have enabled this book to be written in partnership with freshwater biology and water management experts and allow for it to be published free of charge and for public good, for use by the public, experts, and regulators."
Selected titles from the National Academies Press
Selected titles from InTech Open
Selected titles from OApen
OER Repositories
Links to all these resources (and more!) can be found at http://bit.ly/OpenAccessibleUT
Guest Post - Space and Grace in Open Access Publishing, by Dustin Fife; from The Scholarly Kitchen, May 5, 2021.
"We should strive for open but also be realistic about the options truly available to researchers and discuss them transparently and honestly."
Watch Dr. Joshua Barbour (Associate Professor, Communication Studies) and Ashley Morrison (Tocker Open Education Librarian) explain OER, show how it's used effectively in Dr. Barbour's course, and tell you how to get help with OER at UT Austin.
A. Yes! Even if students don't have to purchase your selected course materials, it's useful to do this because your materials will then show up in the "My Textbooks" section of Canvas. Students can access course materials directly from this tab, and it will include both commercial texts and OER if you are using a mix. If you miss that deadline, those materials can be sourced from the OER publisher (e.g., OpenStax) and/or posted directly to your Canvas course.
A: Learn how to best represent your engagement with OER in activity reports or packets for promotion with a new tool from the Driving OER Sustainability for Student Success (DOERS3) working group. This matrix identifies different types of instructor contributions using OER (adopting, adapting, creating, etc.) and demonstrates concrete ways to document and provide evidence of these contributions in teaching, service, and research. Additionally, Iowa OER created a helpful visual to distill the recommendations of DOERS3 in the "Open Education in Promotion, Tenure, & Faculty Development" guide. If you have questions or are interested in talking more about OER activities and institutional reward structures, please get in touch.
Generally, authors own their work and can license it as they choose, but there are exceptions. Read more about it in our Copyright Crash Course or the UT System IP Policy to determine what rules may apply to your situation.
The short answer is that all OER are Open Access (OA), but not all OA is OER. The longer answer is that the license applied to a work determines whether or not it is truly OER. For example, a journal article may be published OA, but the license it carries may be all-rights-reserved copyright. That is not OER because the license does not allow users to copy and adapt the content. However, in a different circumstance that same journal article may be published OA and also carry an open license (such as a Creative Commons license) that allows users to not only access it freely (OA) but copy and adapt it -- this is OER.
Even more FAQs are addressed in the Faculty Guide to Use of Open Educational Resources (OER), produced by the OER Subcommittee of the Sustainable Open Scholarship Working Group charged by the Provost.
Virginia Course Materials Survey
In Fall 2021, in cooperation with member institutions, VIVA, Virginia’s academic library consortium, conducted the Virginia Course Materials Survey. The survey built on the work of previous states and regions and included a special emphasis on educational equity. More than 5,600 valid student responses from 41 institutions were received, reflecting an overall response rate of 10%.
The overarching research questions were:
Survey results, including a very helpful Executive Summary, are available on the VIVA website.
Noted highlights:
Contact: Colleen Lyon,
Scholarly Communications Librarian.
If you're a student interested in learning more about OER or getting involved with advocacy efforts, these resources will get you started. Contact Colleen Lyon, c.lyon@austin.utexas.edu, for more information or support.
What is open education, anyway? Start with the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)'s primer.
Stay in the know about OER at UT Austin by joining our email interest list. We'll keep you informed about upcoming workshops, new programs on campus and in the state, and other news you can use.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License.