OEP@TWU

Join us for some social time before the conference begins! This session will primarily use chat as a way for attendees and presenters to introduce themselves and make connections. You can join for all or part of the time. 

Do you want to take a yoga break at your desk? Try this 20-minute chair yoga session with Susan. The health benefits of chair yoga include greater flexibility, stronger muscles, better posture, and reduced stress.

This session is available for you whenever you need it throughout the conference.

Susan Whitmer is a librarian at Texas Woman’s University. She’s also a registered yoga teacher who specializes in gentle yoga and chair yoga.

In her keynote, Considering Reciprocity in Open Education, Loyer will explore how, at its most aspirational, open education promises a way to lower barriers for access to information, build collaboration, and address inequality in education. Yet the ways that academia and academic publishing approach these projects often replicate our structural biases. We'll consider how reciprocity, particularly from a Cree perspective, might animate these projects beyond their current communities of practice, reflect on ways that open education pedagogy falls into patterns of saviourism and colonialism, and dream the ways that we might embrace Indigenous futurisms to expand open education to care for the knowledge systems that have experienced epistemicide.

Transitioning to using Open Educational Resources (OER) is a time-consuming and labor-intensive project. Student textbook savings is considered the most important impact, but for many instructors, the “why” of their transition to OER is more nuanced. Hear from three faculty members at Texas Woman’s University as they discuss their inspiration for transitioning to using or creating OER, and the processes that made the change easier for them and their students.

In this presentation, the authors start from the importance of improved teacher education during and post-Covid19 pandemic. The Covid19 pandemic continues to exacerbate the lack of qualified teachers. Together with qualified staff, it is clear that relevant and local teaching-learning resources are essential if governments wish to enhance the teaching and learning processes. Solutions to the lack of qualified teachers/educators/ lecturers and to that of localised resources (such as Open Textbooks) are not easily encountered. 
The authors therefore propose a novel community-based approach (Ferreira-Meyers & Dhakulkar, 2021) to tackle this dual challenge by innovative use of technology. Our approach is based on the principles embedded in the Open Science Framework (OSF) and envisions creation of grassroot-level communities of practices via networking of teachers and students. We propose to share a model through which the principle of openness can be put into practice for teacher education. 
The model makes use of different OSF aspects to create a teacher-student community of practice with a peer network of “critical friends”. It offers the opportunity to extend “openness” to teachers and students by fostering sharing, collaboration while also focusing on self-directed learning and constructionist pedagogy. 

Tools of production in the form of software applications are crucial to create and edit digital resources. But what type of tools of production should educators learn and use to create their own resources? If we truly want the commons in education to prosper, the tools of production should be available and accessible to everyone. Any restriction on the tools of production, whether it is about the restrictions of use, or financial aspects, or restrictions on distribution will be detrimental to the participation of the potential creators. Given both the push and a need for creating and adapting open educational resources (OERs), such software application become crucial. We argue that the philosophy behind Free and Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) presents a compelling case for use in this context. FLOSS software is not owned by any single entity but by the community of users such that anyone can use, access, modify and (re)distribute them. In this talk, we will look at a few tools which enable their users to create and edit some of the common media formats such as text, images, audio and video to help create OERs. We argue based on pedagogical, social and political dimensions to make a strong case for the use of FLOSS tools of production in educational contexts.

Join me for a quick (virtual) tour of Texas Learn OER, an award-winning set of ten peer-reviewed, openly licensed, self-paced modules for faculty, staff, and administrators. My organization, the Digital Higher Education Consortium of Texas, worked with Carrie Gits, Associate Professor, Head Librarian, and Library Services OER Team Leader at Austin Community College, to adapt for a wider audience modules she created for ACC as a part of her capstone project for the 2018-19 SPARC Open Education Leadership Program. Texas Learn OER includes information on understanding OER; equitable Open Education practices; open licensing, including Creative Commons; finding and evaluating OER; accessibility; adapting, creating, and sharing OER; and OER policy and practice in Texas. Anyone completing the final assessment with an 80% or higher can earn a certificate of completion for free. Additionally, because it is licensed CC-BY, Texas Learn OER can be adapted for any local context -- including TWU! 
This session will include an interactive discussion after the presentation on why and how attendees might choose to participate in and utilize Texas Learn OER. This presentation is suitable for all levels and institutional roles. Learning Objectives include: 1) Attendees will learn how to earn a certificate for completion of Texas Learn OER and 2) Attendees will learn how they can adapt Texas Learn OER for their local context.

This presentation shares the experiences and motivations of Dr. Sara Ishii, Art History and Visual Culture professor, and Hanna Selman, MFA candidate and Understanding Art instructor for using and adapting Open Educational Resources (OERs).  Dissatisfied with World Art History commercial textbooks’ limited discussion of global art history, Ishii began her path to Open Educational Practices (OEPs) by adapting existing OERs for her classes.  In her portion of the presentation, she will discuss her work on remixing OERs, publishing on this work, and further developing OEPs through the TWU Heart Initiative Grant. Selman, dissatisfied with the culture/gender inequities and the financial inaccessibility of commercial Art Appreciation textbooks, found through working with Ishii, that she can reformulate the TWU Understanding Art course to use OEPs. In her portion of the presentation, she will highlight the process of finding OER’s and implementing them in an accessible way within the digital learning space. Through their interwoven efforts to incorporate OEPs into the visual arts and art history curriculum, Selman and Ishii reflect on the benefits of developing and adopting open access materials in order to address social justice concerns and better serve our students.

This research study examined textbook costs and student success rates at one community college located in the Southwest United States. Descriptive statistics were used in the study to identify the mean textbook costs and student success rates over five semesters. Chi-square tests for independence were used to determine if a statistically significant relationship exists between textbook costs and student success rates based on course level of developmental, lower, or upper-level courses. The chi-square analysis found that there was not a statistically significant relationship between textbooks costs and student success rates in developmental courses. However, the chi-square tests of independence did find a statistically significant relationship between textbook costs and student success rates in lower and upper-level courses. Research shows students often opt not to purchase commercial textbooks due to costs, thus resulting in higher D, F, and W rates among college students. The results of this study support numerous recent research studies on the impact of textbook costs and student success.

For some content and disciplines the transition to open access materials requires the development of extensive new resources, presenting a daunting task in terms of time commitment and scope. This presentation walks through a semester-long project of building an eBook in real-time with a cohort of diverse and interdisciplinary graduate students. The product created addressed an unmet need in the field, contributed to student ownership and application of content, while shaping the professional development of the instructor in unexpected ways. Lessons learned through the process are shared with participants to apply to their own journey in OER and include: The importance of “role release”, how to frame the discourse, following a logical progression, addressing learners with varied backgrounds, building knowledge and skills concurrently, and engaging students at the formative level. The session will include examples of successes and missteps, narrative feedback from the students, and an outline of recommended steps in taking on a similar project.

This session provides an overview on ways that two instructors in the field of TESOL (Teaching English as a Second or Other Language) integrate OERs into their undergraduate teaching methods courses and graduate level courses on TESOL education. A broader trend in the field of TESOL education includes 1) the shift to online and digital teaching spaces prior to, during, and post-pandemic and 2)  the need for TESOL students to be able to transition into digital teaching long-term as a workforce trend while being able to curate their own OER resources for teaching. 
The first presenter will share about the recent growth of OER resources for undergraduate TESOL and ESL teaching, specifically for university level academic ESL. In addition, resource curation will be discussed as a knowledge-building activity that supports the ideals behind open resources, and provides ESL teachers with a wealth of relevant resources at their fingertips. Participants will gain access to some examples of student-curated resources and suggestions for helping students curate their own resources effectively.
The second presenter will share how she leverages OER and principles of open pedagogy in graduate courses: OER as an approach for TESOL methods. Graduate students read about OER, it is modeled and demonstrated, and students apply it to applied linguistics and TESOL lesson tasks.

College is an expensive endeavor for most students, and with the costs of textbooks steadily increasing, many students, especially the economically challenged, find college out of reach. River Parishes Community College faculty Dr. Esperanza Zenon is tackling this issue by utilizing and promoting the use of Open Education Resources (OER). This presentation will focus on using Open Education Resources (OER) in STEM and CTE courses as a way of promoting equity by reducing costs for learning materials. Resources, tools, and processes utilized to evaluate, adopt, and adapt the OER materials utilized in STEM and CTE courses will be discussed.

The goal of this presentation is to share tips and best practices for managing open educational resources (OERs) in any course. Participants will leave the session with strategies for locating OERs, and the best practices for adapting OER material as well as recommendations for including the proper attribution before sharing the open educational resources.

In an effort to make course materials more affordable and accessible, many campuses are experimenting with “Inclusive Access” programs. Designed by the textbook industry (largely in response to the growing OER movement), Inclusive Access is a sales model that adds the cost of digital course content into students’ tuition and fees—in other words, automatic textbook billing. While the advertised benefits of these programs have been widely promoted by vendors, there are also drawbacks for students and faculty that deserve equal attention. At a time where access to course materials is part of meeting students’ basic needs in higher education, what campuses are doing to reduce costs matters. This presentation would present a holistic picture of what Inclusive Access programs mean for your campus, explore how they differ from open models like OER, and examine whether Inclusive Access is “inclusive” at all. Also learn how to access resources and more information from InclusiveAccess.org.

This presentation will discuss how we have successfully incorporated Open Education Resources and Practices (OER and OEP) in various science courses. OER was first implemented in Principles of Physics in the fall of 2014. Since then, we have successfully adapted both OER and OEP in Climate Change: A Human Perspective; Water in a Changing Environment; General Chemistry, and Environmental Chemistry. Each year, we continue to adopt and adapt OER(P) to more courses. 
The Sciences tend to have many fees associated with classes. For instance, traditional books retail around $100, and there are laboratory fees for the students. Therefore, we have mainly adapted both OER and OEP to remove financial roadblocks for our students, and this effort is ongoing to include other subjects. As a result, we have collectively saved over $150,000 for our students and their families.
In this presentation, we will share our journey in OER(P), including personal experiences, challenges, benefits, and plans for the future. In addition, topics will cover how OER(P) provides opportunities for course content to be relevant and include up-to-date research. We also describe how OER provides an equitable platform for all learners from diverse backgrounds and how OEP fosters undergraduate research that benefits the community.

UTArlington’s History Department policies dictate $0 materials cost for core courses. With no available OERs for Science and Technology in American Society, the presenter designed a course pedagogy centering on student creation of an OER (supported by a THECB OER Geer Grant) integrating the impact of science/technology on the development of American society, economics, and politics within the traditional historical narrative. 
The semester-long project allows for more intensive focus on key course learning objectives which include understanding the civic, ethical, and social responsibility of scientists/engineers in conducting research/implementing new technologies and understanding how science and technology have been significant drivers in the development of American society. 
Most enrolled students are engineering majors; therefore, the project approximates typical team organization processes used in industry with several “research and development” phases. Since Pressbooks allows for a wide range of interactive artifacts (including H5P) beyond simple text, experiential learning librarians work with students to create unique content. For example, the “Apollo Program” group is producing a short documentary utilizing NASA materials. The “frozen foods” group will use the library’s kitchen to record a session comparing cooking a meal “from scratch” with preparing a TV dinner as part of their analysis of how food technology impacted family/gender dynamics. 
Each semester students will choose new topics to add to the OER. Through this mechanism, OER creation becomes an organic, well-integrated component of the course utilizing experiential learning to develop marketable skills while teaching invaluable lessons in ethics, civics, and the impact of science on society.

Once you have worked tirelessly and jumped through many hoops to adopt an OER textbook in order to bring down the cost of education for your students, you may feel guilty about adding back the expense of educational tools such as immediate responseware, also known as instant polling. However, there is strong research evidence that immediate responseware is a successful engagement strategy that promotes active learning and fosters a supportive, inclusive classroom when used with low-stakes assignments or to gauge transfer of knowledge. The traditional approach is for students to purchase a physical device or license through an educational technology provider such as TurningPoint or i-Clickers. The cost of these traditional services has been increasing, adding to the financial burden for our students in the midst of an ongoing global economic recession.  An alternative approach is for an instructor to use a free or low-cost mobile app for student participation.  In this session, we will demonstrate an array of free apps that we have used in various courses, present examples of how they can be implemented in different types of classes, and discuss the benefits and limitations of each.

I was awarded a grant from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to jump-start my journey to using Open Educational Resources.  Under this grant, I switched two lower-level statistics courses to using OERs. This switch has alleviated any added cost to the students for materials for these courses, saving students over $100 per person, per class.  This presentation describes the journey to finding and implementing the e-textbook and homework platform and what we’ve learned along the way.  We will also discuss how this change has impacted our students, both financially and academically.

Courses require textbooks but there are many critical issues surrounding access, quality, and costs for students. Many students either delay or choose not to acquire textbooks due to financial constraints. The use of OER addresses these issues of affordability and attainment gap concerns, and increases student learning and retention. While there are many options for OER textbooks, OER lab manuals are uncommon. We saw a need to develop a Plant Biology Lab Manual into an OER for our plant biology laboratory (BIOL 2111). To make the lab manual coherent, we developed each lab exercise with emphasis on the relationship between plant structure and function and adaptations to a sedentary lifestyle, two course themes aligned with the lecture. Most of the exercises are original and self-contained, resulting from the authors’ long-time teaching experience, both in person and online. Each lab includes the following elements: student learning objectives, a topic introduction, keywords, activity instructions, review questions and links to resources. During online lab delivery in spring 2020, we included a special survey for students to identify learning issues for the purpose of improving the manual and course content. During the fall 2021 transition back to in person instruction, we were able to initiate a trial of OER by posting the lab exercises on Canvas after revisions and updates. We are currently finalizing the OER Plant Biology Lab Manual, which will contribute to a more open, inclusive, and accessible resource for our students, thus motivating them to successfully learn plant biology at TWU.

Currently, Open Educational Resources (OER) development focuses on core curriculum subjects. After completing the core curriculum, students must pursue upperclassman subjects to complete the bachelor's degree. Many professions in health science require graduate degrees to be certified as allied health professionals. The demand for OER is high to reduce these many years of higher education costs in various health science majors. In contrast, the supply of OER in these areas is limited.
My co-authors and I developed three OER textbooks since the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020. The books include "remix" portions, and therefore, we did not write everything from scratch. In addition, I received TWU's OER mini-grants to develop these books for three different courses in the Department of Communication Sciences and Oral Health (CSOH). This presentation will discuss the key points to design, organize, refine, compile, and publish OER materials for health science disciplines in two publicly available digital libraries, namely, OER Common (national-level) and OERTX (state-level). This presentation will also introduce available OER resources that allow "remix" and some format choices for OER materials. 

You’ve successfully adopted or created an Open Educational Resource (OER) for your class. Are you wondering if this transition impacted your students? Would you like to encourage your colleagues to join the OER team or use your data to paint a picture for your university administration? In this interactive presentation, we will discuss tips and tricks from a librarian, data analyst, and instructor for using your experience and data to tell your story and perhaps even publish.