#Open Textbook tweet: Driving the Awareness and Adoption of Open Textbooks
This collection of tweets seeks to answer key questions for those who might support open textbooks, and the future of the open textbook movement more
Free to Learn: An Open Educational Resources Policy Development Guidebook for Community College Governance Officials
Open Educational Resources (OER) offer higher education governance leaders a cost-efficient method of improving the quality of teaching and learning while at the same time reducing costs imposed on students related to the purchase of expensive commercial textbooks and learning materials. Leading scholars around the world are already participating in the OER movement even without support from most... more
Open Educational Resources and Higher Education
This paper examines the concept of OER in more detail, offering a simple, clear definition, explaining the economic and educational potential behind that definition, introducing examples of OER practices around the world, exploring legal considerations, and highlighting some of the challenges to releasing the transformative potential of OER. more
How Giving Away Religious Digital Books Influences the Print Sales of Those Books
Lack of access prevents many from benefiting from educational resources. Digital technologies now enable educational resources, such as books, to be openly available to those with access to the Internet. This study examined the financial viability of a religious publisher?s putting free digital versions of eight of its books on the Internet. The total cost of putting these books online was $... more
Peer-To-Peer Recognition of Learning in Open Education
Recognition in education is the acknowledgment of learning achievements. Accreditation is certification of such recognition by an institution, an organization, a government, a community, etc. There are a number of assessment methods by which learning can be evaluated (exam,practicum, etc.) for the purpose of recognition and accreditation, and there are a number of different purposes for the... more
Openness, Dynamic Specialization, and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education
Openness is a fundamental value underlying significant changes in society and is a prerequisite to changes institutions of higher education need to make in order to remain relevant to the society in which they exist. There are a number of ways institutions can be more open, including programs of open sharing of educational materials. Individual faculty can also choose to be more open without... more
Open Textbook Proof-of-Concept via Connexions
To address the high cost of textbooks, Rice University?s Connexions and the Community College Open Textbook Project (CCOTP) collaborated to develop a proof-of-concept free and open textbook. The proof-of-concept served to document a workflow process that would support adoption of open textbooks. Open textbooks provide faculty and students with a low cost alternative to traditional publishers... more
Open Educational Resources: New Possibilities for Change and Sustainability
In an attempt to understand the potential of OER for change and sustainability, this paper presents the results of an informal survey of active and inactive collections of online educational resources, emphasizing data related to collection longevity and the project attributes associated with it. Through an analysis of the results of this survey, in combination with other surveys of OER... more
Incentives and Disincentives for Use of Open Courseware.
This article examines Utah residents' views of incentives and disincentives for the use of OpenCourseWare (OCW), and how they fit into the theoretical framework of perceived innovation attributes established by Rogers (1983). Rogers identified five categories of perceived innovation attributes: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability. A survey... more
From Open Content to Open Course Models: Increasing Access and Enabling Global Participation in Higher Education
Two of the major challenges to international students' right of access to higher education are geographical/economic isolation and academic literacy in English (Carey, 1999; Hamel, 2007). The authors propose that adopting open course models in traditional universities, through blended or online delivery, can offer benefits to the institutions and to the open education movement itself, in... more
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