Adopt an Openly Licensed Textbook

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November 30, 2023

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by Emma Wood

The inaugural OER Adoption cohort at UMass Dartmouth was formed last year and resulted in significant cost-savings to students. The cohort, an example of campus collaboration, was established with stipends from the Provost’s Office, logistical support through the Office of Faculty Development (OFD), and expertise from the Claire T. Carney Library.

The premise of the cohort is simple – Faculty apply to be part of the group, attend workshops to learn more about openly licensed teaching materials, and commit to replace a traditional textbook with a free or low-cost option in one of their courses. For example, Prof. Yuni Kim of the English Dept. participated and decided to use two books of zero cost together in one of her courses: Modern World Literature Compact Edition and Invitation to World Literature.

Among the benefits of OER for faculty, are the flexible permissions given by the Creative Commons licenses the materials carry. We tend to think of the parameters of traditional copyright as restrictive while CC licensing offers a range of uses, including the ability to tailor and update material. The opportunity to remix or alter course materials is especially appealing when covering subjects that change rapidly.

The OER advantage to students is compelling. The price of textbooks has increased swiftly, and around 64% of students report that they have made a decision to forego purchasing a required textbook due to cost. Consequently, students without the textbook often find themselves earning a low grade or even failing the course. Still others may drop a course because of textbook cost or choose to take fewer courses.

If you find yourself dissatisfied with your current textbook or concerned about whether all of your students can procure the material, consider exploring the OER options in your subject area. The second OER Adoption Cohort call is live now through the Office of Faculty Development and accepting applications online through 4:00 p.m. on Friday, December 15, 2023. Questions may be directed to Emma Wood, Scholarly Communication Librarian or Dr. Jay Zysk, OFD Director.

“Flat World Knowledge: Open College Textbooks” by opensourceway is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is OER Adoption? There are quality OER options (openly licensed textbooks and teaching materials) available for many subjects that are ready to be “adopted” and incorporated into your class.

Where do I find resources to adopt? Openstax is one of the prominent names in openly licensed textbook publishing, but there are many other resources. Start here: https://guides.lib.umassd.edu/oer

Research Reflection: Autoethnography

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November 15, 2023

2:58 pm

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by Megan Fletcher, PhD

Autoethnography is a narrative method in qualitative research that combines tenets of autobiographical writing with ethnographic sense-making. Ellis, Adams and Bocher (2011) point out that this combination makes autoethnography “both process and product” (p.1). Authors of autoethnography usually write in the first-person making themselves and their experiences the focus of the research, divorcing the traditional separation between researcher and subject. Autoethnographic research is often characterized by evocative and emotional experience while disclosing details of private life.

I remember the first time I learned about autoethnographic writing during a graduate seminar on qualitative research methods. I was struck by the honesty and vulnerability of the authors and their ability to harness subjective experience rather than attempt to establish and maintain objectivity in a research project. I found myself returning over and over to the topic of intimate partner violence in my developing work but made a point to keep myself (and my lived experience) out of the conversation. After that class, inspired by the bravery of the authors I had read, I decided to make a change. I wrote “We to Me: An Autoethnographic Discovery of Self – In and Out of Domestic Abuse” for my Master’s Thesis project, which later developed into my first publication (Fletcher, 2018). This manuscript went on to receive the Stephen E. Lucas Debut Publication Award from the National Communication Association.

There are great resources for exploring autoethnographic research or submitting your own work. These include the Journal of Autoethnography, the International  Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry, as well as our own Claire T. Carney Library which offers many autoethnographic articles and resources available to students and staff.

Ellis, C., Adams, T. E., & Bochner, A. P. (2011). Autoethnography: An overview. Historical Social

Research/Historische Sozialforschung, 36(1), 273–290.

Fletcher, M. A. (2018). We to me: An autoethnographic discovery of self, in and out of domestic abuse. Women’s Studies in Communication, 41(1), 42-59.

Research and Publishing Roundup

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November 6, 2023

2:16 pm

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Check out the latest publishing achievments in the UMassD Community:

Kevin Stokesbury, Dean of the School for Marine Science & Technology and former SMAST students Kyle Cassidy and Travis M. Lowery co-published “Constructing a baseline groundfish trawl survey for an offshore windfarm development area” in Marine and Coastal Fisheries. The article details an experimental bottom trawl survey in the Vineyard Wind lease and adjacent control areas to collect preliminary estimates of fish assemblage composition, density, and size distribution.Associate Professor Scott Field (Mathematics), Assistant Professor Vijay Varma (Mathematics), and doctoral students Tousif Islam and Feroz H. Shai co-published “Analysis of GWTC-3 with fully precessing numerical relativity surrogate models” in General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology. The article discusses their findings , including identifying a binary black hole system most likely formed through dynamical capture and whose collision produced the second fastest-moving black hole observed.

Need help accessing any of these (or other) articles? Reach out to our Research and Information Literacy Services Librarians.

How the Library Can Help with Your Course Materials

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November 3, 2023

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by Kari Mofford

Course Reserve services in the library are an excellent option for connecting students to required reading, especially at the start of the semester. Students may be waiting for the Amazon truck or a bookstore voucher and risk missing a reading or two. If you have a personal copy of a required textbook, the library can catalog it temporarily and make it available at the main desk for borrowing. Course Reserves offer a backup on days when a student has forgotten their book at home. We discuss openly licensed teaching materials and their cost-savings to students a lot on this blog, but OER are not the only way to be mindful of student budgets and access considerations. Materials under traditional copyright can also be shared and distributed when Fair Use is applied.

While the Library does not have textbooks in the collection, we encourage all faculty who are using print textbooks and/or course materials to place them on Course Reserve at the Library.  You just need to read our guidelines and fill out a request form.  Students may then check out items using their UMass Passes for a short period.  You can choose 2hr, 4hr, 24hr, 3 day, or 7 day for loan period to use.

Our library has a great collection, both in print and online with most of our journal articles available electronically.  If your class needs to access an article or chapter from an e-book for a class assignment, rather than saving it as a PDF in myCourses, just add the Permalink (example below) to your myCourses instead.  Not only does that clear any copyright issues, but it actually helps us to have better usage statistics which is important when we have budget decisions with the collection.

Open Education Conference 2023

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November 2, 2023

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The Open Education Conference is hosted annually to share information about open educational resources, open pedagogy, and open education initiatives. This conference celebrates the tenets of open education and promotes learning experiences that are inclusive to everyone, regardless of their background.

The conference was previously held in-person for sixteen-years but is now virtual event. OpenEd23 will be held November 7-9, 2023 online.#Opened23. For more information, check out the attendee guide, and take a look at preview videos of the keynote speakers can be found on the conference website.

There is still time to Register now to attend.

 

Open Access Week Feature: Prof. Anupama Arora Published in OA South Asian Studies Journal

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October 27, 2023

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We close out International Open Access Week with a look at an article by Dr. Anupama Arora of the English Communications Department titled “Of Women, Gay Men, and Dead Cats: The Precarity of Neoliberal Aspirations in Made in Heaven.” This article is published in the freely accessible journal, Critical South Asian Studies, which is a bi-annual (published twice a year in February and August), peer-reviewed publication that centers on literary, media and cultural studies. Additionally, Anupama serves as Executive co-Editor of an OA journal called The Journal of Feminist Scholarship.

Please see below for the abstract of “Of Women, Gay Men, and Dead Cats: The Precarity of Neoliberal Aspirations in Made in Heaven:”

ABSTRACT: Written by Zoya Akhtar, Reema Kagti, and Alankrita Shrivastava, the first season of the nine-episode web series, Made in Heaven, premiered on Amazon Prime Video on 8 March 2019 to great acclaim, garnering praise for being both “daring and revelatory” in its “provocative exploration of gender, marriage and love” and for offering “binge-worthy television” (Qureshi). In this essay, we examine how Made in Heaven investigates women’s lives as they navigate precarity, a distinct and historically contingent condition produced by neoliberalism in India. It does so by especially paying attention to the configurations of precarity produced through the intersectional workings of gender and class simultaneously. We argue that the show maps the ubiquity of precarity as it permeates and engulfs all life but ends with offering alternatives to perpetuating neoliberal logics of precarity and precarization by suggesting other possible worlds of solidarities, love, and care.

Research and Publishing Roundup

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October 27, 2023

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This week in UMD scholarly publishing, research, and news features:

Professor Viviane Saleh-Hanna (Crime & Justice Studies) co-edited Abolish Criminology, which presents critical scholarship on criminology and criminal justice ideologies and practices and emerging freedom-driven visions and practices for new world formations. The volume features chapters from Crime & Justice Studies faculty members Associate Professor Erin Katherine Krafft with “Marxist Criminology Abolishes Lombroso, Marxist Criminology Abolishes Itself,” Assistant Professor Vanessa Lynn Lovelace with “Abolish the Courthouse: Uncovering the Space of ‘Justice’ in a Black Feminist Criminal Trial,” Assistant Professor Toniqua Mikell with “Trans Black Women Deserve Better: Expanding Queer Criminology to Unpack Trans Misogynoir in the Field of Criminology”, and Saleh-Hanna’s chapters “A Call for Wild Seed Justice” and “The History of Criminology is a History of White Supremacy.” Also featured are chapters written by Charlemya Erasme (’18; MS,’20) with “Biology and Criminology Entangled: Education as a Meeting Point” and Tatiana Lopes DosSantos (’21) with “Civil Lies.”Professor Pia Moisander (Biology; Estuarine & Ocean Sciences) and Abhishek Naik (Doctoral student) co-authored “Disturbance frequency directs microbial community succession in marine biofilms exposed to shear” in mSphere. The article investigated microbial community dynamics in marine biofilms exposed to foul-release paint and/or shear and the impacts of antifouling-induced disturbance on stability in biomass.Assistant Professor Robert J. Gegear (Biology) co-published “Temporal variation of floral reward can improve the pollination success of a rare flowering plant” in Arthropod-Plant Interactions. The article examines a lab experiment with bumblebees foraging on artificial flowers of two colors to investigate whether bees’ foraging behaviors produce a rarity disadvantage.Associate Professor Michael Sheriff (Biology) and Olivia Aguiar (’22) co-published “Short Commentary on Playing it Safe; Risk-induced Trait Responses Increase Survival in the Face of Predation” in the Journal of Veterinary Sciences. The article found that those individuals with greater risk-induced trait responses (i.e., increased risk aversion behavior) had greater survival when exposed to a lethal predator. However, these responses came at the cost of growth.

Need help accessing any of these articles? Reach out to our Research and Information Literacy Services Librarians.

Open Access Week Feature: A Book Chapter About the History of Portuguese Colonies by Prof. Timothy Walker

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October 25, 2023

1:34 pm

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As we continue celebrating International Open Access Week, we turn to an openly licensed book called The Globalization of Knowledge in the Iberian Colonial World which discusses botany, medicine, religion and mining in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. UMass Dartmouth Professor Timothy Walker of the History Dept. contributed a chapter to this freely available book called “Global Cross-Cultural Dissemination of Indigenous Medical Practices through the Portuguese Colonial System: Evidence from Sixteenth to Eighteenth-Century Ethno-Botanical Manuscripts.” The book is published under a CC BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license which means that not only can other researchers and faculty share the material, but they can also remix, transform, and build upon it.

When asked about his thoughts on Open Access publishing, Prof. Walker said “To be most effective, and to achieve the widest possible dissemination, knowledge needs to travel freely, unimpeded by online pay walls or the practical limits of print-only distribution of publications.  Open Access publishing online democratizes information by making it available to anyone with internet access, and guarantees the broadest impact of our scholarly work.  Open Access publishing should be a central aspiration for researchers seeking to publish and disseminate their work.”

Open Access Week Feature: SMAST Professor Published in OA Marine Science Journal

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October 24, 2023

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International open Access Week is a time to recognize scholarly research and published works that are available free of charge and unfettered by access barriers. Today we highlight Associate Professor Gavin Fay’s recent publication to promote Open Access publishing activities. Prof. Gavin Fay (Fisheries Oceanography) co-published “Navigating concepts of social-ecological resilience in marine fisheries under climate change: shared challenges and recommendations from the northeast United States” in ICES Journal of Marine Science. Starting in January 2023, ICES Journal of Marine Science became freely available, including the archive which extends back 120 years! Fay’s article focuses on the challenges and ambiguity in social-ecological resilience concepts and explores implications for research and implementation. Kudos to Prof. Fay!

Prof. Fay also has an openly licensed lab manual that is now linked in the UMassD Open Educational Resources (OER) Hub available through OER Commons. This lab manual resource is intended to provide an overview for lab members and others about how the lab operates and centers around developing interdisciplinary modeling approaches to extend the scope of applications for fisheries and ecosystem-based management.

Open Access Week Feature: Two OA Journals Founded at UMassD

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October 23, 2023

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International Open Access Week (October 23-29, 2023) is a time to recognize Open Access (OA), and to inspire scholars to engage in this publishing model in scholarship and research. OA means information that is available digitally without cost or access barriers. Today on the blog, we highlight two OA journals with UMass Dartmouth roots:

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The Journal of Feminist Scholarship is an Open Access journal that was founded by UMD faculty members, Catherine Villanueva Gardner, Anna M. Klobucka, and Jeannette E. Riley, in 2011. Anupama Arora, PhD, Professor of English & Communication, and Women’s and Gender Studies, currently serves as co-Executive Editor with Jeannette E. Riley of University of Rhode Island. A few other UMD faculty are currently listed as co-editors.

The Journal of Feminist Scholarship is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes twice a year on topics that encourage a discussion of feminist thought for the twenty-first century. In addition to its regular issues, it publishes an interview series with important national and international feminist artists, practitioners, or scholars of color who have reshaped their fields. JFS has become highly regarded with frequent submissions, downloads, and citations in national and international fora. The journal is a great resource for researching feminist scholarship across the disciplines, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License which means that researchers are free to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles. The journal published a feminist criticism of paywall publishing.

Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies

Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies (PLCS) is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed hybrid (online and print) journal that publishes original research about the literatures and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world from a broad range of academic, critical and theoretical approaches. Mario Pereira and Anna M. Klobucka  currently serve as co-editors. PLCS is published semi-annually by Tagus Press in the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Tagus Press is the publishing division of the UMD Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, an outreach unit committed to the study of the language, literatures and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world. With the help of the Claire T. Carney Library, the journal is available publicly through Open Journal Systems (OJS) which aims to facilitate open access, peer-reviewed publishing. OJS is open source and enables the publication of articles and issues online and indexed in global services like Google Scholar, Crossref, and many others.

Are you interested in locating more OA Journals? Take a look at the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).