Tag: creative commons

Call for Applications: Open Educational Resources (OER) Adoption Cohort

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December 20, 2024

6:20 pm

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News & Events, Uncategorized

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The call for applications is live for UMassD faculty who are considering making the switch from traditional (and often costly teaching materials) to OER. The Office of Faculty Development (OFD), in collaboration with the Office of the Provost and the Claire T. Carney Library, invite participation in an Open Educational Resources (OER) faculty cohort which will meet during Spring 2025,and will provide participants with resources, tools, and guidance for selecting and remixing OER textbooks and ancillary material. Sessions will cover Creative Commons licenses, copyright, OER repositories, and OER best practices. The aim of the initiative is for participants to commit to replacing at least one required core textbook for a single course with an OER option in the Fall 2025 semester.

The price of textbooks has risen significantly over the past few decades, and many students report that they do not purchase textbooks due to cost. Access codes are a newer model from publishers where students pay a fee for access to digital course materials, and sometimes the cost is lower than print textbooks, but students do not have the option of the used textbook market, library materials, or keeping their resources beyond the term of the class. A great alternative to these options is to search for OER in your discipline.Consider applying for the cohort to explore your OER options.

For the full program description or to ask questions, please contact Emma Wood.

Photo by Artem Podrez: https://www.pexels.com/photo/laptop-on-a-table-4884118/

Open Access Week Feature: A UMD Collaboration in an OA Journal

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October 24, 2024

4:09 pm

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Journals, News & Events

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Cross-posted from the Claire T. Carney Library Blog

International Open Access Week (October 21-27, 2024) is a time to recognize free and accessible research and scholarship and to inspire scholars to engage in the advantageous OA model in publishing. The term Open Access refers to scholarly material that is available digitally free of charge and without other access barriers. Today we will highlight a UMass Dartmouth faculty member who has published along with a UMass Dartmouth student under a Creative Commons license in an Open Access journal.

Nicholas Zambrotta is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Psychology department whose research interests include morality, political polarization, and social support and health related behaviors. In early 2024 Zambrotta published an article called “Attitude Changes Among College Students Post-Pandemic” with Alex Goncalo who was working on his BS in Finance. Goncalo has since earned his MS, and has gone on to pursue his PhD in Finance at the University of South Florida. Their study “measured happiness, optimism, and psychological well-being in a sample of 182 college students via an electronic Qualtrics questionnaire to identify predictors of state optimism and examine potential differences in these variables between class rankings.” The results of their survey and analysis can be read and shared (with attribution) by any researcher thanks to the OA model of their selected publication, Modern Psychological Studies.

The journal is managed by undergraduate students at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, and not only is it student-led, but Modern Psychological Studies focuses on publishing quality articles by undergraduate students. Regarding the review process, Goncalo says, “Their rigorous review process was enlightening, which contributed greatly to this undeniably invaluable experience.” Authors who choose to publish with MPS actually retain their copyright under a Non-Exclusive Distribution License. This arrangement protects freedoms of the authors, while the Creative Commons licenses applied to each article ensure that all researchers can benefit from the work. 

Kudos to Zambrotta and Goncalo on their OA publication! 

Image by Nick Shockey, licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en, available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Open_Access_symbol.png

 

The UMass Dartmouth OER Commons Hub: A Community Space to Share Your Teaching Materials

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January 2, 2024

7:26 pm

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Uncategorized

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by Emma Wood

One of the tenets of Creative Commons (CC) licensing is sharing your work with others. Creating free materials for the students in your course is valuable, but providing those materials for other educators to adopt and potentially remix helps to build the existing library of free and accessible learning tools. OER repositories store and link to materials that you can use, but you can also upload and display the worksheets, textbooks, quizzes, etc. that you have designed.

OER Commons is a well-known repository that provides a single point of access to a vast collection of openly-licensed teaching materials. New within the past few years, all Massachusetts institutions of higher education have their own page or “hub” where their OER authors can upload teaching materials. This allows institutions to showcase and share the OER work of their faculty in one convenient location.

The UMass Dartmouth OER Commons Hub has started to grow. For example, our group page hosts a Women’s and Gender Studies textbook by Catherine Villanova Gardner and a textbook for E-Commerce and E-Business by Shouhong Wang. Both resources are robust and support a full course without financial or other access barriers for students. Gardner’s resource offers 11 chapters covering topics such as intersectionality and feminist movements with the incorporation of colorful images and links to videos. Wang’s textbook  fills a gap in the available OER on electronic commerce by providing a much needed update to the freely available options. The resource is organized into six chapters and is simple to follow and download. Both authors have the unique ability to update and change their teaching materials as they see fit.

Please consider sharing your openly licensed materials in our OER Commons hub. OER Commons offers an Open Author tool to streamline the process of creating and sharing OER. I welcome any questions about the creation or adoption of OER and UMD’s OER Commons hub.