Thank you all for being here. Um, should
we close the door or leave it open? Okay.
Okay. Um, thank you very much for inviting
me to be here today. I'm hoping that we
can have some time to both listen and then at
the end, have lots of conversation. Um,
so my name is Anita Walz. I'm from Virginia
Tech. Virginia Tech is a polytechnic university that's
about five hours south of here. And I used
to live in Washington D. C. About 10
years ago. Um, I don't know most of
your contexts. If you're from American, or if you're
from somewhere else. Um, but I would love
to learn more about why you're here and what you
want to learn in just a minute. First I
want to say, Oh, first I wanna say
happy open education week. Um, it is our
spring break at Virginia Tech, which is why I
could be here today. But it's open education week
around the world. So if you are a twitter
user or hashtag finder, um, this link will
get you to a lot of events. Yesterday.
I saw a curated 24 hour long list of live
web events. So if you want to know more about
this topic, there are presentations from around the world
. Um, they're going on this week, all
week. Um, so happy open Education Week.
As Olivia mentioned I wear a lot of hats.
I'm a subject liaison in a library in in the
university libraries. Uh, I work in with the
faculty, students and staff of economics, math,
and then legal studies. We do not have a
law school, but we have people around the university
that teach and do research and legal topics. I
also work primarily in the area of open education and
then also, uh, copyright and some open access
types of work. Uh, I want to show
you a little bit about what we're doing, um
, to support open education at Virginia Tech.
We can come back to this, but I wanted
to show you up front. Um, some of
the ways that we are trying to support, slash
instigate open educational practices at VT. Some include,
um, one on one consultations as needed.
Teach a lot of workshops. We run a number
of listservs for our faculty. Also on the state
level. Most of my time goes to, um
, providing technical support and grants for faculty who are
building or adapting open educational resources and then planning
learning opportunities. So that I do not forget
to tell you there is a hand out on the
table over there that you may want to pick up
or take a picture of, um, you are
invited to our open education symposium. It's in about
a week and a half on the 19th of Monday
. Um, the three events on Monday are live
streamed, so you do not have to drive five
hours to come and see us, but they're very
much on the topics that we're going to talk about
today. So please take a moment before you go
to take a copy of this. Um, they're
free. We'd love to have you there.
So good morning. And then, two other things
that I also do are, um, mhm.
I've developed a teaching inquiry group for faculty and grad
students at Virginia Tech who want to learn more.
They want to discuss what what istheir experience?
What does open education mean in their context? What
are they trying to do? And people come with
very different ideas, as you will probably see.
So Virginia Tech is a land grant institution. We
have about 34,000 full time equivalent students, grads and
undergrads. Uh, the library is fairly traditional in
terms of our services, but we have a lot
of focus on making things. We're in part,
a large engineering school. We also have emphasis on
business and a a wide range, of course,
of humanities related topics. Um, but you can
see some of our our common areas where students study
and and do group work together. Um, I
would love to know how many of you are from
American here. Okay, on how many of you
are from how many of you are from maybe outside
of higher education? Maybe you work with a different
age group than college age or graduate students.
Anyone okay, A few. Great. How many
of you are here? Because you know a lot
about OER and you want to know more?
Okay. How many of you, um, would
say Oh, we are. What's that? Don't
be shy. It's okay. It helps me.
Thank you. Um, how many of you have
heard or could maybe described what might be meant by
open pedagogy. Okay. Alright, Um, let's
see, What else can I ask you? That
would be helpful. I think that's a good start.
Um, okay. Did you have something?
You looked like you wanted to say something. Um
, so our question today really is what on earth
, what is open education? Um, I'll let
you read this definition, um, or description.
I think this description comes from the organization that organizes
open Education week. Um, and what I like
to emphasize from it is that it's not one
thing. Um, it has a really strong emphasis
on sharing for the purpose of learning. Um,
it has a strong emphasis on both resources,
so maybe open educational resource is maybe other things,
maybe tools. So tools and practices. This is a
really wide of a wide, very broad sort of
definition. But it's purposeful in that focuses educational access
and effectiveness, and the scope is worldwide. Um
, depending on what context you're in, as I
am in a university context, we cannot serve the
whole world. We primarily serve our students, but
we hope that our impact those worldwide, um so
the open education can mean things in some different context
, depending on where you are. Okay, So
open is about sharing eso knowledge, sharing tools,
technology, collaboration to a certain degree, that will
become apparent. Um, and these things in the
service of learning. So I'd like to tell you
about two practices that are pretty prominent in the open
education field. Open educational resource and open pedagogy.
And then as a way of talking about the
philosophy of open education, I want to tell you
about a value framework. Um, so does this
sound like a good place to go? Okay,
so this is sort of our outline of open educational
resources. I'll let you take a minute and read this
definition also. Okay, So these resources
could be almost anything. They could be books.
They could be modules that could be videos that could
be assessment tools. But what is very important about
them is that they are in the public domain,
meaning they're free of copyright. They've either graduated from
copyright. They were donated to the public domain.
They were created by a certain government agency. And
when that agency creates things, they are automatically in
the public domain or they're released under an intellectual property
license And that kind of license. As I think
we have some folks from Creative Commons here, um
the most prominent licenses under which these things
are released are creative Commons licenses. And those promote
free use and repurposing. Um, if you
can imagine being able to adapt something for a local
use for a use maybe in another country with a
different age group with a different group of, um
people who have have different needs, Um, regarding
access, perhaps those that are, um, use
screen readers or people who
may want something in a particular format.
This tells you that you're able to basically
pull the content out of its container, adapt it
, put it into the kind of container that you
need it to be in kind of mind blowing! Um
, really, um, in in what these sorts
of things are, um, so I hope that
piques your curiosity in terms of, um, the
potential. So we think often of open educational resources
as books. Sometimes they're print. Sometimes their
digital. Uh huh. A few prominent examples are
books that come out of the Open Stacks project.
This is a project out of Rice University in Texas
. Um, they create books with the most open
of the Creative Commons licenses. They're free online,
And low cost in print. So around $40 or
so. How many of you have heard of these
before? Okay, okay. Another place toelook
is Open Textbook Library, and we're just talking about
books right now. Right? Um, the open
textbook library has over 450 openly licensed books that are
downloadable. If students don't have Internet access at home
, if somebody wants to download something to their phone
and not have to read it online, Um,
this is a really great option. Many of the
books have reviews, so you can see what other
faculty members thought of them if they thought they weren't
worth reading or if they thought this is pretty good.
Um, there are other kinds of open educational
resources. So the grants program that I run -
this one of our projects. One of our faculty
, we have a school of veterinary medicine, and
one of our faculty members said I really like to
have a series of videos that show our introductory students
how to do a basic dog examination. Basic animal
examination. So, uh, he and his colleague
here are shown, uh, in a series of
four videos that, uh, show that that students
what they need to do to examine a small animal
. A few other examples At Virginia Tech in 2006
I was approached by a faculty member
who said, The book I'm using is coming out
in a new edition. It's $220. I have
700 students. They're not going to read the book
anyway. Why would I? What can I do?
I can't justify assigning this new book and we
work together, and this was the first project that
we did. It was it was very difficult to
be completely honest, but we remixed a book that
had the Creative Commons license on it. That
allows editing, and we created a book that fits
this course. It's available chapter by chapter as he
wanted it. It's also available the complete thing in
PDF. It's available in editable Microsoft Word, which
it is great. While in its current
iteration has longevity issues Um, but for now
, we're really thrilled about this, So Yeah.
Yes. He took an existing book. He threw
out probably 40 or 50% of the book , reorganized.
what was left. Added things. Um, as
needed. Created a few additional sections and chapters.
I updated all the data. We changed all of
the pictures, um, into things that are openly
licensed. So it was quite it was quite involved.
Yeah. Okay.
[inaudible question from audience]
I knew about some of the intro
to business course or books, and we were able
to look through probably three or four of them.
I think I probably found this one in the open
textbook library, but I knew of a collection of
books that had open licenses. Uh, that were
from the late two thousands. Um, so yeah
Ah, second book. This is a beta
version of a book on electro Magnetics that we published
in January. So this is a draft that is
being field tested but is available in print. Um
, that we worked with the faculty member on,
and this is all original content. He did hire
some students with our grant money tp create figures
and, um, to develop some of the graphics
in the book. And, uh, we're really
proud of it. So take a look, and
I'm happy to talk with you more about that.
But just some examples. We do this
in part because it's valuable to for our students,
and because we find it's valuable for other
people so these are downloads for the fundamentals of Business
Books for January. This is mid January, This isyesterday.
S people are using this, and there's a tremendous
impact that these kinds of resource is can have.
It's also important that they're high quality, that they're
accurate if you're going to have this kind of reach.
Okay. So I've alluded to creative commons
We want to tell you two different ways of defining
what open educational resources are, so starting with creative
Commons licenses. Um or actually, I wanted to
tell you two different ways. Sorry of thinking about
open educational resource is, um, items in the
public domain items with the creative Commons licenses. They
allow, um, someone to copy and to reuse
these four with attribution, some of them allow commercial
use. Some of them do not. And some
of them require that the same license from the work
, the original work. Maybe that you modified,
um, is put on the work that you create.
So if you take something with this license that
has the backwards, the left left circling arrow um,
you need to put that same license on your work
. Same with this one. Another way of thinking
about open educational resource is, and open content is
called the five ours. This comes from David Wiley
, who is I like to think of David as
the godfather of open education. Open educational resources.
Anyway, he's been working in this field for
a very long time, and his questions to us
are Can anyone retain it? Can you keep it
? Does it expire? Um, do you have
to give it back? Um, can you keep
it as long as as long as you like?
Can you reuse it? Um, is this something
that you can use over and over again? Can
you revise it or remix it and then can you
share it? Can you redistribute it? Um,
so if you're wondering, is something an open educational
resource. These are two tests that you can use
to to answer that question, um, more specifically
with Creative Commons licenses, you'll see these four symbols
used. The little person - who is it by? this
tells you you always need to give credit and Creative
Commons licenses of a very specific way of giving credit
. Some licenses will have a non commercial icon.
Um, that says you can't make money off of
it, but you can use it. You can
remix it, The SA says: the license that
you used or the license on the content that you
used is the same license you need to apply.
This one is new. You didn't see this one
in the previous slide. This one says I'm not
really open. Um, it says you can -
You can share me, but you can't make any
changes. It's called no derivatives, so you can
share copies of those those kinds of things. But
you can't make any changes. Um, so from
most open to least open, copyright being at the bottom,
these licenses are applied on top of copyright.
So the author is not giving away their copyright.
They're just saying there are some rights that I'm allowing
you to have. Um, in addition
to the rights that you would have
fair use and otherwise with copyright material,
um, I will make sure you have a copy
of these slides if you would like them or linked
to them, if that's helpful. Um, this
chart shows us what some of the differences are between
, um, the licenses in the public domain marks
is well, is copyright in terms of whether or
not you can adapt something, whether or not you
can distribute something, if something requires attribution and how
fair use is affected because fair use is not affected.
Um, and that's that's something those of you
in the legal profession might be - um, you
know that that's something that is rather important. Is
fair use. I have these crossed out here
because we don't consider these to be open. They're
free online. These two anyway, not that was
in copyright, but these two are free online.
You can copy and share them, but you can't
adapt them. So there's value, but maybe not
quite as much value as we might want to see.
Um, first, any questions comments. Yeah
, right. Okay. So if you wanted to
, let's say you had a of photo montage that
had one of these licenses on it. You had
a collection of photos in one one piece, and
you wanted to take two of them out because they
weren't related. The point you were trying to
make and you wanted to add a few more in
you wanted to make changes or to adapt something you
would not be allowed to do that. Um,
under the no derivatives, you might be allowed to
do that under fair use. Um, but this
licenses you need to share as is, does it
Does it help? Really? Good question. Okay
. Anything else? Other questions? Yeah. So
if they want to get you to a stray,
but and I agree, you know, like having
possible is a good school. But when we,
for example, worked with faculty, we kind of
define we are much more broadly. For example,
the library will pay to license ebooks, journals
, and so they're free to students through that license.
And so, if the goal of OER
just to reduce costs of textbooks by using materials that
are free of students. Then I define that much
more broadly. Uh huh. Okay than this.
So I would call that affordability because textbooks that
are produced by commercial vendors be they e books,
multi user online versions or, um, anything else
- They're still - usually still in copyright. And
I think it's it's a good goal. The student
affordability is a good goal. But I would be
very careful in not calling that open because, um
, it doesn't meet the five Rs. It doesn't
fall under, you know, it doesn't fall in
this range. Um, so my point here and
what I want to get into is the philosophy behind
Open, and then look at what are the different
ways that's applied. And I think this is the
sort of, ah, sister strategy, if you
will, um, to open. But at times
there are conflicts between affordability and open. Um,
but I'd love to come back to that a little
bit later, If you like. You had a
comment or question. Really? Right. It works
. Bash everything. Uh huh. Um, so
scholarship and being a good scholar requires that we that
we site right. That's good. Scholarly practice attribution
is a practice that has to do with the terms
of these licenses. And copyright does not say you
have to attribute, um, you really should,
um otherwise, someone will assume that you made it.
It would be plagiarism if you did not.
So there's a fine, fine distinction between plagiarism and
an attribution. But excellent question also. Okay.
All right. So let's talk a little bit about
what the potential of these licenses are. Um,
I'll let you read this. We'll talk about it.
So this is one potential What does this allow
us to doo as educators, as people
in society? Um, what potential do these things
have? And I'm going to prompt you in the
next slide. I apologize for all of the red.
As we engage in understanding licenses, figuring out how
do we extract content? Um, figuring out how
to create and format that lots of
different kinds of people different maybe than us can use.
Um, as we engage with attributing third party
works, we change. We learn. Um,
we learn our students could learn. Uh, if
we're doing this, we're thinking we're communicating. We're
building. We're creating. Um, if our students
are doing this. We can use this as a
tool for building their understanding of some of these areas,
building student understanding of why it's not okay just
to pull an image off of the Web and use
it however you want, right? Why it's not
okay for us to do that. Um, for
a long time, I didn't know that you couldn't
do that. Um, but that's that's a copyright
issue. Um, these things force us into thinking
about and maybe teaching about information ethics. Um,
they force us into thinking and working on our skills,
our digital literacy skills, our information literacy or technical
literacy. Our software skills. It's a sort
of a doorway into which you can walk for your
own skill, development, your own knowledge development as
well as the development of students. Um, in
these particular areas, thoughts or questions about these?
Yeah, so for creating a format
others can use and learning from that barriers other people
face what what practices do you guys use to
make sure that you're creating accessible materials, both in
the sort of legal standards,
but also in just a real world standard where
your students, regardless of potential barriers, do you
have specific accessibility policies? Materials that we've
developed are intended to be accessible, screen reader accessible.
Um, you can't make something completely accessible because some
of the accessibility needs, um, conflict or compete
with each other. Um, but our goal is
to make sure that, uh, at least with
documents that they have a navigation structure that screenreader can
read that they have all tags, Um, that
all takes her old tags or descriptions for images that
that tell you in words what you would hope somebody
would see, a sighted person would see in that particular
image. Um, look, honestly, I think
that's what's important to me. Here is having that
conversation and figuring out what barriers might somebody face.
And how can we be really proactive in reaching those?
We had a lot of problems with this book
because it was written in LaTeX, and it
was very difficult to apply standard tagging and auto tagging
to it. We have since figured out how to
do that, but that was not ready when we
released in January. Um, so we're happy we
call this a beta because we had a lot of
things to figure out. Um, but I think
this is a conversation that we have with our accessibility
office. How can we do this? We have
a new project. How can we do this?
Do we need a transcript? Do we need of
, um, do we need captions? Do we
need, um, what do we need? What
, are we not thinking of that? Who are
we not thinking of for this material? Okay,
so some potentials here, Um, and then sort
of what problems could this solve and this gets to
John's question about affordability? This gets to other
kinds of things. Thoughts on what kind of problems?
This presentation is designed to make you curious. Okay
, um, I hope it's working. Um,
can you think of anything? And maybe this is
just rhetorical. If there's nothing that is coming to
mind. Yeah, with a lot of students,
as part of sort of the exploration phase of research
, are running into copyright issues, access issues with
library loan, things like that. And they don't
necessarily want to make the investment of time and resources
to get access to all of these things that are
hard to get. So in some ways I think
OER ideas can solve that.
Yeah. Yeah. So those of you
who are maybe not from an educational institution, or are
from other places, have traveled other places in the world
or you're from other places. You could also tell
us that. Well, we don't have, You
know, the full blown EBSCO package. We don't
have access to this suite of journals or, um
, in many places of the world. Um,
there are a lot of access issues to to content
that we take for granted here, um, or
in our in our educational institutions. So other thoughts
, problems this could solve. And I know you
also want to say, Well, what problems this
is create, right, and, let's hold
on to that till later. But yeah, perhaps
a role for ladies in terms of the long term
preservation. Uh huh. Everything something has this format
today. It's actually that right, Right.
Right. Yeah. So, for example, our
book that is in Microsoft Word, making sure that's
in a format that lasts for a long time.
Um, very important. Okay, So I want you
to just kind of benchmark this question
because I think it's a really important one to think
about. So, that's a question for
you to take home and to say, How could
I apply this? What does this mean in my
context? What does this mean in all the different
projects that I do, all the different things that they
work on? Okay, that was a thinking slide.
Okay, So, back to our outline.
Let's talk about open pedagogy. A couple of you
raised your hands. Um, when I said open
pedagogy and, um, probably a year ago I
would have gone What? What are you talking about?
Um, so a few examples that might be
helpful. Um, example of open pedagogy is a
non disposable assignment. It's something that ah, student
doesn't just say. Okay, I wrote this paper
my professor sought. I'm done. It's something that
is larger than the trash can. Okay, more
people are going to see it. Besides the professor
, what could this be? Some of these
projects might, uh, include projects in which a
student was to adapt or create something or there to
modify with the intent of sharing, um, block
posts that republic Wikipedia editing, um, creation and
remix of learning Resource is creation and remix of Of
Almost Anything, um, open pedagogy emphasizes, uh
, a different relationship between students and teachers in that
students are the ones who are actively participating in their
learning. And instructors are coaches, um, encouraging
students to invest in their own learning. This might
be a small part of a class. It might
be a large part of a class. Depends on
the maturity of the students. It depends on how
you can implement this without them getting overwhelmed. Um
, the philosophy behind this comes out of comes from
a Canadian philosopher, and I have a list of
citations will share with you that that site him,
Um, he's a French Canadian and some of the
themes that this kind of teaching, um, really
wrestles with our, um the balance between autonomy and
interdependence. You see this in the student teacher redefinition
of that relationship, freedom and responsibility. When I
think of this, I think of the first time
I joined the university as a faculty member and just
the tremendous freedom that I was given that I had
never experienced in the private sector or in the government
sector in terms of, uh, being given a
task and being told you could do this however you
like, um, or not being given a task
and say Go explore, Go learn, go figure
out what this program could look like. Um,
giving students that same freedom but the responsibility of it
is very transformational for me and then
democracy and participation. Who has access? Who can
participate? Um, this type of learning open
pedagogy. This kind of teaching tends to promote student
engagement. It's more motivational for students to, um
, be engaged in something that they're personally interested in
. There are a lot of, um, parallels
with deeper learning approaches, when students
take a deeper learning approach. So there are
a lot of benefits to this type of teaching.
There is value for the real world
So if you're having students do things like,
um yeah, contribute something that they've created to
Wikipedia or to creating a an article to be published
or doing some kind of outreach in their community that
there's really value for the world and that the students
are learning at the same time. I do have
a list of citations. Happy to share the slides with
you, but these four articles, not very long,
have all been really helpful for me and understanding
these concepts. I don't fully understand
this. I'm not also in the classroom, Um
, for 16 weeks every semester. Um, but
there's, um there's a lot of insight from these
really bright and creative people and I hope that you
get a chance to read some of these. So I'd
be happy to provide the slides to you and make
sure that you either ask me or sign in and
I'll make sure that you get them. Yeah,
with open textbook library. Yeah. Yep. Okay.
So a couple examples as I mentioned earlier.
David Wiley is sort of the godfather of open education,
Open educational resources, and he worked
with a group of graduate students in 2012 at his
university and took a book that was Project Management Book
and asked them to adapt the book to be
project management for instructional design in class.
Over several semesters the students improved this
book. Not all of their work was included in
the book. Probably not all of their work should
have been included in the book, right. But
for the students whose work was was excellent,
Uh, their work was included, and they are
a contributor, um, to a book, which
is a great thing tp come out of school
having your name on. Another example comes from ah
, faculty member in New Hampshire who decided that she
was really tired of having her students buy public domain
materials for her American literature class. And so she
got a group of students to compile a collection of
, uh, public domain works, Um, that
are legal, to, um, to use,
however you wish because they're in the public domain,
they're that old. Just created a book
for and with her students
, Um, she has a lot to say about
what that was like and what she learned on what
her students learned. So lots of potentials here.
Uh, I don't have the next slide that has
lots of details about what I think the potentials are
because I'm still trying to wrap my head around this
. Um, but I'd be curious to know from
you if you have thoughts. Let's think for yes
, the voice. Mm. Person. Mhm.
Yeah. Good. Um, one of the potential
that I've seen faculty that I've worked with that have
developed open educational resource, or just repurpose their course
using others open educational resource is, um they have
found student engagement has increased. And a lot of
this is not just because of affordability, although that's
part of it. But it's probably even more important
is that the professor or instructor takes a new look
at their course from outcomes based approach. What
is important that the students learned, as opposed
to just like, here's this textbook for economics.
One on one, you know, how am I
gonna use the text? So it creates a
different mindset with professors, which in turn, creates
different mindset with the students to write. Right.
So a professor is approaching a course with
ideas of what they want students to get out of
it and then building the material that they ask students
to interact with around those things rather than building the
course around the materials. Is that what you're saying?
Yeah, yeah. Legal. Several projects going
on Institution 11 in particular. Here's people in which
students put together essentially decision tree models for people
who can't afford attorneys. Okay, your story,
Clay. And which is that was not just the
area law itself. Musk intends to your inside who
but also teaches them. So basically, your programs
, what comes out of it essentially, not just
more like an act that it sort of does.
It is an interview question. You know, Is
this true or is this true? And this is
this question of it teaches them basic computer programming skills
and also sort of a moral, really world stuff
which, frankly, this falls down, Uh,
in terms of what? What is it like to
conduct a client interview? It's kind of because you're
necessarily walking through with client, but you at least
having in that process of enquiry I'm thinking about with
other people. And then, of course, some
things are better than out in the world. They're
used by some courts of jurisdiction. You you're actually
doing good in the world. So you had tell that you
were talking about, but my mind interesting. It
is how it sort of broaden them from thinking about
? Sort of. So I think doing this particular
area of law. How it actually, yes.
Thank you. Yes, property every lost. So
you value the transferability of knowledge. The transferability
approach from one. Uh huh. Exercise taking
it. If I return, you could pluck a
single idea. You realize this more organic, the
entire process. So this kind of learning is very
different than memorization. Um, it is more applied.
It's potentially more related to what students will be
doing after they finish school. Um,
if somebody like a student is using this kind of
approach, Um, I really appreciate your insight.
It's really interesting. Other thoughts. Yeah.
[inaudible comment from audience]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, So
, lots of applications. Yes.
. Some of the focus on just including its mhm
stuff flying. Listen, cultures are holding if you're
interested. So also, that is transit by our
cultural background. Interest in most cases, question by
engaging students really before patients. Thank you. The
silent they create not just what they say. Oversight
get. That's terrible. French. Okay. Yes
. Yeah. Please wait. Yeah, Thank you
. Yeah. For 17 years post Soviet country,
I want to say in mobile, you can see
university a picture of one. The library is empty
. So list, um, their books and libraries
on. So, for my opinion, uh,
it's the form. Give a good possibility students to
attract, maybe electronic form library. Uh, this
is a different. And the kinds now the waste
truck students in library on 24 is one way to
be successful. Yeah, Great. Okay. Um
oh, I do have a slide. I'll let
you read that later because I told you
I didn't. So, um, I want to
move on quickly because we're we're getting close to being
out of time, and talk about sort of the
philosophies that are behind, um, or the values
that are behind these two types of practices. Uh
when I tried to consolidate my thinking about what
open education is. Um, I think it turned
out to be very similar to what the description is
that we read initially that it's a movement. It's
a philosophy. It's practices. It's tools. It's
resources, um and so I've adapted, um,
, some work from a colleague in Washington state who
, um, has six different attributes of what open
education is. So, uh, and this might
be a good time to compare what is open education
versus what are some other approaches to both, um
, teaching and to publication. Um, it's outward
facing. Um, if you write an article,
it's for your audience. It's maybe not for your
tenure packet. Maybe it is for your tenure packet
, but it's more important for your audience to be
able to read it. So this value may drive
you to say, How can I self archive my
work? Can I publish in an open access journal
? Can I, um uh, if I edit
a journal, can I flip my journal to be
open access instead of something that's closed? One of
the articles I cited earlier, um, is in
a journal that is a closed access journal. And
I find it extremely frustrating because I would really like
to share that article and say, Here's the link
. Go get it. Um, but I can't
. I can share the link, but maybe you
don't have a subscription. Um, maybe you don't
have a really great interlibrary loan department. Maybe
you can't get it, um, so outward facing
, um, this being a value of how we
act in the academy, who needs access, and
how do we make sure they have it? Who
needs what kind of access? How do we make
sure they have it? Um, it's inclusive.
Um, so we think about all kinds of barriers
. We have our own barriers. Um, and
other people may have different barriers. What might the
barriers be? How can we be intentional? As
we're thinking about publishing, we're thinking about teaching.
Um, sometimes students who are asked to write a
blog post don't want their real name out there.
That's okay. You don't know what their
history is, and you want them to be safe.
Maybe there's a restraining order against the ex.
Whatever. Um, um, that's a barrier.
So those are important barriers to acknowledge. If you're
engaging in these kinds of practices, it's not just
the need for screen readers or of, you know
, other kinds of, um, traditional accessibility,
things that we may think of, but other kind
of barriers to keep people safe and keep them,
um, really in in control of their environment.
Um, we engage with open licenses and try to
be push ourselves to be as free as possible.
Try to push ourselves to be as open as possible
. Try to say Okay. So I'm not gonna
make any money off of this thing. Um,
but if somebody else can build a really great and
modify it and make something really great out of it
, go for it. Maybe somebody can
make something I hadn't thought of before. Um,
feedback and collaboration. Part of working, teaching,
writing in the open. Both is giving feedback and
receiving feedback. Sometimes feedback hurts. Um, but
feedback is really important because it helps us know.
It helps us understand what kind of quality we're producing.
It helps us understand what kind of value we're
producing. Um, and collaboration is really valuable.
It's hard to create something all by yourself.
Sometimes it's easy, but maybe there's more value when
when you work together, um, implementing, incorporating
new ideas, both about teaching, about research,
about other kinds of things. Um, some of
you and, um, coming in here I've been
able to talk with and have told me Ah,
little bit about the kinds of pedagogy is you're looking
at that. Want to know more of
incorporating new ideas and seeing
what does this work? Um is there a research
base for it? Does it work in my classroom?
What does and what doesn't? What does
it do? How does it work? Giving credit
This is how you would credit the author
, the creator of this image? Um, copyright
symbol. The name of the work with a link
to the work, the name of the author and
the name of the license. This tells everybody I
didn't make this. It was made by Luis Prado
And ithas this license on it. And
if you want to see the actual thing, you
can click here and see that same picture.
This gives credit to Luis, and
, uh, it also tells someone I didn't create
this myself. Finally, I think these
practices can be used as a lever, um,
for a lot of different things in in our society
and the university. Um and I'm excited to see
in all of your different context what you how you
end up using this information and this thinking about these
approaches. So, um, I'm going to challenge
you to figure out what you
can do to make what you do more open.
Um, what you can do to make it more
valuable for others how you can explore and wrestle with
some of these values and and maybe implement some of
them. Um, this is a lot to wrap
your mind around in terms of an approach, but
I think it's I found it to be very gratifying
and, um, really exciting in terms of something
that I can give to other people and say,
I think there's something in here that's really exciting.
I think there's something in here this really effective and
that can change your practice and can make what you
do more helpful to other people and even more valuable
and interesting to yourself. So, um, find
out what's in your bag and figure out how you
configure it. So thank you. Happy to
talk further and just wanna make sure before
you go to pick one of these up. So
I think we have not very much time. Yeah
, great in the back. You want to see
the slide? I didn't show. You okay?
Yes, sir. Sorry to make you dizzy.
Thanks. Okay, So this was the What is
the potential for open pedagogy? This is not comprehensive
and part of the reason I didn't
show this to you is because what I told you wasn't
there. And then I realized, yes, I
had made this slide. Also, because I
think there's a lot more that could be added to
this than I have thought of. So yeah,
you mentioned open access journals. Any of them
are pure. Yes. Yes. S O P.
Review is not contingent on open access or vice
versa. E, Could she go another way?
Yeah. Yeah, there are some? Yeah.
Not not all there is the site called Think, Check,
Submit. That's sort of a three step way of
evaluating publication opportunity. And it it asks authors to
think through, um, you know, where is
this? What are the ethics behind this journal?
Um, is it a valuable thing is that it's
essentially a response to some of the predatory publishing that
we we see. Think, check, submit.
Hey, there's the directory of open access journals,
and I don't think it has, but it government
is. Yeah. Yeah, they have. Ah
, there's several not societies, but but groups that
you could belong to you. But you must adhere
to the ethical standards of publication for those particular groups.
And those are good markers of journals that
have good practices. Um, think check
Submit has links to all of those different ethical bodies
. Um, yeah. Sorry. I thought I
know. Yeah. One plan in your presentation.
I think it was at the end of the movie
are part you briefly alluded to what might be potential
downsides to this. Okay. Briefly said that.
So does anything come like, are there? Are
there downsides, though? Sure. Um well,
I think that what the objections that I usually hear
are Well, what about somebody who takes my work
and does something with it that I don't like?
And my response to that is to say it could
happen. You know, you also could stub your
toe on the sidewalk or miss the bus like there
are risks in life. There are rogue
actors. Um, so we do what we can
to deal with rogue actors. Um, there are
some. I've heard of stories where some of the
open stacks books are being sold at a huge cost.
Um, somebody's making money off of them.
They can, um, but buyer beware. You
know, check to see if you can get this
material for the price of which was, you know
, the lower price it was intended to be sold
at. Um, there are some instances where vanity
publishers have compiled creative Commons license things and republished them.
Well, it gets your work out there.
Um, is that bad? Um, there are
some instances where, um, someone has said,
Okay, we're we're embracing and creative Commons license practice
, and then they change their mind. You can't
take the licenses off. It's like feathers in a
pillow. It's out there. You get all of
them back, right? Okay? It depends
on what your motivation is. It depends on how
risk averse you are. Um, I think there
, um I wouldn't advocate for sharing national security data
with a creative Commons license. You know, there's
some things that should be, um, secret for
a time based on what they are. Um,
so, yeah, we're at American University. What
do you think? You all work with security kinds
of things. Just a second. It's gonna take
a slightly different direction with him to say, you
know, there's There's a certain amount of privilege to
being able to publish your work for free, creating
a culture where information is free. So If you're
in a secure position where you receive a salary for
the work you do. You don't have to worry
about making ends meet through somebody paying for you for
your property. But if we create a
culture, wherein people develop an expectation that
information is going to be free and you're not attached
to a salary institution and you don't rely on somebody
buying your work for you to make ends meet.
. So certain creative work where folks aren't receiving a
salary to do what they do. If we create
this major cultural shift, wherein consumers
expect that the information they want can and should be
free, we've created a big economic shift that could put
people who don't have the privilege of a full time
salary faculty position at risk. I think there's,
I think, Um, yeah, that's
a reality. Um, and I don't have an
answer. I'm not saying that that's a reason to
never, ever published open access. But it's a
thing to think about and to recognize that if you
can put your material out there for free, you
talk about real world applications. So, students,
you know you're using student labor to produce intellectual property
, and they're paying for the privilege. Get that
exposure. Yeah, I think they're gonna graduate
And want to be paid for that same level of
work. Where is their salary going to come from?
Ithink there's There is definitely an ethical dilemma
in including students in this that it needs to be,
that needs to be voluntary. Um, because I
don't ever want to say that student labor should be
used to create things against student wishes;
that's not appropriate. Um, but I think you
raise a valuable point of if we're in a society
where some people are embracing these practices because they can
, and some people are not because they can't,
what kind of disadvantage does that put them at?
Um, so how do we spread the advantages
to others? I guess you know, doing what
we can do? Um, yeah, some downside
Although very much in favor of open education
resources, another potential downside is a
loss of quality. For example, textbook publishers get
a lot of bad press,but the
truth is, you know, the textbooks they produce
are very high quality and usually right. I
can't say all for anything. Yeah, generally of
high quality, with a lot of extra materials,
like ancillary websites. Not saying that open textbook can't
be of high quality. There are many that are,
but there's the potential for that. Uh, mm
hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So I think looking
at those kinds of resource is why are they being
created? Is this is this a pedagogical experience?
I this of an outcome output experience and then getting
savvy about. And I think this is a real
for libraries getting savvy about what makes for a good
publication. Um, good questions. You had something
you wanted to add. Oh, okay. Yeah
[inaudible comment from audience]
And that actually, we have something very
similar. Virginia Tech. That's where the fundamentals of
business book lives. And, so those
are good places to put the more static kinds of
resourcesa very stable place where they can
live.
[inaudible comment from audience]
. Mhm. Thank you. Yes. Smiling big
issues for our libraries, which waas like a separate
on, Uh, especially in my university. Small
university in south left, The director of library ways
To be open because, you know, when this small
university there is a little bit it was difficult to
reach them. There's another off library travel the
students in the library. So now the library.
Mogoba, have a big large list off the question
. Have developed the library. A progressive developing in
like I say you things like Yeah, yeah,
yeah. Good. Good. Okay. Um alright
. Two more. Two more comments. Questions You
wanna go first? Well, okay. We're away
for free. What? This is it was There
are a number of grants givers still paying authors to
produce works that are open license. They're just going
front here. [inaudible]
How many? A few?
A few? Yeah. Yeah. Did you have
something else? you wanted to add just one.
What did you use to create the two textbooks?
The print versions or the electronic versions? or Okay
, we did, uh, they're both available in
PDF. They're both available Print on demand we
use two different vendors for the print on demand.
Um, I learned a lot about parts of a
book, about parts of a cover, about front matter, about
formatting. Um, the first book was authored,
and Microsoft Word converted to pdf and, um,
sent divided into chapters posted, um, and
then the whole pdf we published through Lulu Press,
which is a print on demand vendor. Um,
the color version was a lot more expensive than I
wanted to be, but the author really wanted print
on demand available. The second book was written in
LaTeX, which is Ah, a mathematical notation
language that is very helpful for, um, equations.
And, um, there are a lot of
equations in the book. So we said Yes.
This is your native language. Please write in it.
We will support you, and we'll figure out
how to do this. Um, that book is
only available in pdf We will release when the that
version is updated in the summer will release the LaTeX
code. The idea behind that project is and
this is a faculty lead project. Um, the
faculty member's idea is to create a body of work
that can be, um, pulled from using a
remix system. So there are three different ways of
teaching Electro Magnetics. Um, it depends on what
? Your preferences and in order of things, if
you like to use certain kinds of charts and graphs
in your work and so being able to pull from
that system to create what you want in the order
in which you want to create it. So if
you look in the book, there are module numbers,
little tiny numbers before each of the sections in
the chapters and those are discrete pieces that can be
moved. They can also be edited within. So
we, um very much struggled with print on demand
from LaTeX to pdf, um,
because our files kept getting rejected from the printer
so we have figured out we have a script now
that cleanly allows us to have those not at all
kinds of, um, strange figures here and there
. Um, and that one was went through Amazon
create space. Um, we are working with I
would like to also work with Ingram, um,
spark Ingram Press, um, to, um,
do a print on demand version, but the timeline
was too long. Um, for when we needed
a version that students could purchase from a point
of sale vendor, um, for them. So
that's why we ended up going with CreateSpace.
So thank you very much for your time. I
hope this has been has given you some curious things
to be curious about. And, um, it's
really nice to meet all of you, so thank
you. Right.