SCHEV Open Virginia Advisory Committee (OVAC) Webinar Series Part II: Open Education: Student Success and Faculty Autonomy Fall 2020

ESL Composition II Handbook Chris Soholt and Yu Bai, Northern Virginia Community College This presentation showcases the ESL Composition II Handbook developed for ESL 41 at the Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) Loudoun Campus. The Handbook is being piloted in Fall 2020. This presentation includes both the instructor and the students' feedback to the Handbook and insights into the development of OER. We hope that our work will encourage our fellow faculty to embrace, adapt and create OER to reduce the cost for students and to improve the quality of education by making it more personalized and adaptive.

Using Open Science Framework (OSF) and GitHub to Promote Student Training and Research Transparency
Anne M. Brown, Virginia Tech Open access practices can be a cornerstone of undergraduate research training to encourage best practices with data and research reproducibility. Our research lab utilizes platforms such as GitHub and the Open Science Framework (OSF) consistently and with a structure to train and promote research outcomes and products. In using these tools and introducing them to students early, we are promoting a culture of research training and reproducibility in our students, while also documenting and providing all workflows and tutorials that our students utilize in an open way. This approach provides a digital footprint of student work, strengthening their portfolio and recognition in the field, and making our research and training more transparent. This talk discusses the creation and organization of a research lab centered OSF and GitHub page and how it is used by students and researchers.

Privacy and Surveillance in Digital Courseware Judith Thomas, University of Virginia Much digital courseware, including “inclusive access” products, pose a threat to the future of open education. Purporting to address the textbook affordability crisis, publishers have devised automatic billing models for products that gather a lot of student data, which is then put to various uses, including product development and learning analytics. Students must agree to privacy terms in order to access the materials, and have no say in how their data is gathered, analyzed, and used. In this talk we look at a few privacy notices from major vendors and discuss the ethical implications of this type of data capture.