Open
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Open Access Week is October 20-26, 2014!
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Diane (Dede) Dawson, Science Liaison Librarian This year marks the eighth annual Open Access Week – an international advocacy event that seeks to promote and raise awareness about open access (OA) and several closely related areas such as open education and open data. So… what is open access? “Open Access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder” (from Peter Suber’s A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access). The OA movement developed as a response to the unsustainable, higher-than-inflation, journal subscription increases experienced by…
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Open Textbooks Easily Available Through BC Project
[social_share/] [social-bio] There has been a growing amount of talk around the U of S, and higher education in general about open textbooks. These are digital textbooks that are freely available to learners and customizable for instructors. Textbooks are expensive, something particularly clear to first year university students. This fact has had a shift toward open textbooks a priority of University of Saskatchewan Student Union President Max FineDay’s since his first term. The provincial government has also this issue on its radar as evidenced by the Saskatchewan government signing a memorandum of understanding to cooperate on the creation of open educational resources with Alberta and British Columbia. There are several…
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New Research Guides at the University Library: LibGuides2 Update
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Shannon Lucky, Information Technology Librarian As we enter a new Fall semester the University Library has launched a major update to our Research Guides. These guides, built on the new LibGuides2 platform, are carefully curated selections of discipline and course specific resources combined with information on how to conduct research, writing skills, and other valuable Library tools. To explore the new guides, go to the University Library homepage and choose “Research Guides” under the Tools and Services column on the left-hand menu, or go directly to http://libguides.usask.ca. There are 3 types of Research Guides you can find through the University Library: Subject Guides are maintained by your…
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How Do We Define Success in an Open Course
[social_share/] [social-bio] A version of this post was originally published on Heather Ross’s blog on June 24, 2014. In June I attended the Society for Teaching and Learning In Higher Education (STLHE) conference in Kingston, Ontario. As part of the conference I presented, along with Nancy Turner and Jaymie Koroluk (University of Ontario Institute of Technology), a poster about the Introduction to Learning Technologies (ILT) open course that the GMCTE offered earlier this year. During discussions around our poster as well as in other sessions related to open courses, I had a number of conversations with colleagues about just what is “success” in an open course. Completion rates are often used…
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Defining Open Access
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Jeff Martin The Internet has transformed the ways in which academic research can be accessed. Researchers can now grant any person connected to the Internet unfettered access to their work at any time without cost. This free access is commonly called open access (OA). Open access is a property of a research article. An OA article does not require payment from a customer (no price barriers such as subscriptions) and has reduced permissions barriers (such as most copyright and licensing restrictions). Some commentators also argue that OA is the ideal way that academic research should be published. The four main types of open access are “green” repositories,…
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Open Textbooks – An Instructor’s Perspective
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Karla Panchuk This post originally appeared on the blog Petragogy on March 23, 2014. I’ve wondered before about the feasibility of creating an open textbook for introductory physical geology. I got as far as sketching out some of the ideas and stopped when it became clear that a lot of work would be involved. My most recent thinking about open textbooks was motivated by learning some startling facts from my students: (1) At sea level, water boils at 1007°C. (2) In areas on the ocean floor where new ocean crust is produced, water can be heated up to 10,007°C. Setting aside for a moment the fact that that my students…
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What Do We Mean by ‘Open’?
[social_share/] [social-bio] As I wrote about in an earlier post, the GMCTE is launching what we believe is the first “open” online course from the University of Saskatchewan. Introduction to Learning Technologies is being offered simultaneously to both a small blended cohort (mostly online, with five face-to-face sessions) and a much larger open group of participants. This course is designed for faculty, instructors and grad students who wish to learn more about effective uses of learning technologies. Participants will explore pedagogically-informed use of blogs, podcasts, social bookmarking and a host of other tools, in addition to considering the implications of copyright and Creative Commons, digital citizenship and digital literacy for…
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Supporting Your Flipped Classroom with Open Resources
[social_share/] [social-bio] We’ve talked about flipped classrooms in this space before. In a nutshell, flipped classrooms involve taking the regular lecture style content out of the classroom and assigning it as homework prior to coming to class. The majority of the time, this involves having the students watch videos, often created by the instructor, to prepare for class. Recently I came across the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) and have considered how it would couple with a flipped classroom. The Open Learning Initiative “is a grant-funded group at Carnegie Mellon University, offering innovative online courses to anyone who wants to learn or teach. [Their] aim is to create high-quality courses and contribute…
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GMCTE to Launch First Open Online Course From USask
[social_share/] [social-bio] On January 21, 2014, the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching Effectiveness (GMCTE) will launch the first open online course (OOC) from the University of Saskatchewan, Introduction to Learning Technologies. This course, aimed at novices, will invite participants to explore pedagogically informed use of blogs, podcasts, social bookmarking and a host of other tools, in addition to considering the implications of copyright and Creative Commons, digital citizenship and digital literacy for their teaching practice. The course was initially designed to be a blended course with a small group of participants coming in for face-to-face class meetings five times throughout the term, but with the bulk of the materials being open to…
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An Update on Open Courseware at the U of S
[social_share/] [social-bio] Last year we ran a blog post about the Open Courseware (OCW) initiative which is a joint venture of ICT, SESD and the ULC at the U of S. This portal offers a gateway to every course offered at the UofS and provides a space where instructors may choose to open up course information or learning resources to the world. There has been a lot of talk around the university lately about syllabi being open through OCW, which is now in accordance with the Academic Courses Policy. I thought that these conversations make it an appropriate time to write another post on this initiative. Instructors have the option to…