Education Commons^™

Faculty Perceptions Of Open Educational Resources In Cyber Curriculum: A Pilot Study, Alan Stines

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

The cyber landscape is growing and evolving at a fast pace. Public and private industries need qualified applicants to protect and defend information systems that drive the digital economy. Currently, there are not enough candidates in the pipeline to fill this need in the workforce. The digital economy is still growing, thus presenting an even greater need for skilled workers in the future. The lack of a strong workforce in cybersecurity presents many challenges to safeguarding U.S. national security and citizens across the world. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation defines Open Educational Resources (OER) as teaching, learning, and research …

Collaboration Between Faculty And The Library Using Oer For Curriculum Development, Kelly Whealan George, Anne Marie Casey

Publications

• High Cost of Textbooks
• $1,240 – expected cost of textbooks in 2018-2019 for 4-year college students (CollegeBoard, 2019)
• 43.8% of Florida students spent $301 or more on textbooks in Spring 2018 (Florida Virtual Campus, 2018, p. 9)
• 63% of ERAU students surveyed in summer 2018 found textbooks more expensive than expected

• Case Study to explore textbooks in online courses
• Collaboration between the Library and the Faculty create value for the university and student population by incorporating OER into the course development process.

Scholarly Piracy Vs Scholarly Activism: Where Sci-Hub Fits In The Information Literacy Landscape, Fred Rascoe, Laura Burtle, Mariann Burright, Melanie Kowalski

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

In recent months, the site Sci-Hub (https://sci-hub.io/) has gained attention for providing easy access to any scholarly journal article, without regard to the user’s subscription status, and without requiring payment. For articles that are not already open access, this activity infringes on the copyright in the articles, generally held by publishers, and, for articles obtained via a library subscription, is presumptively a breach of the license between the library and the publisher. Regardless, this activity has proven to be a popular and expedient way to break through access barriers to important scholarly information for students and faculty, especially those in …

Publishing And Archiving Trends In Open Access: Preliminary Results, Jenny Oleen, Diana Farmer, Livia Olsen

Kansas Library Association College and University Libraries Section Proceedings

Agricultural researchers are engaged in the growing open access (OA) movement, either publishing in OA journals or archiving in OA repositories. The latter is reflected in the use of the institutional repository (IR) at Kansas State University (K-State), a land grant institution. K-State library faculty are analyzing faculty publications to determine the publishing and archiving habits of selected researchers. Reviewing copyright agreements from journals reveals those with policies for archiving post-prints in an IR; articles by these authors are compared to their total three-year article output to determine the efficacy of the current IR program at K-State. Chosen for analysis …

Cost-Savings Achieved In Two Semesters Through The Adoption Of Open Educational Resources, John Hilton Iii, T. Jared Robinson, David Wiley, J. Dale Ackerman

Faculty Publications

Textbooks represent a significant portion of the overall cost of higher education in the United States. The burden of these costs is typically shouldered by students, those who support them, and the taxpayers who fund the grants and student loans which pay for textbooks. Open educational resources (OER) provide students a way to receive high-quality learning materials at little or no cost to students. We report on the cost savings achieved by students at eight colleges when these colleges began utilizing OER in place of traditional commercial textbooks.

The Adoption Of Open Educational Resources By One Community College Math Department, John Hilton Iii, Donna Gaudet, Phil Clark, Jared Robinson, David Wiley

Faculty Publications

The high cost of textbooks is of concern not only to college students but also to society as a whole. Open textbooks promise the same educational benefits as traditional textbooks; however, their efficacy remains largely untested. We report on one community college’s adoption of a collection of open resources across five different mathematics classes. During the 2012 fall semester, 2,043 students in five different courses used these open access resources. We present a comparison between the previous two years in terms of the number of students who withdrew from the courses and the number that completed the courses with a …

One College's Use Of An Open Psychology Textbook, John Hilton Iii

Faculty Publications

The high cost of textbooks is of concern not only to college students but also to society as a whole. Open textbooks promise the same educational benefits as traditional textbooks; however, their efficacy remains largely untested. We report on one community college's adoption of a free online psychology textbook. During the fall semester, 2011, 690 students used this book. Compared to students using a traditional text in the spring of 2011, students who used the free online textbook scored higher on departmental final exams, had higher GPAs in the class and higher retention rates.

A Preliminary Examination Of The Cost Savings And Learning Impacts Of Using Open Textbooks In Middle And High School Science Classes, John Hilton Iii, David Wiley, Shelley Ellington, Tiffany Hall

Faculty Publications

Proponents of open educational resources claim that significant cost savings are possible when open textbooks displace traditional textbooks in the classroom. Over a period of two years, we worked with 20 middle and high school science teachers (collectively teaching approximately 3,900 students) who adopted open textbooks to understand the process and determine the overall cost of such an adoption. The teachers deployed open textbooks in multiple ways. Some of these methods cost more than traditional textbooks; however, we did identify and implement a successful model of open textbook adoption that reduces costs by over 50% compared to the cost of …

Examining The Reuse Of Open Textbooks, John Hilton Iii, David A. Wiley, Neil Lutz

Faculty Publications

An important element of open educational resources (OER) is the permission to use the materials in new ways, including revising and remixing them. Prior research has shown that the revision and remix rates for OER are relatively low. In this study we examined the extent to which the openly licensed Flat World Knowledge textbooks were being revised and remixed. We found that the levels of revision and remix were similar to those of other OER collections. We discuss the possible significance and implication of these findings.

Open-Access Textbooks And Financial Sustainability: A Case Study On Flat World Knowledge, John Hilton Iii, David Wiley

Faculty Publications

Many college students and their families are concerned about the high costs of textbooks. A company called Flat World Knowledge both gives away and sells open-source textbooks in a way it believes to be financially sustainable. This article reports on the financial sustainability of the Flat World Knowledge open-source textbook model after one year of operation.