Learning Portal - OER Toolkit : Collaborating

What the Research Says 

• Quality of Instructional Materials. Sapire and Reed’s (2001) study showed that faculty collaboration on the redesign of open course materials improved the quality of instructional materials--specifically in terms of the materials' ability to scaffold student learning across knowledge domains and to offer enhanced, inquiry-based learning experiences.
• Student Learning. Azzam’s (2017) study showed that medical students’ collaborative contribution to Wikipedia articles cultivated core medical competencies while helping students to build their identities as digital contributors and socially responsible physicians. The study also revealed how students’ engagement with the content led to improvements in the quality of health-related knowledge disseminated in the global public domain.
• Faculty Learning. Petrides et al. (2011) found that collaboration with peers around the integration of an open textbook into a statistics course led faculty participants to increase their collaborative practices in subsequent course planning efforts.
• Sustainability. Petrides et al. (2008) found that when faculty collaborated in the creation of OER, they were more likely to continue creating and sharing content online on a consistent and ongoing basis--suggesting that communities and collaboration play a role in sustaining OER.

Research Cited:

• Azzam, A. (2017). Why medical schools should embrace Wikipedia: Final-year medical student contributions to Wikipedia articles for academic credit at one school. Academic Medicine, Vol. 92, No. 2.
• Petrides, L., Jimes, C., Middleton-Detzner, C., Walling, J. and Weiss, S. (2011). Open textbook adoption and use: Implications for teachers and learners. Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning, Vol. 26, Issue 1: 39.
• Petrides, L., Nguyen, L., Jimes, C., and Karaglani, A. (2008). Open educational resources: Inquiring into author use and reuse. International Journal of Technology Enhanced Education, Vol. 1, No. 1-2: 98-117.
• Sapire, I. and Reed, Y. (2011). Collaborative design and use of open educational resources: A case study of a mathematics teacher education project in South Africa. Distance Learning, Vol 32, No. 2: 195-211.

 What Faculty Bring to OER

• Knowledge of course objectives

• Understanding of student needs and learning styles

• Expertise in evaluating resources for use and application in a course

• Experience in constructing and authoring instructional materials

• Expertise in various pedagogical approaches and curriculum implementation

What Learning Commons Staff Bring to OER

• Expertise in accessibility, and often accessibility expertise

• Understanding of copyright and its pitfalls, and of how to select and apply open licenses

• Knowledge of how to find things and to make things discoverable by others

• Understanding of the best way to share resources for future audiences

• Expertise in technology for online authoring and publishing

• Overall information literacy expertise

• Experience with the content of college coursework

Open Textbook Sprints

Open Textbook Sprints are collaborative writing sessions inspired by code sprints from the software development world. The goal of a book sprint is to create a book from scratch in a very short time frame. The idea is to gather instructors, instructional designers, library staff, trained facilitators, and others in a face-to-face environment to write and compile a textbook into an online format.

Reach out to eCampus Ontario to see if there are local book sprints that you can join at your institution. Or see the tools section of the module below for information on setting up your own open textbook sprints.

Attribution:

Definition of open textbook sprints is a derivative of the definition provided in Roundup of the Geography Open Textbook Sprint, by BCcampus, licensed under CC BY 4.0

Open Textbook Review

Faculty at Ontario post-secondary institutions can collaborate as paid reviewers of open textbooks. Contact eCampusOntario for more information on how to participate in the review process.

Canada 

• eCampusOntario.ca seeks to support quality online learning experiences across Ontario, through workshops, conferences, and resources--including its open textbook library.
• BCcampus was the first province in Canada to implement an open education initiative, and have been been paving the way for the rest of the nation to adopt OER.
• Canada OER Group is a BCcampus initiative comprised of members representing open education initiatives across Canada. The group seeks to ensure that provinces are openly and actively sharing ideas and supporting each other on similar projects.
• OER universitas (OERu) is a consortium of institutions and organizations across five continents. In Canada, OERu offers free online university courses through various institutional partnerships across provinces so that learners can gain formal credentials.

International

• The OER World Map seeks to provide a comprehensive picture of the global Open Education OER movement. Users can search by country for information on people, organizations, services, projects stories and events related to OER.
• The OER Knowledge Cloud provides access to knowledge and research on Open Educational Resources through a searchable, centralized database.

How to collaboratively develop open-source textbooks (in hindsight!)

The guide linked above from South Africa’s Free High School Science Texts provides tips on how to set up a project to produce open textbooks collaboratively.

There are a few platforms on the web that seek to support post-secondary educators in the collaborative development of OER and open textbooks, including:

• Pressbooks for eCampusOntario Members (opens in a new window) - provides free access to a Pressbooks EDU account for anyone currently affiliated with one of our member institutions (opens in a new window). Pressbooks is an online formatting and publishing system that makes it easy to create professional, well-formatted print and digital resources. Pressbooks is a Canadian-built, open-source tool built on WordPress.
• Rebus Open Textbook Community, based in Canada, is an online space to support educators in the collaborative development of open textbooks.
• OpenStax Community Hub offers an authoring tool and workgroup structure to enable collaborative authorship by faculty around OpenStax textbooks, which span math, science, social science and the humanities.