Students and open education

For an article I am writing this week, I’d like to showcase work by students relating to open education and Open Educational Resources (OER). I’m writing this brief post mostly to gather comments from others on examples I don’t know about!

Here are a few things that come to mind:

  • Student advocacy on campuses and what it has accomplished: there has been some great stuff happening at UBC due to student advocacy around OER, and I’ll talk about that. What else has student advocacy accomplished?
  • Students creating OERs: I will speak about work I know of here at UBC where students are creating OER, including Wikipedia projects and also other open educational resources. What else is out there?
  • Students contributing to open textbooks: Yes, open textbooks are OERs, but I’m separating them out here just for now. I know that Robin DeRosa has involved students in creating open textbooks, and this blog post from the Conversations on Open Education for Language Learning blog talks about a couple more (by students in classes with David Wiley and Lixun Wang). What other such projects do you know about?
  • Anything else that would fall under students working to create, revise, or promote OER?

Please provide your ideas in the comments!

 

Update Aug. 21, 2017: Several people replied on Twitter instead of in the comments below, and in order to keep all of the contributions in one place, I’m embedding the tweets here.

12 comments

  1. One area that might be useful to discuss is the role of co-op or work learn students as key supporters for OER projects. For example, in the 2017 BCcampus Open Education Grants, students are providing direct support in four of the seven OER Grants, two out of three Ancillary grants and will be providing advocacy support for at least two out of three Zed credential grants. Student work includes the creation and adaptation of openly licensed anatomy and astronomy diagrams, the creation Engineering questions using WebWork, the adapting of WordPress modules to open textbooks and case studies. Beyond projects co-op and work learn students are often hired by libraries, teaching, and learning centers and by individual project coordinators to support OER by creating and adapting textbook using Pressbooks, finding and creating open educational resources and developing video resources. One of the ways that we are trying to help to connect and support these students in this work at BCcampus is by proving an Open workshop this year, where we will help students working to support open gain new competencies around licensing, Pressbooks, and open publishing overall. Most importantly students will be able to share their experiences and approaches to supporting open practice.

  2. We’ve had students involved in authoring the Open Logic project. Students in classes using it have provided feedback (suggestions, typos, etc.).

  3. Hi!

    Regarding content the Hamburg Open Online University published a big show case of content projects where students are actively involved. The publication is unfortunately only available in german right now – and only as large PDF/epub so Google Translate does not work right now, but maybe you’ll find another suitable tool: http://www.hoou.de/p/2017/04/26/publikation-hoou-content-projekte-der-vorprojektphase-201516-der-hamburg-open-online-university-erschienen/

    Best regards from Cologne, Germany!
    Matthias

    1. Thanks so much for this, Mattias! I can at least point to it in the article and those who can speak German can read it! I do like showcasing things from different parts of the world as much as I can…

  4. Christina, I am looking forward to the blog post. One area that I have noted both working at UBC and now at BCcampus is the role of co-op and Worklearn students who are hired for terms to support the development of OER or Open Textbooks. These students often play important roles in the project teams and not only create, license and adapt OERs but also contribute to the content created within the project.

    For example, in the 2017 BCcampus Open Education Grants, students are providing direct support in four of the seven OER Grants, two out of three Ancillary grants and will be providing advocacy support in two out of three Zed credential grants. Student work includes the creation and adaptation of openly licensed anatomy and astronomy diagrams, the creation of questions Mechanical Engineering questions using WebWork, the adapting of WordPress modules to open textbooks and case studies. Beyond projects co-op and work learn students are often hired by libraries, teaching and learning centres and by individual project coordinators to support OER by creating and adapting textbook using Pressbooks, finding and creating open educational resources and developing video resources. We are working on a couple initiatives at BCcampus to help to connect these students together across projects and to highlight the important work they are doing in this area.

    The second example I wanted to bring up is Chemwiki and Libretexts at UCDavis an open resource where students have been part of the process of creating entries. Libretexts hires to help develop many of their open resources.

    https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/chemwiki-free-alternative-costly-textbooks/
    https://chem.libretexts.org/

  5. Hi Christina,

    I have a whole course that is designed as open with the main OER here: https://wp.me/P4Ng5z-7r (I self-host it)

    It has been running like that for four years now… and the idea is that with a diverse class, we can learn from one another, from reflection, and from connection.

    1. Thanks, Laura! This looks really interesting. I am trying to find specific OER created by students and somehow I’m not succeeding. I’d love to link to some of those! Or maybe that’s not what you meant…maybe the OER is the course content itself, which is also great!

  6. There are also some resources I’ve gotten via email or otherwise, which I’m posting here:

    1. Athabasca University: Dr. Shawn Fraser pointed me to a site for a course in which students are providing in-depth examination and critique of various research methods. They are doing this for several courses; here is an example of one such site. It is for a Master in Health Studies course. Students worked in groups to create the pages for each type of research method.

    2. University of British Columbia: David Gaertner teaches a course called Indigenous New Media and Digital Storytelling, and students do digital storytelling projects for the course. A number of them are public:

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