Similarly, the proliferation of OER degree programs at 38 community colleges announced last summer will reduce costs on an even larger scale. And we have only begun to scratch the surface of how OER can help improve student outcomes, create opportunities for new pedagogies, and give institutions ownership over their course content. Ultimately, OER is about what you do with it. As New York has recognized, OER can take funding and effort to implement at scale, but solutions to important problems typically do. If there is a turning point for OER, it will be when all of the problems with the affordability, accessibility and quality shortcomings in the traditional course materials market are solved.
Anderson, executive director of higher education, Association of American Publishers. But by embracing OER, the State of New York is showing its commitment to helping students graduate on time while reducing student debt. Education publishers agree that digital learning has great potential to help students. As it has done in so many different industries, digital technology has changed the way students learn and professors teach in higher education.
The digital materials of today from commercial educational publishers are no longer simply a PDF of a textbook. They include features like adaptive quizzes, practice activities and gradebooks.
Turning Points
With these digital course materials, professors can customize lectures based on class progress, and materials can be quickly updated when new information is found or new discoveries are made. They provide students with immediate feedback and offer guidance in the areas they struggle with at any hour. OER are just one of many models that professors can use as they decide what works best for their class. They also make sure the material can help improve learning outcomes and increase retention while seamlessly integrating with a learning management system.
While there is a vast amount of free educational content available at our fingertips online, there is still a need for professionally researched and vetted materials produced by learning companies. Educational publishers collaborate with colleges and universities to help make these digital learning materials and platforms even more affordable. Education companies can help deliver accessible, interactive and personalized digital content by the first day of class, the cost of which are far lower than traditional hardbound print textbooks.
Additional information
This model can help facilitate the transition from print to digital, making it easier for students to access their course materials at a discounted price. Will it be used to seed the creation of an OER enterprise? Will it be parceled out to state higher-ed institutions with an instruction to create local development programs? Will it be offered to individual authors in the form of grants? Many observers find it baffling that professors are slow to adopt let alone write open textbooks, and my experience suggests that whenever someone insists on doing something you find baffling, that suggests that you might not know as much as you think you do about the phenomenon in question.
The new announcement from New York is further evidence of the growing trend of OER adoption across higher ed and K At the Hewlett Foundation, we have been making strategic investments for years in the infrastructure and connective tissue necessary to bring OER to scale, and we continue to see demand grow for the incredible number of high-quality OER textbooks and materials available through sources like OpenStax College and the Open Textbook Library.
As in any paradigm shift, we expect to encounter bumps in the road and unexpected obstacles, and implementing OER is no exception. However, we continue to be pleased at how nimbly the OER field tackles each challenge that comes along, embracing the notion of continuous improvement whole-heartedly, and always working to ensure that students get the best education possible with the outcomes they deserve.
Building capability for such a dynamic knowledge environment includes a conceptual perspective on knowledge as evolving rather than fixed, a skill set for extending knowledge and knowledge practices in innovative ways, and above all a sense of agency and self-efficacy for this kind of knowledge-building as part of contemporary professional and vocational workloads.
That process demonstrates how the knowledge can be — and must be — adapted for particular contexts, how new research evidence can be applied to improve outcomes, and reveal instructional challenges that remain as open questions being actively addressed. Cheryl Costantini, vice president of content Strategy, Cengage. The idea that we need to address these two items together, not separately, really represents a new, smart way of thinking. The announcement in New York is not a surprise, as the state has always been a leader when it comes to OER initiatives. Regardless of the amount of the investment, the same barriers exist when it comes to discoverability of OER sources, durability and sustainability of the materials created and winning professor buy-in.
Is New York's decision to spend $8 million on OER a turning point?
Cleary, the OER movement has come far, but Cengage research indicates that the next 5 years will be a real tipping point for OER use, which could triple from 4 percent to 12 percent of the primary courseware market and 19 percent of the supplemental adoption market. Overall, these most recent advancements in affordability are win for all of us. The more we can do to increase access to education and remove barriers for learners, the better off we are.
Some things have changed over the last ten years, and some have not. There is greater energy in the OER movement now, but the core problems affecting the uptake of OER in higher education remain unchanged. The first of these is that the overall quality of the materials is all over the place. It takes a truly industrious instructor to find things that can be used. There is a place in the marketplace or the ecosystem for a demanding review publication of OER products so that instructors can separate the useful from the half-baked. The second point is that many instructors simply don't have the time to put into OER.
One of the great advantages of the traditional textbook is that it makes life easy for the instructor. An instructor whose tenure decision will mostly be based on his or her publications and not on skills in the classroom has little incentive to adopt OER. Finally, OER is "open" in two ways: It's very hard to find a topic taught in universities for which there isn't also a free lecture available from someone world class. Academics have to add value in different ways, he says. An academic's success should not be measured by the number of research papers they produce, but in how they communicate their work to a wider audience, suggests Sarah Hewitt, assistant professor in the department of biology at Mount Royal University.
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As a firm believer in making research useful to people through "broader impact" and "maximising their understanding", she is in essence, a flipped academic. Working as an 'embedded scientist', Hewitt focuses on effective science communication by assisting scientists in the field: There are thousands of people doing great research but who struggle to answer why their research is important," she adds.
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Hewitt believes the role of the academic should be more about training people to think, problem-solve, and communicate their subjects effectively in and out of formal education. Achieving impact through greater engagement with communities and colleagues is an idea that is also being reflected through the way new university buildings are being designed. Simon Doody, partner of Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios which designs higher education buildings, says they have seen a noticeable change in the way academic work spaces are being designed: But this development is not always welcomed, he added, and there is still a "prevailing desire for academics to undertake their individual research work in a withdrawn environment, separated from other academics so they cannot be disturbed.
Bruton acknowledges that not everyone can or wants to be a flipped academic an idea he describes as being a "potentially disruptive innovation" that many may find threatening and hard to relate to , but he believes that the existing generation of academics "need to understand and ready themselves for a possible changing reality".
One academic who is embracing the need for a shakeup in the way individuals and their institutions see their role in higher education is Tom Fisher, professor and dean of the college of design at the University of Minnesota. What kind of education is necessary here and now? These kinds of fundamental questions animate the efforts of the 35 educators gathered here to reflect on their work and imagine the road ahead.
Each is a person of vision and commitment, each willing to dive into the contradictions and swim with confidence through the wreckage toward a distant and often indistinct shore. Each is able to negotiate with intelligence and grace the line between school as it is and education as it could be but is not yet.
The flipped academic: turning higher education on its head
Together they ignite our imaginations, and urge us to leap into the whirlwind with courage and hope. The Journey in Comics. This book is a testament to the important things in life: The authors in this book provide clear, narrative evidence that the hope for the future a more democratic education can bring is more than just wishful thinking and that, in fact, it can be and has been a concrete reality.
The stories clearly build on the notion that schooling, in whatever form it takes, should be built on the natural curiosity and excitement for learning all children seem to have before they enter formal schooling. Without a doubt, readers will not forget this book and I give it my highest recommendation as a must read for students, and parents, and educators, and policy makers. The book is inspiring and comforting. If you read it, you might become inspired and more hopeful, too. It is awesome to get some stories of how and what these great people have done, and glimpses of their thought processes, decisions and struggles.
What has been accomplished by the writers whose stories grace the pages of this book is clear and a tribute to the efforts they have put forth on behalf of children everywhere. The amazing thing to me is that none of these authors has lost hope, even in the face of schools that had to be closed and criticism from authorities in academia, in traditional education, and in their communities. Several of them have had to put down their dreams for a while, but none has given up. Our young people depend on that hope and on the fact that there are others who follow after us to build on what we have done or to create something new and stronger than has gone before.
This is a book to stir pride in those in the trenches at the same time as it stirs admiration and courage to create on behalf of all children, among those who have yet to join in the effort. I was engaged and fascinated to read about the ways in which so many different people came to their life's work in advocating a vision of education that greatly differs from the teacher-directed, knowledge-fragmented, meritocratic, potential-limiting, standardized education we find in the majority of schools these days.