Introductions (Essential)
Introducing the OEN
Who is the Open Education Network? The Open Education Network (OEN) is a growing, vibrant, and supportive community that advances the use of open educational resources and practices. We work with more than 1300 higher education institutions and are based at the College of Education and Human Development's Center for Open Education at the University of Minnesota. We are not a vendor. We are higher ed. We believe that by working together, we can transform higher education.
How do we do that?
We are an action-oriented organization advancing and championing ideas that will have a lasting benefit for the students, faculty, and staff of academic institutions and the future of learning.
We have developed strategies that support the adoption and publishing of open textbooks. We provide shared solutions - such as the Open Textbook Library, slide decks for faculty outreach, and data collection to track faculty adoptions and subsequent student savings. Our community shares their experience and expertise, allowing us to compile best practices for open education through guides, templates, community conversations, webinars, and the Certificate in OER Librarianship.
Our focus on action means our community is tackling challenges in open education. We see this in our working groups (currently, there are three working groups meeting regularly on the following topics: Accessibility of OER; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and OER, and OER as Scholarly Work), and in our extremely active Community of Practice.
At the center of what we do and who we are is our community. Our Guiding Principles and our community's input and needs steer our work and actions.
Our focus in this training
Our focus in this training is going to remain on the adoption and use of open textbooks. We know that publishing is vital to the open education eco-system. We also know it is a massive undertaking that requires training, resources, infrastructure, and time (otherwise known as a whole other workshop!). If you are interested in learning more about the OEN's publishing program, please reach out to Karen Lauritsen, our Director of Publishing, at open@umn.edu.
The scope of the training will also be on open education.
What do we mean by "open education"?
A Creative Commons license means that a resource is "open"; it is free plus permissions--forever! So, Open Educational Resources (OER) are able to be copied, mixed, shared, kept, edited, and used; OER can be retained, reused, revised, remixed, and redistributed.
The benefits of OER are plentiful, and here are just a few:
- OER remove financial barriers for all students and provide immediate and forever access
- OER facilitate the free exchange of knowledge
- Give more control to faculty
- Can be used to innovate pedagogy
- Are scalable (free forever!)
Why Open Textbooks?
We don't focus on textbooks in the workshop because we love textbooks. We focus on textbooks because of the following reasons:
- Textbook costs hit on a major pain point for many students
- Faculty understand textbooks
- Faculty know how to adopt textbooks
- Faculty effort (vs. alternatives) is kept at a minimum - textbooks can provide content for a complete (or nearly complete) course
- Textbooks have a unique academic impact (more on this later!) for students
Never has accessibility been more critical than during the pandemic when students are home and possibly unable to access their traditional textbooks. It's important to note that open textbooks must be downloaded only once to be used free, forever, and they can also be printed out.
So now you know a little bit about who we are, why we do what we do, and what we will focus on in the rest of the training. The next module will help to situate this work in a bigger context. Are you ready?