2024 Open Education Conference

The OER textbook Why Do I Have to Take This Course? A Guide to General Education, published through the Remixing Open Textbooks through an Equity Lens (ROTEL) project, helps students think about why they take General Education courses and what significance they have. It allows students to do something they often do not have the opportunity to do: contemplate the potential reasons for developing certain learning outcomes and skills as well as the applications to their professional and personal lives. Sections include stories, research, testimonies and reflections about student success, and activities, which can be used in their entirety or in parts as needed. In this workshop, we will explore General Education through the main lens of the book: what the late Civil Rights activist and Congressperson John Lewis called "good, necessary trouble,” an approach that applies anti-racist and universal design pedagogy. We will workshop how to utilize the book inside and outside of the classroom.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Devise methods for using the OER textbook Why Do I Have to Take This Course? A Guide to General Education inside and outside of the classroom.
• Apply anti-racist pedagogy and an equity and inclusion approach to exploring the significance of general education with students.
• Develop strategies supported by OER to provide students time and resources for engaging with the why of general education learning.

Language barriers should not hinder knowledge acquisition. Yet, in 2024, most OER are in English, limiting accessibility and impact. The 2024 OE Conference offers an opportunity to explore how AI can bridge the cultural and linguistic divides through OER localization. Our focus is on AI's role in translating and culturally adapting academic or pedagogical documents. We'll discuss AI's transformative impact on OER, its current applications, and potential developments for language diversity. Examining case studies, we'll engage the audience in assessing AI's ability to convey complex concepts in OER localization, AI's limits like contextual understanding and biases and discuss how collaborative efforts within the open education community could impulse community-driven AI training and strategies for embedding AI into OER development that would optimize AI localization tools' effectiveness to promote learners' engagement and multilingual accessibility in online learning.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Gain insights on the potential role of AI in providing OER Localization;
• Enhance their knowledge on how AI-driven translation and localization tools can help adapt OER to different languages and cultural contexts, making academic or educational resources more accessible and culturally sensitive and adapted to OER users.
• Explore how AI tools can handle the subtleties of cultural context and local dialects in knowledge documents or educational materials, ensuring content relevance and cultural sensitivity.

Those who create MOOCs often consider the “openness” of their course simply to mean that anyone can enroll. At the University of Michigan Center for Academic Innovation, we challenge that in order for a MOOC to truly be “open”, it must be openly licensed and accessible. With over 250+ courses in our portfolio supporting learners across the globe, we will retrospectively review and discuss the positive social impact of our openly licensed, accessible courses and share our hopes for the future to continue to remove barriers to lifelong learning. We provide faculty perspectives on their motivation to create truly open learning experiences and discuss case studies on how our MOOCs have been reused. Ultimately, participants will gain insight into how to nudge stakeholders into prioritizing the “Open” in Massive Online Open Courses.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Explain why “open” also means accessible
• Amplify and advocate for accessible courses
• Explain faculty motivations for applying Creative Commons licenses
• Generate an elevator pitch for faculty on why they should openly license their MOOCs and other online content

This work introduces an experimental OER pedagogy of "Embodied Sonic Meditation" to teach music in higher education. From UC Santa Barbara to the University of Colorado, from in-person to online remote teaching, the author designed and taught a music technology and mindfulness arts course that can appeal to students from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines from music to math, chemistry, engineering, creative literature, and fine arts. In addition to a focus on technical skills, the course provides a non-hierarchical, inclusive, open, and student-centered "maker" theme, supported by state-of-the-art technologies and mindfulness practices. Through conducting course assessments, diverse in-class/out-of-class activities, and engaging students with OER materials, sonic meditation, and group activities, students enjoyed the OER courses and provided positive evaluations. The data shows that "Embodied Sonic Meditation" effectively enhances the creative open education learning experience.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Understand the principles and practices of "Embodied Sonic Meditation" as an innovative OER pedagogical approach in higher education in music and related interdisciplinary STEAM fields.
• Integrate technology and mindfulness arts into their creative teaching methodologies across diverse academic disciplines to promote DEI as well as students' creativity, academic performance, and wellbeing.
• Develop skills in creating inclusive and student-centered learning environments that foster creativity and collaboration.
• Implement state-of-the-art OER materials, open-source technologies and mindfulness practices to enhance their teaching effectiveness and student engagement.
• Gain insights into the effectiveness of Open Educational Resources (OER) in promoting creative and open education learning experiences.

Historically, female psychologists have been notably underrepresented in Introductory Psychology textbooks, perpetuating the stereotype that the field's trailblazers were predominantly male. Despite extensive research on gender bias in commercial textbooks, no research thus far has focused on the inclusion of female psychologists in OER textbooks. As OER scholarship looks beyond issues of cost to the realm of social justice, it becomes imperative to evaluate its efficacy in addressing female gender representation. For my study, I conducted a comparative content analysis of five commercial Introductory Psychology textbooks and three OER counterparts to examine the extent to which such OER textbooks are inclusive of female pioneering psychologists. Join us as we discuss evolving OER scholarship, the findings of our comparative content analysis, and consider strategies to enhance diversity within OER content creation, furthering the principles of recognitive justice in OER development.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Gain insight into the shift of focus within OER scholarship from cost-saving to broader social justice initiatives, with a focus on recognitive justice.
• Explore the findings of the comparative content analysis regarding the inclusion of female pioneering psychologists in commercial and OER Introductory Psychology textbooks.
• Consider strategies to enhance gender representation and diversity within OER content development, advancing the principles of recognitive justice.

Innovative research designs are needed to understand the experiences of teachers using OER in challenging contexts like the economic and refugee crisis in Lebanon. This presentation will showcase the use of photovoice in a research collaboration with Lebanese Alternative Learning (LAL), a local nonprofit that formed a knowledge partnership with teachers through Tabshoura, a digital learning platform that houses content aligned with the Lebanese curriculum for K-9 students. Photovoice invites participants to submit a photo and a brief caption in response to a prompt in order to share their full experiences. This approach captured how OER that is created locally with and for teachers can empower teachers to fill in the gaps for students who have been prevented from attending school consistently. This project centers the experiences of teachers to support LAL’s efforts in growing Tabshoura and to further understanding of how OER can support teachers in opening education for all.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Understand the importance of local OER in non-Western contexts.
• Recognize the innovative uses of OER in Lebanon.
• Design and conduct research using photovoice.
• Evaluate teachers’ experiences with OER for continued growth of OER.