Open Education Week
Open Education Week is a celebration of the global Open Education Movement, an effort to promote free and equal access to education for people across the world. Its goal is to raise awareness about the movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide, and to highlight the value of Open Education to Clemson.
Schedule of Events
2021 Events:
Keynote: Open Pedagogy and the Empowerment of STEM Learners
Monday, March 1st, 2021 @ 1pm |
Dr. Karen Cangialosi, Professor of Biology at Keene State College introduces an innovative strategy to STEM teaching that involves having students learn through creating and sharing scientific knowledge online. Students do so using blogs, openly licensed web publishing, and in communications with each other on Twitter. A creative application of open pedagogy, her approach offers a refreshing alternative to tests and structured lab activities. It gives instructors the opportunity to contextualize learning in a larger world outside of the classroom, and makes education more relevant, inclusive, equitable and accessible. Integrating open pedagogical practices into teaching also builds trust and community with students, engaging them more fully in course content and design and promotes their agency as learners. It encourages student engagement in the most potent way: to not just be consumers of, but contributors to knowledge. Applicable to a variety of disciplines and well suited for face-to-face, online, hybrid and blended teaching, open pedagogy allows instructors to utilize the web for boundless discovery, creativity and analysis, and as a venue for dialogue with the wider public. Join Dr. Cangialosi for a discussion of her teaching activities, and she will also ask you this larger question: How can your role as a teacher in higher education have a greater impact in influencing our larger culture?
Introducing WeBWork (Open Source Homework Systems)
Tuesday, March 2, 2021 @ 1pm |
Are you concerned about the high cost of homework systems for students in STEM subjects? Would you like to learn about free and low-cost options that you and your institution can use to alleviate their financial burdens? These alternative homework systems not only provide students cost savings, but they also allow instructors flexibility in designing practice exercises and assignments. Join Dr. Matthew Macauley from Clemson’s School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences for a demonstration of WeBWorK, the school’s experimental open-source homework system, and a discussion on low-cost homework alternatives for students.
Speaker: Matthew Macauley, Associate Professor, Clemson University
PressBooks Demonstration (Open Publishing)
Wednesday, March 3, 2021 @ 1pm |
Are you a faculty member seeking to publish an Open Access book or a free (open) textbook? Do you know there is an online self-publishing platform that is simple to use, has a plugin for integrating LaTeX, and produces publications that can be easily exported and distributed as eBooks, high quality PDFs, and in print-on-demand formats? Are you also aware that some faculty are using this platform as a teaching tool, creating textbooks with students using it as a class assignment? Join us for a demonstration of PressBooks, the revolutionary self-publishing platform you can now access for free through Clemson Libraries and learn how you can get started using it.
Speakers: Sarah Fennessey (Pressbooks), Yang Wu (Open Resources Librarian, Clemson University)
Copyright and Course Materials: A Chat with the Experts
Thursday, March 4, 2021 @ 2pm |
Copyright and course materials are frequent topics of discussion in higher education. And no wonder: how can you provide your students access to the books, articles, and cases studies that they need without infringing copyright? Perhaps you’re concerned with protecting the content that you have created for your course. And how do open educational resources (OER) and Creative Commons licenses fit in?
Join three expert panelists as they discuss copyright and answer your burning copyright questions surrounding OER, course materials, fair use, and open licensing.
Panelists: Dick Kawooya (University of South Carolina, School of Information Science), Tucker Taylor (Library Futures), John Morgenstern (Clemson University Press)
Using Open Textbook writing to Engage Freshmen and Sophomore Students During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Friday, March 5, 2021 @11am |
The switch to hybrid and online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic has created many difficulties for instructors in directing and motivating students. For freshmen and sophomore students, the sudden change in the mode of instruction has created more emphasis on them to self-learn, something that many are not familiar with. Three librarians at Clemson University have developed an approach to address this problem. Combining open pedagogy and active learning, their teaching strategy asks students to work together to write an open textbook on their class subject. Students write the book through number of scaffolded assignments aimed at making them more self-directed, creative, and confident in learning on their own. This presentation highlights their experiences and insights in applying the approach to STS 1010, a course on information literacy in the fall of 2020.
Speakers: Yang Wu (Open Resources Librarian), Anne Grant (Instruction Coordinator), Megan Palmer (Assessment Librarian), Clemson University
2019 Events:
Active learning using Open Educational Resources (OER) in Stem Education
Monday, March 4th, Noon-1, Brown Room, Cooper Library.
Join Dr. Chrissy Spencer from Georgia Tech to learn about how their introductory biology curriculum morphed from commercial textbooks to open education resources (OER), which are low- or no-cost online resources that support their interactive classroom approach to teaching biology to majors and non-majors in a flipped classroom. The session will highlight their no-cost OER and low-cost online homework system, present evidence to support the efficacy of the OER and flipped classroom approach in Georgia Tech’s large-lecture biology courses and provide interactive ideas about how to build a student-centered classroom.
Chrissy Spencer is a Senior Academic Professional in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech, where she teaches, advises undergraduates, coordinates teaching assistants, and conducts research on biology education centered around open education resources. She is an author on all three open education textbooks produced for the introductory biology curriculum at Georgia Tech and is the course coordinator for the non-science majors course, the Biology of Sex and Death.
Copyright for Scholarly Publication and Teaching
Tuesday, March 5th, Noon-1, Brown Room, Cooper Library.
Are you preparing to submit a manuscript to a publisher? Do you have questions about copyright, permissions, or what’s covered under fair use? In this workshop, Dr. John Morgenstern (Director of Clemson University Press) will guide you through the basics of copyright from the perspective of academic publishers. The workshop will also answer questions specific to your research publications and teaching.
Introduction to WeBWork
Thursday, March 7th, Noon-1, Brown Room, Cooper Library.
Did you know that there is an open source homework system for classes that involve equations in mathematics, science, engineering and business? Dr. Matthew Macauley from Clemson’s School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences will explain the benefits of WeBWork for both students and educators.
From Wikipedia to Full On OER
Friday, March 8th, 11:30-12:30, Room 309, Cooper Library.
Want to know how Wikipedia can be used as a tool for student assignments, creative publishing projects and a way to teach them about how online information is created and used for deception? Dr. Mills Kelly, a Digital Historian from George Mason University will discuss how Wikipedia and other free web resources can be used in humanities education.
Mills Kelly is a Professor of History at George Mason University and the President of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. His most recent book, Teaching History in the Digital Age, is available free online from the University of Michigan Press.
Finding and Citing Open Multimedia
Monday, March 11th, Noon-1, Brown Room, Cooper Library.
Would you like to create a media-rich course? Aren’t sure how you can? April Pelt, Digital Learning Strategist from Clemson Online and Jan Comfort, Engineering reference Librarian at Clemson Libraries will demonstrate how to locate open images, videos, and other multimedia and incorporate them into your Canvas course. They will also teach you how to create assignments for students that incorporate using copyright and proper attribution of multi-media sources.
Using Open “Texts”
Tuesday, March 12th, Noon-1, Brown Room, Cooper Library.
Tired of the limitations of traditional textbooks and their rising costs? Discover possibilities offered by OER textbooks, class activities, assignments and other courseware, as well as open courses. Yang Wu, Open Resources Librarian at Clemson Libraries will show you the growing variety of high quality OER textual materials for your higher education and k-12 teaching needs and discuss considerations for using them.
Starting a Large Scale Open Educational Resource Effort
Wednesday, March 13th, Noon-1, Brown Room, Cooper Library.
Mr. Jeff Gallant, Program Manager for Affordable Learning Georgia, one of the most successful initiatives to promote low cost, affordable learning in the US will share his insights on what universities can do to increase student success through the adoption, adaption and creation of OER, quality learning materials that are available to students cost free.