COOLSIG are delighted to announce their latest webinar. Join us on Friday October 7th at 11:00am for an exploration of open educational resources (OER) and open textbooks with two experts in the area. Join the webinar via Blackboard Collaborate.
As institutions face rapidly increasing etextbook costs as they move away from print materials in response to the pivot to online learning triggered by the COVID pandemic, and longer-term trends in academic publishing, there has been renewed interest in open textbooks. A number of universities have set up new open eBook presses or dedicated lists to host or publish open textbooks including University College London, University of Edinburgh, NUI Galway, University of Sussex and Manchester University. Open textbooks have long been the common form of open educational resources in North America, with funding to support this activity, however to date, they have not seen extensive uptake in the UK, where engagement with OER tends to be supported by learning technologists rather than dedicated OER librarians.
This webinar will explore different models of open textbook and OER adoption and support in the UK and the US, and look at different approaches for managing open content effectively.
Lorna M. Campbell, OER Service Manager at the University of Edinburgh, will talk about sustainable institutional support for OER and open textbooks, and introduce the Open eTextbooks for Access to Music Education project, a student experience project at the University of Edinburgh that repurposed existing MOOC content to co-create a new open textbook.
Dhara Snowden, Textbook Programme Manager at UCL Press, will talk about the processes involved in establishing a new OA textbook list including, commissioning authors, developing and publishing OA resources, and the lessons learned from publishing The Textbook of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, in 2016 (as part of JISC’s Institution as eTextbook Publisher project)
Biographies
Lorna is a learning technology service manager at the University of Edinburgh’s Open Educational Resources Service. She has over 25 years experience working as a learning technologist, and a longstanding commitment to supporting open knowledge and open education. Lorna blogs about openness and knowledge equity at Open World.
Dhara is Textbook Programme Manager at UCL Press, the UK’S first fully-OA University Press. She joined the team in May 2021 and is responsible for establishing a new OA textbook list. She is an experienced commissioning editor and has held editorial positions at Rowman & Littlefield, Edinburgh University Press and Bloomsbury Publishing and was included in The Bookseller Rising Stars in Publishing in 2019.
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