I spoke to Lucy May, Scholarly Communications Librarian (@UoMLib_Lucy), and Helen Dobson, Scholarly Communications Manager (@h_j_dobson), based at The University of Manchester, about open access publishing at the University and the interest they’d received from students in self-publishing journals. The University of Manchester Library has explored its relation to publishing over the past few years… Read more
This post was originally published on OpenStax.org on May 1, 2018. How one university is using OER to address a STEM teacher shortage Higher education is expensive. College fees, accommodations, and travel costs impose mounting pressures on today’s students. The increasing cost of many of today’s university textbooks can sometimes be the straw that breaks the… Read more
“We don’t want to have somebody who could be a fantastic teacher [and] didn’t really get there because they didn’t have access to the materials to develop their subject knowledge.” Andy Fraser is a senior lecturer in the Education School at the University of Sunderland. With a specialism in science and maths pedagogy, Andy focuses… Read more
Robin Freeburn is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Science and Sports, The University of the West of Scotland (UWS). Teaching across all levels of the Biomedical Science and Bioscience degrees both Robin and some of his colleagues use OpenStax materials as part of their first and second year teaching. The module Cells and… Read more
Stephen Murphy, Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Digital Technology at Birmingham City University uses a range of openly licensed materials for his teaching, including open textbooks. Steve has been “heavily involved” in open source initiatives for the past 15 years and current involvement includes developing examinations for Linux with the Linux Professional… Read more
The New Year saw Rob and I head to ASE 2018 at The University of Liverpool to showcase OpenStax STEM textbooks to science educators. A massive thanks to the dozens of participants who stopped by to talk to us during the event, both to find out more about open textbooks and OpenStax but also talk about… Read more
For the penultimate open textbook workshop of 2017 I had the privilege of spending time with fantastic University of Sunderland colleagues to discuss how we can help increase access and participation in education through the use of openly licensed resources. This blog post summarises our discussion. The workshop was organised by Andy Fraser, Senior Lecturer, who is… Read more
Viv and I headed up to Stoke-on-Trent recently to conduct two open textbook workshops with staff from Staffordshire University. We had a great mix of participants from librarians, senior lecturers to senior management, with fantastic discussions on all aspects of openness and the potential of open textbooks. Some key points from both workshops: In general,… Read more
Yesterday I attended my first open textbook workshop with practitioners from outside the project at a workshop led by Viv Rolfe at the University of Sussex. We met in the Employability and Careers Centre in the Library, and the session was attended by academics, subject support specialists, librarians and subject specialist librarians, technologists, specialists… Read more
Over the course of three weeks during late August and early September we had the pleasure of Dani Nicolson and Daniel Williamson of project collaborators OpenStax (US based providers of more than 20 open textbooks in high enrolment subjects) visiting the UK as part of their month-long #EurOpenStax tour. Their visit kicked off with several days in… Read more
