Feature: Open education resources
g However, materials from UCL Press have been indexed on several large- scale international platforms including JStor, as well as Google. ‘This is how to make the materials from our international collaborations available and visible – from our experience with research monographs, this has been hugely successful,’ he said. For her part, Eastman-Mullins, with West
End Learning, has developed the Syllect platform which screens, curates and matches resources to course topics. A first version covers entrepreneurship and
A growing impact
innovation, and other disciplines are going to follow. ‘We make sure, for example, that [an OER] is relevant for a discipline, copyright is cleared for re-use, and links are stable,’ she says. ‘We’ve been testing this with partner institutions and faculty, and will launch this during summertime.’ Eastman-Mullins also believes the
platform will help with the potential OER quality issues that concern many in academia. ‘A lot of the time, quality comes by word of mouth but the challenge comes if you’re tapped to teach a course that
you’re not an expert in,’ she said. ‘So we’ve built recommendations into our process... and we’re now thinking of building impact metrics to the platform.’ Eastman-Mullins launched West
End Learning early last year, based in Winston-Salem – a North Carolina city home to six higher education institutions – well placed for hands- on development and collaborations. However, what she hadn’t initially factored into her business venture was the college closures that coronavirus would bring, and she feels the pandemic has had its pros and cons. On the downside, some local
programmes from community colleges or other institutions have stalled, while staff deal with fallout from Covid-19. But on the upside, she believes many lecturers and academics are now ready for ‘something different’. ‘They’re already over the hurdle of teaching differently and as people come back to campus, faculties everywhere know that in many ways, there’s no going back to the way it was,’ she said.
“Materials from UCL Press have been indexed on several large-scale international platforms, including JStor”
Demand for high-quality educational materials in developing nations is constrained by sparse human resources and overwhelming financial pressures – but OERs can make the difference. Free, open and reusable learning and teaching resources can help narrow the gap between rich and poor, a fact not lost on Philippa Benson, managing editor of CABI Agriculture and Bioscience, an OA journal from BioMed Central. ‘Open educational
resources are critically important for researchers and educators in low- and middle-income countries who have to make difficult decisions about how to spend money,’ she said. ‘Climate change is already having a huge impact on food security, planetary health and equity, and
8 Research Information June/July 2021
good-quality OERs are becoming increasingly important in helping people get basic information they need to address these issues.’ While CABI Agriculture and Bioscience publishes OA research on such issues, recently it has launched free webinars on how to successfully publish research. These include detail on the Chorus initiative that aims to optimise a publication’s metadata in CrossRef, data repository requirements, and other practices that increase OA publications’ visibility. ‘Many researchers
[in developing nations] don’t fully understand the importance of information. It’s so important we get this out there, so research is designed with open science in mind,’ said Benson.
In a similar vein, CABI
A&B has also launched its ‘Meet an editor’ series that provides free interviews with section editors on critical research areas, and how to get research published. ‘We really need to have this global outreach,’ said Benson. Eventually, the managing
director is hopeful that a new kind of open journal will emerge, where the researcher can access an article, click on a figure to reach its dataset, and then retrieve the underlying open data for his or her own work. ‘This is already happening,’ she says. ‘A journal or top-level educational resource becomes a portal or gateway into an entire ocean of scientific information that anyone can draw on and learn about the experiences of others.’
She highlighted how OpenStax, a
non-profit Rice University initiative that publishes peer-reviewed, openly- licensed textbooks that are free online, recently received $12.5m from philanthropic organisations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. OpenStax’s goal is to ensure no student ever has to worry about textbook costs again, and intends to double the size of its library with the latest raft of grants. ‘There’s this new awareness coming out of the pandemic,’ says Eastman- Mullins. ‘I really think the OER movement will now continue to grow, even though we’ve had a slight lag in the past year.’ And Ayris holds similar aspirations.
‘I’d like to see UCL’s OER and open access e-textbook offering to be widely appreciated and used by our academic community, and all those that can benefit from resources made available in this way,’ he said. ‘My hope is that OERs are going to be part of the new normal.’
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