OEG Live: Audiobook Versions of OER Textbooks (and AI Implications)

A conversation that started here in OEG Connect with a question on Audiobook versions of OER spilled over into several channels making for a compelling conversation for our unstructured OEG Live webcast show.

Join us for this episode June 2 where we hope to talk about the potential advantages of making open educational resources available in audio form, the ways in which it has and is done. But also, and more timely, we want to discuss implications/potentiality for the rapdily emerging AI tools to hopefully make it easier to produce audio (compared to recording and editing). Also, what are things we might do collectively to increase the amount of text content available in audio form?

When (in your local time): 2023-06-02T17:00:00Z

Watch live on YouTube (or later). No registration required. We can accommodate up to 8 panelists in our Streamyard Studio, but everyone is welcome to participate via the live stream and using the chat to ask questions/send comments that can be brought right into the studio. Or reply below with your questions or thoughts on this topic.

Guests

Below are confirmed guests for this show (more details about their work in the replies below).

  • Amanda Grey @AmandaGrey Open Strategist at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, started this whole conversation with her question
  • Brian Barrick, political science professor at LA Harbor College and creator of the Audiobook of American Government OpenStax text and has been actively experimenting with AI for audio production.
  • Steel Wagstaff @steel product manager and tech guru at Pressbooks and has an active interest and platform insight for media in OER
  • Brenna Clark Grey @bgray educational technologist at Thomspon Rivers University, multi podcaster, AI questioner
  • Delmar Larsen @DelmarLarsen Director of LibreTexts has been actively deploying machine language for OER translation and has experience too with using it for audio production.
  • Jonathan Poritz @poritzj has created an entire Audiobook version of the of the Creative Commons Certificate

Keep the conversation going right here-- what is your experience with audio versions of OER text? Do you know of any specific examples? If you have been involved with projects like this, how have you gone about producing it? What feedback have you gotten on it? What are you using or experimenting with in regards to AI and audio content?

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Stay tuned as we have just invited a few more guests to be in our studio, hoping that they have interest on short notice.

I was fortunate to sit in on an AI in Education online workshop at LA Harbor College co-facilitated by our guest Brian Barrick who will absolutely be worth listening to here next week. Slides from that sessions are available https://bit.ly/lahc-presentation-slides

Just confirmed! @DelmarLarsen will be in the studio too and sharing some insight into his experience on doing audio versions of LibreTexts content
 from the original topic that started this:

Hopefully @annarmills and @AmandaGrey got my emails and are interested in being on the show :wink:

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Worth sharing here (as mentioned in original topic thread) is the Audiobook version of the Creative Commons Certificate for Educators and for Librarians published by @poritzj released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Note the variety of formats (entire book, hours long) and chapter sections, plus his careful attention to attributing CC licensed media contained within the audio. An example Section 5E.3: Creating and Sharing OER (18:05; 23MB):

He’s got a voice made for audiobooks! We hope Jonathan maybe chimes in with how he produced the audio (and why).

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For some more fuel for discussion, I have written a bit about a radical change (for me) in podcast production of OEG Voices, going from a decade+ of waveform editing in Audacity to a new tool, Descript. It uses AI to transcribe audio, but also ties audio and sound together, so much of my editing is now via a primary text interface.

It has been a game changer for my podcast production (but took a while to get there).

Also mentioned:

And we now have a full house having confirmed for Friday that we not only have Amanda Grey from KPU who’s OEG Connect post started this whole thing and Brenna Clark Grey from Thompson University will be in the studio too.

This is gonna be greeeeeeeeeat.

A big thanks to all our guests in the studio and the ones who watched and interacted from the YouTube stream (now the archive of the conversation>

Here are some links mentioned in chat (help if we missed any there were a lot)