For announcement October 15, 2021 winners in the four categories of the Open Assets Award.
Open assets are what open education initiatives produce and use, tangible goods (usually digital) with educational purpose and value. Open assets are produced, curated, and distributed in ways that make them freely accessible, usable, and improvable by others.
The Open Reuse / Remix / Adaptation Category
An outstanding example of OER reuse, remix or adaptation. This may include examples of significant iterative improvements of resources including translation and localization.
The winners are…
Texas Learn OER
Digital Higher Education Consortium of Texas, United States
Texas Learn OER is a set of openly licensed, self-paced modules for faculty, staff, and administrators adapted from ACC Learn OER by Carrie Gits at Austin Community College for the Digital Higher Education Consortium of Texas (DigiTex). (Gits created ACC Learn OER in 2018 for her capstone project for the SPARC Open Education Leadership Program.) Released in August 2020, Texas Learn OER serves primarily as an introduction to OER, including such topics as understanding, licensing, finding and evaluating, and adapting and sharing OER, and there is an opportunity to earn a certificate of completion. The modules have been peer-reviewed by both state and national OER experts and are regularly updated, and continuous improvement plans include annual releases of more significant revisions to ensure the content is relevant and up-to-date.
Because it is licensed CC BY, Texas Learn OER can be adapted for any local context; for example, shortly after it was launched, Rice University in Houston remixed it to create “Owls Learn OER.” We are even prouder that the impact of the training, in less than a year, has extended beyond Texas’ borders. These adaptations have included (but are not limited to) the “OER Starter Kit for Faculty” at Northern Virginia Community College, “Open Educational Resources: Basics and Beyond” by the Online Consortium of Oklahoma, and a soon-to-be released remix from the Michigan Academic Library Association’s OER Interest Group.
We at DigiTex, along with Gits, believe that Texas Learn OER and its adaptations are exemplary examples of Open Education collaboration and community, as well as of how the CC BY license benefits the field and higher education in general.
Kit de REA REBIUN
REBIUN (Red Bibliotecas Universitarias Españolas), Spain
https://rebiun.libguides.com/GuiaREA/KitREA
The reasons that inspired us for this nomination are several:
Firstly, because it is an example of an Open Educational Resource (OER) that deals with OER: a toolkit aimed at teachers and librarians to explain how to create, use, reuse, share and implement OER into teaching and learning.
Second, because it is an example of reuse. It is an adaptation of the original OER Toolkit created by the Colleges Libraries Ontario and the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME). It is shared with the same license as the originating resource, CC-BY-NC. At the same time, it has been reused to generate new OER toolkits.
Third, because it is an OER co-created collaboratively between the libraries from REBIUN (the Spanish network of Universities Libraries), from a specific action dedicated to OER in the REBIUN repositories’ working group. It is made with contributions from different colleagues, who curated the resources in a very professional way and who also enjoyed doing it.
Another reason is because it is an OER in Spanish, since most of the OER are in English we found this especially important and useful for the Spanish-speaking community. In this sense, it is aligned with the OER UNESCO Recommendation of encouraging inclusive, equitable and multilingual resources.
And last but not least…because our kit de REA has had a great acceptance and impact in the Spanish and Latin American educational environment, among teachers, librarians and other stakeholders. It has been disseminated in several courses, webinars, and conferences, as well as institutional websites, blogs from universities, social media, etc. We have received significant interest, various questions and demonstrations of gratitude. Some users have recognized that the Kit of REA has been useful for creating and using OER. That is the best result and the real success!
25 Years of EdTech: The Serialized Audio Version
BCcampus, Canada
25 Years of EdTech: The Serialized Audio Version" is an adaptation of Martin Weller’s 25 Years of EdTech book into a community audiobook, published in podcast form. Each chapter of the book has been read by a different member of the open education community and was released on a weekly schedule between November 2020 and May 2021. The original 25 Years of EdTech is published by AUPress under an open license.
This project is an outstanding example of the power of OER reuse for the following reasons. - Remixing the physical book into an audiobook has increased accessibility by providing the text in an alternate format.
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Drawing together the open education community around the reading of the text sparked the companion “Between the Chapters” podcast, providing a deeper dive and critical analysis by experts into the topic of each chapter. This has added an additional layer of richness to the original book.
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The weekly podcast release schedule, and accompanying critical analysis created a fundamentally new way to experience the book - slower and in bitesize chunks.
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Each episode of the main recording or the companion podcast also now exists as an OER available for future use / reuse.
The podcast is also hosted on open infrastructure in BC, Canada and syndicated onto all major podcast platforms for discoverability. AUPress host their books on the Manifold open publishing system, and have also linked to the audiobook version. The main podcast is produced by Clint Lalonde and the Between the Chapters podcast is produced by Laura Pasquini.