mcarncross – Library News

May 31 2022

2023 OpenHawks grants to help students save on textbooks

Posted on May 31, 2022June 16, 2022 by Mahrya Burnett

University Libraries is pleased to announce another 12 OpenHawks grants for the development of open educational resources (OER). OpenHawks is a campus-wide grant program that funds faculty efforts to replace or avoid high-cost textbooks with OERs for enhanced student success.

The cohort of projects, which are slated to be completed in 2023, will save UI students $167,688 in the first year alone. Removing cost barriers to course materials opens student access and positively impacts learning. The funded OER projects, which were selected through a competitive application process, will benefit students in a wide range of disciplines, including law, radiation oncology, communication science and disorders, language learning, mathematics, library and information science, pediatrics, and social work.

The next call for proposals will be in the spring of 2023. For more information, visit www.lib.uiowa.edu/openhawks.

Jared Stiles and Emily Heithoff, Radiology, OER Creation Grant

Localization & Treatment Procedures in Radiation Therapy

Stiles and Heithoff team will develop an OER textbook for radiation therapy that would replace the textbooks currently used in the program. The OER will be regularly updated to account for developments in the field and will include a number of multimedia activities developed in collaboration with other radiation therapy programs.

Sean Rodriguez, Margaret Strampe, Andrew Goldstein, Caroline Yu, Salma Dawoud, and David Ramirez, Ophthalmology, OER Creation Grant

EyeRounds Anki: An Openly Licensed Resource for Ophthalmology Education

The group will develop EyeRounds Anki, an OER based on a free flashcard program that uses a spaced repetition algorithm to enhance knowledge acquisition and retention over traditional study methods. The resource is meant to increase global access to a body of knowledge that is currently only available as expensive, multi-volume books.

Jason Rantanen, Stella Elias, Derek Muller, Caroline Sheerin, and Maya Steinitz, Law, OER Creation Grant

Rules and Laws for Civil Actions

Grantee will develop an OER supplement in Pressbooks containing rules and statutory laws related to civil litigation. This will replace one of the textbooks in the intro to civil procedure course and will be referenced by students throughout their legal studies.

Philip Combiths, Communication Sciences and Disorders, OER Creation Grant

A Software Tool for Phonological Analysis and Treatment Target Selection

This project is for further development of phonological analysis software and an accompanying manual for students in speech pathology. It would modernize the process that speech language pathologists use to analyze children’s speech patterns by using digital transcription rather than the manual process currently used.

Maricelle Pinto-Tomas and Mariana Ruiz Nascimento, Spanish and Portuguese, OER Creation Grant

Primeiros passos: Portuguese for Beginners

This project aims to replace the current Portuguese textbook with an OER. It will address the current book’s deficiencies, with a focus on incorporating social justice pedagogy and avoiding the outdated stereotypes. The book is intended to save students money, increase learner motivation, facilitate cultural learning, and has the ability to be adopted outside the university.

Isabel Darcy, Mathematics, OER Creation Grant

Interactive Jupyter Textbook for Differential Equations

Darcy will replace the current text and homework system with an OER textbook in Jupyter Notebooks. She and a colleague have developed most of the content, and the PI hopes to hire a student to compile it all into an interactive text.

Micah Bateman, Library and Information Science, Support Materials Grant

Introduction to Metadata through Dublin Core

Bateman will develop resources for beginning users of the metadata standard, Dublin Core. The project will equip future librarians with skills often used in community and university archives, as well as in the digital humanities.

Alexander Tuttle, Vanessa Curtis, Jeffrey Pettit, and Katherine Schultz, Pediatrics, OER Creation Grant

An Inpatient Pediatric Diabetes Management Resource

The project team will develop a resource on pediatric diabetes management for residents at UIHC. A preliminary version has already been developed on Pressbooks, and this grant would allow them to further develop it and publish it as an OER.

Olga Sokratova, Mathematics, OER Creation Grant

Graph Theory and Applications

This project will replace several commercial texts with an OER targeted to the needs of the course. Sokratova hopes that this resource will allow students to use their class time more efficiently and spend more time actually solving math problems.

Susana Nkurlu, Swahili, OER Creation Grant

Developing Swahili Reading Comprehension Textbook

Nkurlu will develop an OER to supplement Swahili language learning. The objective is to make sure students start with the common knowledge before getting into more complex structures. Grantee will match collected stories with relevant pictures for ease of message comprehension.

Gregory Shill, Law, Remixing Grant

Transportation Law & Policy

For this interdisciplinary project on transportation law and policy, Shill proposes an OER to replace several costly textbooks. The work will incorporate multimedia and archival materials and could be used in several different classes at UI.

Megan Gilster and Aislinn Conrad, Social Work, Course Redesign Grant

Open to Working with Organizations and Communities

This team will create an OER using existing openly licensed materials, new content, and library resources. From the application, “For our pedagogy, we expect the impact to be a succinct, robust set of OER materials and a high-quality, new course that employs active learning teaching techniques.”

Apr 11 2022

Spanish Language OER with Giovanni Zimotti

Posted on April 11, 2022 by Mahrya Burnett

Cover image for Salón de clase: Intermediate Spanish for Education Professionals

By Georgia Page, UI Libraries Student Specialist, Scholarly Impact, georgiab-page@uiowa.edu

In early March, UI Libraries celebrated Open Education Week in order to raise awareness about open educational resources (OER) and other open education practices. However, many students and faculty on campus are not yet familiar with the positive impact that OER has on students’ academic success, while also making education more accessible and affordable. To get a better understanding of what it means to “create” OER, I interviewed Dr. Giovanni Zimotti, head of the Spanish and Portuguese programs here at the university.

Zimotti, who is now working on his third OER project, talked about the process of creating OER, and how it has benefitted both students and educators within the Spanish program. When asking him how he decided to make open textbooks, he explained, “We didn’t know anything about writing a textbook, but we knew we wanted to write one. The ones that were available were not good enough for our classrooms. They were either really expensive – like $200 – or they were too easy for our students. We want a textbook for four semesters of Spanish and something that would be challenging. This didn’t exist, so we started to make it.”

But how does one even start making a textbook for four different levels from scratch? Zimotti explains that while he didn’t know for sure from the start, he was up for a challenge. “We created a small team, and decided to apply for another grant,” he explains. “Right now, a year later, we have 10 to 15 professors across the country peer-reviewing the textbook to make sure that it is of quality to be used in our classroom and classrooms in other states as well.”

Zimotti explains that over the past few years, he and a team have been working on creating a new textbook that could be utilized not only by students here at the University of Iowa but also across the world. When asked what part of this project most excited him, he says, “The most exciting part, and my main goal, is trying to get all textbooks to a really low cost. All of our students have to pay a lot of money for these textbooks, so my goal is to get the cost as close to zero as possible. If we can save our students hundreds of thousands of dollars in textbook fees, that’s my goal.”

While cost is one of the biggest issues for these textbooks, Zimotti explains that most language textbooks are also out-of-date, which is an issue for students and educators alike. “When we started creating the OER textbook, we started thinking about how to create localized content. Instead of having interviews with celebrities from 20 years ago, or a random piece of technology that is outdated. For this textbook, we tried to interview people that were real people in the community. We found Spanish speakers from different backgrounds, such as a person from West Liberty that run a dual-language program. He is from Mexico, he is on the school board, and he is an indigenous person. He was super interesting and brought a new perspective to the students.” This is just one example of the many folks that Zimotti and his team were able to interview and include in the new textbook, which will help to better immerse students in the reality of Spanish speaking culture, as well as making sure that students can directly relate with the scenarios and references within the text. As Zimotti explains, “This is not something you can just get from your average textbook.”

OER allows for a more inclusive, immersive, and accessible way to educate, and encourages students to be involved and invested in their success. While this project is just one of many here at UI, it will change the way that Spanish is taught not only at the University of Iowa but at universities across the country. Zimotti and his team’s new textbook will be available for use in Spanish classrooms at the University of Iowa and the University of Nebraska starting Spring of 2023.

If you are interested in receiving grant funding to use, adapt, or create your own OER, check out UI Libraries’ OpenHawks program. We are currently accepting proposals through April 29, 2022.

Feb 18 2022

Fair Use Week (February 21-25)

Posted on February 18, 2022February 20, 2022 by Mahrya Burnett

During the week of February 21, we celebrate Fair Dealing/Fair Use Week, which uplifts the Fair Use Doctrine and the educational and creative expression that it allows. Fair use of copyrighted information is a right that is guaranteed in the U.S. Code and allows us to use copyrighted material within the contexts of education, parody, accessibility, and reporting.

There are some misconceptions about fair use, however. Not every educational activity is covered under the doctrine, and some cases for fair use are stronger than others. There are four factors that must be considered when determining whether you are covered under fair use:

the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
the nature of the copyrighted work. Is it more factual or more creative?
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

In recent years, courts have determined that the four factors should not be weighted equally in all cases, and a “checklist” method of determining fair use cannot accurately be applied across different cases and different types of use. This means that each time you wish to use material under the Fair Use Doctrine, you should conduct a four-factor analysis and document your rationale. Below are some resources that can help you walk through the process of conducting an analysis for fair use.

Measuring Fair Use: The Four Factors: This guide from Stanford Libraries walks you through how to conduct a fair use analysis.
More Information on Fair Use: This page from the U.S. Copyright Office provides information on fair use and how to conduct a fair use analysis.
Fair Use Evaluator: Use this tool to document your fair use analysis.
UI Libraries Copyright Guide: Learn more about fair use, author rights, seeking permissions, open licensing, and other topics.

Sep 17 2021

Regents OER Grant Recipients Announced

Posted on September 17, 2021September 17, 2021 by Mahrya Burnett

The Regents university libraries are proud to announce the awarding of grants to 5 faculty teams to support creation of free, openly-licensed course materials. This funding opportunity provides intensive training and support for faculty writing open textbooks or other materials to replace expensive, traditional textbooks. In addition to saving UNI, UI, and ISU students an estimated $308,000 per year, new Open Educational Resources created through the program prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion. They are also likely to be adopted at other institutions, expanding the impact and cost savings beyond the Regents.

For more about Open Educational Resources, see https://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/oer

Funded projects include:

Communication for College, Career, and Civic Life
PIs: Ryan McGeough, Kyle Rudick, Danielle McGeough, and Kathryn Golsan (UNI)
Course supported: COMM 1000
Award amount: $21,400
Estimated student savings: $82,000 per year
Description: The project brings together several faculty members, all of whom have authored textbooks in the past, to create an OER textbook focused on developing communication skills. It will accomplish multiple objectives. In addition to providing substantial cost savings, it will fill gaps in existing texts related to communication and diversity, information literacy, and communication and digital technology. It will also support the oral communication outcome of the new general education curriculum (UNIFI).

Creating Open Resource Textbook for Methods of Teaching Early Literacy
PIs: Nandita Gurjar (UNI), Sohyun Meacham (UNI), and Constance Beecher (ISU)
Courses supported: LitEd3115 (UNI), LitEd3119 (UNI), and EDUC377 (ISU)
Award amount: $23,550
Estimated student savings: $52,200 per year
Description: This project will create a comprehensive resource to replace twelve books currently used in the PI’s three courses. The OER will be a multimodal resource, focusing on literacy development of PreK-3rd grade elementary students while addressing the needs of diverse students.

Elementary Science Methods I and II: Ancillary Project
PIs: Ted Neal, Jeff Nordine, & LaVerne Logan (UI)
Courses supported: EDTL3165 and EDTL3166
Award amount: $5,550
Estimated student savings: $5,356 per year (in addition to previous savings)
Description: This project will merge two existing open texts the lead author previously created, update content with presentation slides, improve/update the test banks, and improve ancillary materials. It will address Next Generation Science Standards, better align with a new course sequence, and add resources students have been requesting.

Elementary Spanish: An OER Textbook
PIs: Giovanni Zimotti, Rachel Klevar, Braeden Jones (UI), and Gabriela Olivares-Cuhat (UNI)
Courses supported: SPAN1001
Award amount: $25,560
Estimated student savings: $65,000 per year
Description: UI and UNI are joining efforts to redesign the core sequence of the elementary Spanish language track. The work of this team will result in the creation of an OER textbook and ancillary materials for Elementary Spanish that address the diverse needs of undergraduate non-native Spanish Speakers. Self-assessment exercises created using H5P will be included.

Integrated Learning Resources for an Inclusive and Adaptive Undergraduate Music Theory and Musicianship Core Curriculum
PIs: Randall Harlow, Heather Peyton, Jonathan Schwabe, and Daniel Swilley (UNI)
Courses supported: 12 courses in School of Music core (Music Theory I-IV, Aural Training I-IV, and Sight Singing I-IV)
Award amount: $21,400
Estimated student savings: $33,640 per year
Description: This project will replace three standard textbooks with new learning resources that will be free and open to all students, accessible to a more diverse population, and tailored to UNI’s evolving core music curriculum. One key goal is to create an accessible resource for students with a diversity of backgrounds, learning styles, and socioeconomic realities.

Jun 16 2021

Iowa Regents libraries offer new grants to support open educational resources

Posted on June 16, 2021June 16, 2021 by Mahrya Burnett

Libraries at the University of Iowa, Iowa State University, and the University of Northern Iowa announce a joint funding opportunity for the creation of Open Educational Resources (OER). This program is open to small teams of faculty, graduate students, and staff at any of the three Board of Regents State of Iowa public universities.

The Regents OER Grant Program was recently created via support from the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund (GEER Fund), which was established in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act passed by Congress in 2020. The new Regents OER Grant Program will facilitate the development of OER across the three Iowa Regent universities. The grant program supports the growing use of sustainable, affordable course content at the Regent institutions through the development of OER. OER provide teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers and licensed for open use (SPARC, n.d.).

Two types of awards are available through this program. Textbook development grants, in the amount of up to $7,500 per team member, are intended to fund the development of new open textbooks to fill gaps in existing OER coverage within a discipline. Grants for ancillary materials projects will be funded at up to $1,500 per team member for the development of slide presentations, test banks, and/or other support materials to accompany an existing open textbook.

In addition to financial stipends, successful applicants will receive intensive training on OER creation and development. This training will include an OER development “sprint” that will take place in September 2021, at which grantees will have the opportunity to work intensively on their projects over the course of a two-day workshop. In addition, grant recipients will receive support for finding source material, using OER authoring tools, developing content, understanding open licensing, and OER project management before and after the workshop.

More details about the Regents OER Grant Program will be distributed with the call for proposals on June 22, 2021.

Questions about the grant program should be sent to the grant coordinator for each institution, Abbey Elder (Iowa State University), Mahrya Burnett (University of Iowa), and Anne Marie Gruber (University of Northern Iowa).

Mar 04 2021

Celebrating Open Education Week

Posted on March 4, 2021March 4, 2021 by Mahrya Burnett

Open Education Week (March 1-5, 2021, #OEWeek) is a time when educators around the world come together to learn and share practices around Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Pedagogy. While there are a host of excellent webinars and events to tune into this week, let’s also celebrate our local faculty who are creating openly licensed resources, tailoring existing OER to better fit the needs of their students, and creating courses with fewer barriers to learning. Integrating OER into a course takes a lot of work, oftentimes uncompensated. But the result is well worth it. Students can access their course materials for free, from the first day of class. Ideally, the materials have been chosen and tailored to better align with the needs of the class, and they can be adapted easily if something isn’t working.

OER Projects Underway

UI Libraries supports faculty and graduate students working on OER projects through our OpenHawks grants program. There are currently 27 UI grant teams who are working on or have recently completed OER projects as part of this three-year pilot. You can read more about these projects at the links to our 2019 and 2020 announcements. Completed OpenHawks projects can be found in Iowa Research Online, as well as OER Commons, Open Textbook Library, and wherever else you go to find OER. The projects below are complete and ready to use.

Illana-Mahiques, Emilia; and Alejandro Pérez Belda. OER: Curso de Escritura En Español. University of Iowa, 2020.

Description: The materials in this project are specifically designed for a third-year Spanish Writing course, offering guidance to instructors on how to develop each of the four modules that constitute the course: Description, narration, argumentation, and exposition.

Myers, Brandon D. Guided Inquiry Activities for Programming Language Concepts. University of Iowa, 2020.

Description: Guided Inquiry Activities for Programming Language Concepts is a collection of activities intended to support the use of POGIL—a research-based instruction strategy comprising peer learning, development of process skills, and activities that are designed around the constructivist theory of learning cycles (pogil.org)—in intermediate-level undergraduate computer science courses on functional programming and the implementation of programming languages.

Neal, Ted; Dunn, Rachel; Haley, Jenny; McDonald, Ella; Smith, Ben. Elementary Earth and Space Science Methods. Iowa City: University of Iowa, 2020.

Description: This book is intended for use by future teachers, written from the perspective of students who have taken Science Methods II. The student authors gathered and created resources to help prospective elementary science teachers better understand science and feel confident in their abilities as future teachers.

Pizzimenti, Marc A.; Brenneman, Anthony; Gorney, Carol; Hickman, James; Bernat, Carrie. Physical Examination: Cardiovascular System. Iowa City: University of Iowa, 2020.

Description: At our institution, teaching basic physical examination (PE) skills capitalizes on the use of electronic resources and Standardized Patients (SP) with advanced training who are better able to assist students in developing their skills. This online module uses interactive methods, video, and concept applications to prepare learners for practice/review of the necessary components to develop a PE skill set.

Wingate, Christine. American English Sounds. Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa, 2018-2021.

Description: American English Sounds is a web resource that allows English as a Second Language (ESL) students to practice perceiving and producing the sounds of American English in order to improve their pronunciation.

Yoon, Sang-Seok; and Joung-A Park. Beginning Korean. Activity Book 1. Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa, 2020.

Description: The Korean Activity Book 1 is designed to provide various useful materials for practicing Korean. This book is ideal for learners at the Novice Low to Novice High levels who want to practice writing and pronouncing hangeul, communicate in Korean by creating sentences using basic grammar and vocabulary, and understand and create simple conversations that are useful in everyday conversations.

More about OpenHawks

We have just released our third Call for Proposals for additional OpenHawks grant funding. If you’re interested in applying or finding out more, I would encourage you to visit the OpenHawks website to learn about the different award categories and types of OER projects you might consider. You will also find more information about the application, including the rubrics we use to evaluate proposals, general information about OER, and links to upcoming informational sessions.

Applications are due on April 30, 2021 so get yours in soon!

Iowa Colleges and Universities Group on OER Commons

Finally, I’m pleased to announce the new Iowa Colleges and Universities Group on OER Commons. OER in these collections have been adopted, created, or recommended by faculty in the state of Iowa. The purpose of this group is to share OER that have been adopted in the state and to make it easier for faculty to locate what they need. You will be able to find many of the completed OpenHawks projects in the group, as well.

If you have any questions about OER, please contact me at mahrya-burnett@uiowa.edu.

Feb 18 2021

UI authors can now make Cambridge articles Open Access for free

Posted on February 18, 2021May 21, 2021 by Mahrya Burnett

On the heels of its recent arrangement with PLOS, the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) has entered into a second contract to bundle the cost of journal subscriptions and Open Access (OA) publishing, this time with publisher, Cambridge University Press. Under this three-year contract, UI corresponding authors can publish their journal articles OA and free of cost to them, in any of Cambridge’s journals. These articles can then be read by anyone, anywhere, without the paywalls that traditionally accompany academic journals.

This arrangement is part of a larger effort by UI Libraries and the BTAA to reduce the cost of OA for individual researchers. Unfortunately, publishers often charge authors directly to pay for the cost of publishing OA journal articles. (For instance, Cambridge normally charges $2,520 per article for OA.) For faculty who don’t have grant or departmental funding, this can be prohibitively expensive. These costs have soared in recent years and are a significant barrier to making research open and freely accessible.

As the Libraries continue to sign these types of transformative agreements, our hope is that more and more of our faculty will be able to publish their research OA without fees.

For more information, please contact Sara Scheib, Head of Scholarly Impact, or Mahrya Burnett, Scholarly Communications Librarian.

Jan 22 2021

Big Ten Academic Alliance Signs new PLOS Deal

Posted on January 22, 2021May 21, 2021 by Mahrya Burnett

If you’ve ever considered publishing Open Access (OA) in PLOS Biology or PLOS Medicine, it just got a lot more affordable. The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA), of which University of Iowa is a member, just signed a three-year deal with the OA mega-journal publisher, PLOS, allowing corresponding authors at any Big 10 university to publish in these two journals without any cost to the author. This agreement is part of PLOS’ Community Action Publishing (CAP) program, which its website describes as, “a type of ‘collective action’ business model that can equitably distribute the cost of selective, Open Access publishing among institutions rather than charging high APCs to individual authors.” The program comes as part of an existing resource sharing consortium among the institutions of the Big 10 and is the first of its kind, both for PLOS and the BTAA.

While not all of PLOS’ journal titles are covered by this agreement—most notably the publisher’s flagship journal, PLOS One is not covered—PLOS Biology and PLOS Medicine are already major publication venues for authors at Big 10 universities, representing 5% of the total articles published in both journals from 2016 to 2019. This deal makes the highly selective titles even more attractive to BTAA authors.

Article Processing Charges (APCs) are a burden that OA authors have to bear themselves if they have no grant or department funding to cover them. These costs have risen precipitously in recent years and are a significant barrier to making research open and freely accessible. Without the CAP program, authors submitting to PLOS Biology or PLOS Medicine could expect to pay up to $3,000 to make a single article open. This agreement represents an alternative to both the traditional subscription model of academic publishing and the author-funded APC model. Under the CAP program, the BTAA pays for the publishing costs (+ 10% margin) and any revenues above the target are redistributed back to community members.

If you’re interested in taking advantage of no-cost OA publishing in PLOS Biology or PLOS Medicine, the process should be seamless. You just follow PLOS’ existing workflows and your institutional affiliation will trigger PLOS to publish the article without the APC. As UI Libraries move toward supporting more sustainable and equitable models of OA, we see this community-based agreement as a step in the right direction.

For more information, please contact Sara Scheib, Head of Scholarly Impact, or Mahrya Burnett, Scholarly Communications Librarian.

Jan 03 2019

2019: The Year of Public Domain

Posted on January 3, 2019January 3, 2019 by Mahrya Burnett

Photo Credit: Center for the Study of the Public Domain

For the first time in 20 years, artistic works copyrighted in the U.S. will enter the public domain, opening up a trove of material published during 1923 to be freely digitized, read, and used as the basis for new works. But why is this happening now? After all, shouldn’t copyrights expire and works enter into the public domain every year? One would think so, but since the late 1970s, U.S. copyright law has been subject to a series of extensions and retroactive patches that have tied up and confused the status of copyrighted works produced during the mid-20th century. (Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain has an excellent breakdown of recent copyright history here. The Atlantic also published a comprehensive article on this issue, which can be found here.) The result has been that nothing has entered the public domain since 1998. But January 1, 2019 marks a pause in the era of the shrinking public domain. If no legislative action is taken to the contrary, each year, we will now have a new set of books, recordings, movies, and other creative works to enjoy freely.

Here are some places to check out the creative works of 1923:

Hathi Trust Digital Library – These materials from the Google Books Project have been digitized for years, but as of January 1, the full-text is now available to everyone.
Center for the Study of Public Domain – Duke’s Public Domain Day page has some great selected highlights.
Public Domain Review – This journal specializes in mining the public domain. Here are their international picks for this year.

Interested in finding out more about U.S. copyright law and how to determine a work’s copyright status? As part of the library’s new Scholarly Impact Department, part of my job is to help faculty work through complex copyright issues, such as what can be used in the classroom, how to retain your rights as an author, and how to apply Creative Commons licensing. Feel free to send me an email at mahrya-burnett@uiowa.edu to set up a consultation. You might also try these excellent copyright resources:

Cornell University Library Copyright Information Center – This handy reference chart is great for a quick check on copyright status.
Digital Copyright Slider – This Flash-based slider provides copyright status for works, depending on when they were published and whether copyright was renewed.
UI Libraries Copyright Guide – This guide provides the basics on copyright issues, such as Fair Use, seeking permissions, author rights, and licensing

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Author: mcarncross