Open Education Week (OEWeek) is from March 3-7 and celebrates open education around the globe!
Open Education is a movement to make learning free, accessible, and flexible for everyone. The goal is to remove barriers to high quality learning and resources through sharing, adapting, and building upon the work that others have done. Open education includes:
- Open access – research that is published and available for all freely online
- Open educational resources (OER) – free learning materials that are published with licenses that allow instructors to remix and adapt them to suit their needs
- Open pedagogy – a teaching approach that invites students to be a part of the information creation process
- Massive open online courses (MOOCs) – online courses accessible to anyone with a computer and access to the internet
- And more!
See the events page to learn about open education work being done around the world.
How Students Can Get Involved
Closer to home, the Washington Research Library Consortium’s Textbook Affordability Working Group is working to increase the use of OER and reduce textbook costs to our students. We’ve done outreach to partner with faculty, helped provide stipends to increase OER use, and hosted workshops to teach about OER, how to find them, and how to use and adapt them into courses.
Our next workshop is upcoming on March 19th at Noon to discuss student opinions of OER use and their benefits, register on our events page. Student opinions workshop flyer
Please help us by taking this 5 question survey to tell us about how much you spend on textbooks.
You can also get involved with the Open Textbook Alliance. The Open Textbook Alliance is a nationwide group connecting student government leaders that are working to increase the use of open textbooks across college campuses. In addition to open textbooks, their current campaigns include increasing the transparency of textbook costs and reducing automatic textbook billing. Visit their website to find out all of the ways that you connect with them and take action.