Open Educational Resources

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Affordable Learning Georgia: http://www.affordablelearninggeorgia.org

Visited: Summer 2015

Reviewer: Ru Story Huffman, Dean of Library Services, Georgia Southwestern State University

Affordable Learning Georgia (ALG) is an initiative of the University System of Georgia (USG) to provide open educational resources (OERs) and no-cost textbooks to students attending Georgia colleges and universities. As a partner service with California State University/MERLOT, ALG is designed to encourage use of the Georgia GALILEO database and USG libraries. Although designed for use by USG faculty, the website offers numerous resources, pedagogies, and concepts for use by all interested in the concept of OERs/no-cost textbooks.

An important facet of ALG are the Textbook Transformation Grants, which provide funding for faculty in the state of Georgia to develop no-cost textbooks as an OER resource for use in academic coursework. Since early 2015, the Textbook Transformation Grants have saved students in Georgia $8,335,411, with an estimated 71,397 students impacted by the savings (L. Fancher, personal communication, August 19, 2015).

The ALG website consists of seven sections, including an overview of ALG and its function. The main page and all subsequent pages contain a labeled tab located at the top of the page. The additional sections include Find Textbooks, Library Resources, Open Resources/MERLOT, Bookstores, Help, and Events. When hovering over a tab, a drop down menu appears providing the user with additional related content. The design of the page adheres to usability standards and the pages are easy to navigate. The ALG website is designed to function as a clearinghouse for information, dissemination of free training opportunities, and a listing of OERs and no-cost textbook resources. A useful section of interest to academic librarians, the LibGuide page provides a starting point for OERs. Increasingly, academic libraries are being asked to assist with the location, creation, and development of OERs. Maintaining a LibGuide for use by faculty is an effective method to assist instructors and encourage use of OERs.

In Short: The Affordable Learning Georgia site is an important contribution to the OER/no cost textbook initiative in higher education. The resources and information on the ALG website are valuable for all interested in the use and benefits of OERs in the academic environment.

Highly recommended.

PLOS (Public Library of Science): http://www.plos.org

Visited: Summer 2015

Reviewer: Carrie B. Levinson, Project Manager Librarian, Touro College

Public Library of Science (PLOS) is a nonprofit organization co-founded by Stanford University School of Medicine professor Patrick O. Brown and University of California Berkeley professor Michael B. Eisen. The mission of PLOS is to promote research in science by using innovative publishing methods and breaking down barriers to access. This philosophy permeates throughout the site, where PLOS publications and the platform they are published on are both open access or open source. Articles have a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license applied to them, allowing reuse without permission or fees. While there are a number of resources throughout the site, the ones that are probably most relevant to academic public services librarians are the journals, which are the focus of this review.

PLOS has several peer-reviewed journals: PLOS ONE (an interdisciplinary journal covering the sciences and medicine), PLOS Biology, PLOS Medicine, PLOS Genetics, PLOS Computational Biology, PLOS Pathogens, and PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. Clicking on any of these titles from the main PLOS page will open up a new window to that journal. Each journal has a standard layout, but each has its own special twist; for example, PLOS Pathogens features “pearls,” which are concise articles on relevant topics. The layout is large and easy to read, but there are a lot of different boxes featuring research, which can be a bit overwhelming. There is a browse link and search box at the top of the page, so if clicking on each box is cumbersome, these may be welcome options. Once an article is opened, the words “open access” and “peer-reviewed” are prominently displayed, so students who are looking for scholarly research do not have to do any guesswork. Citations can be generated as well.

In Short: PLOS is a fantastic multidisciplinary site for open access, peer-reviewed scientific and medical research. It shows that open educational resources can be extremely high quality and accessible to a wider audience. The scholarship will be useful to undergraduate and graduate students doing research papers.

Highly recommended.

Digital Commons Network: http://network.bepress.com/

Visited: Summer 2015

Reviewer: Lora L. Smallman, Humanities Librarian, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

The Digital Commons Network is a gateway to search more than one million full-text, open-access works published online by scholars at more than 400 institutions. The amount of scholarship will likely grow as more universities choose the bepress product, Digital Commons, as their institutional repository software, thus providing a space for researchers, faculty, librarians, and students to deposit scholarly work. Institutional repositories (IR) often have multiple access points to their content. While a search engine may draw up great results from IRs, a novice user may lack the skill to isolate those in a query. Another challenge to searching IRs is identifying which university and/or scholar best fits one's information needs. What makes the Digital Commons Network a fantastic open educational resource (OER) is the concentration of free, full-text, scholarly articles in one place that are organized into respective disciplines. Still, many universities have the means and opt to build their own software to support and host the digital scholarship at their institution. While this illustrates the Digital Commons Network is not an exhaustive reflection of the work published in the academic sphere, it is nevertheless an incredible resource to keep in one's arsenal.

The home page of the Digital Commons Network is clean and attractive with a prominent, engaging, and user-friendly color wheel. The color wheel is organized into major disciplines such as law, arts & humanities, and life sciences. The inner ring of the wheel is broad and the outer rings narrow into each discipline. Clicking on the section labeled “Explore Arts & Humanities,” for example, will zoom into a new color wheel that is specific only to this major discipline. The user can then continue clicking on sections in the outer rings until he or she reaches a specific subtopic such as “Women's Studies.” Clicking on this takes the user to the Women's Studies Commons, which is a page organized into the following sections for this subtopic: featured publications, a list of all articles, and the popular articles, authors, and institutions for this discipline. The links to articles on this page take users to free, full-text, scholarly articles in PDF format. Users can also choose to bypass the color wheel and use the simple search box to explore by authors, titles, or keywords. This reviewer was unable to locate an advanced search on the Digital Commons Network home page; however, all the participating Digital Commons institutions appear to have an advanced search option on the homepage of their institutional repository.

In Short: Academic professionals, especially professors and librarians, will greatly benefit from this resource, particularly for comprehensive literature reviews and in cases of shrinking budgets.

Highly recommended.

The Orange Grove: http://florida.theorangegrove.org

Visited: Summer 2015

Reviewer: Shalu Gillum, Head of Public Services, Harriet F. Ginsburg Health Sciences Library, University of Central Florida College of Medicine

The Orange Grove is a digital repository of instructional resources from the state of Florida. The repository consists of several collections: Orange Grove, Open Courseware, Open Textbooks, Harvested Resources, and OG3D. The first four are all open for anyone to use. The Orange Grove collection currently contains more than 2,200 resources in a variety of subtopics including faculty development; content from the Khan Academy and NASA; science, math, and simulation; and general education. Open Courseware contains college level courses and textbooks, while Open Textbooks contains more than 5,000 science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) freely available books.

Harvested Resources are those curated from around the world, and what helps make this site so unique and comprehensive. The largest collection within The Orange Grove, Harvested Resources number in the tens of thousands; the “Connexions” subcollection of learning modules, journals, and open textbooks alone feature 23,000 resources. Other interesting content includes historical items from the Library of Congress (e.g., digitized books and drawings) and biological and life sciences resources including zoology and natural history. Finally, the OG3D collection contains printable 3D object models.

While The Orange Grove is intended for Florida educators, much of the content is freely available for anyone to use. Users can also add content to this repository. Faculty and staff from public higher education intuitions in Florida can request a member account to contribute resources. Florida K–12 educators and individuals outside of Florida can also submit resources via the “Suggest a Resource” form.

The Orange Grove is housed on Equella, a web-based digital content repository platform. The site is arranged in a dashboard format, with a simple search feature. Users can browse all open collections, higher education resources, K-12 content, or browse by institution. More than 15 educational institutions from the state of Florida have contributed content. Users can search by keyword, sort results by relevance and other limiters, filter by resource owner, keyword, date, or resource type, or they can share via link, email or RSS feed.

Content is available in a variety of modalities, from PDF textbooks to videos and images. Some content links out to external sites where it can be downloaded. Most open textbooks are available for download in PDF format via a simple link, while others are on publisher platforms similar to those for e-books licensed by academic libraries. Content can also be imported directly into a learning management system such as Canvas or Blackboard. Resources are free to use but may have varying copyright statements or creative commons licenses. The default copyright notice is the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike 3.0 License.

In Short: Overall, The Orange Grove open textbook repository is STEM-heavy. While it features some K-12 resources, the site is geared more for higher education, which makes it more applicable for academic, public services librarians. The platform is meant to be a place where educators can openly find, use, and share educational resources. It can sometimes be difficult to ascertain the quality of a resource from the repository until it is downloaded, but with so much content available, and the robust search options, users are sure to find something that fits their needs.

Recommended.

Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT II): https://www.merlot.org/

Visited: Summer 2015

Reviewer: Anne Larrivee, Subject Librarian, Binghamton University Libraries

Accessible resources that relay educational lessons are now scattered throughout the Internet; it has become difficult to know where to start. According to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (2013), the main purpose of an Open Educational Resource (OER) is to “reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute” materials, a trend that offers many opportunities for people to share and learn with others. OER sites that provide links to open textbooks, lesson plans, and other material are key to creating an affordable academic environment. However, parsing through the multiple sites and resources can feel overwhelming. Although the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT II) welcomes a massive amount of open content, their site builders have tried to incorporate tools to make searching manageable. Searching within MERLOT II includes the ability to search through several fields of metadata and assess content based on user and peer reviews.

MERLOT II, sponsored by the California State University System with partnering institutions, claims to have over 40,000 materials in more than 19 different languages. MERLOT II emphasizes their effort to provide a “curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community.” Within the site, there are 20 different material types covered, such as animations, case studies, e-portfolios, open journal articles, open textbooks, presentations, tutorials, and several others. They also cover 20 different technical formats such as PDFs, podcasts, wikis, images, and more. The concept for this platform was initially brainstormed in 1997 when California State University Center for Distributed Learning sought an NSF grant and later developed the software in 1999 with the help of a consortium. Over the past several years, members have added a majority of the materials. Membership is free, and members are encouraged to help rate materials to enhance user selection. The advanced search option also helps users narrow down their selection. Users can search by keyword, title, description, category, language, material type, format, audience, mobile preference, copyright, date added, and peer-review, along with several other options. With so many materials, it is helpful that the system provides a robust searching experience. Users can even choose to search for materials based on an ISBN search to find related open materials.

With all of this access to thousands of open materials, it is difficult to be critical about the site; that being said, there are some visual drawbacks. The site seeks to be so informative that their portal seems cluttered. The home screen presents eight visual boxes of different sizes that provide gateways to gather more information about MERLOT or for users to search the collection. If a user chooses to search the collection, they are taken to another page with nine additional visual boxes that provide options to search, browse, or view several different options. Although the filter pages might be useful for honing in on the needs of the user, it seems to this reviewer like an unnecessary amount of clicks to reach a search screen. Fortunately, there is a small search box located in the upper right corner that provides a direct link to the advanced search page; although, the eye is not immediately drawn to this corner of the screen. If a user is not satisfied with their list of results, they can choose to refine their search with a material limiter. Unlike a Google Search, which only provides users with a site title, the URL, and a brief glimpse of the text, MERLOT II chooses to display much more metadata in the results list. The metadata is useful in deciding whether or not to click into the record. Choosing to view the record with a quick glance is a bit overwhelming. There are links and text that fill the record screen. It is nice that MERLOT II provides so many details about the resource but the link to “Go to material” easily becomes lost among all the other text and links. The value of the information is swallowed by the amount of information presented on one screen.

In Short: While MERLOT II is a valuable portal to many different open educational resources, all of the metadata displayed on the records screen can be distracting for users. If the site was more streamlined, it might be easier to sift through all the resources: the amount of results and information about the resources can seem overwhelming. The site is definitely worth using for its variety and user ratings, however, it is worth recognizing that the design may seem a little overloaded with data and options.

Recommended.

REFERENCES

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. (2013). Open educational resources: Breaking the lockbox on education. Retrieved from http://www.hewlett.org/sites/default/files/OER%20White%20Paper%20Nov%2022%202013%20Final_0.pdf

OER Commons: Open Educational Resources: https://www.oercommons.org

Visited: Summer 2015

Reviewer: Nicholas Wyant, Head Social Sciences Librarian, Indiana University Bloomington

Increasingly, educators are looking for options regarding teaching materials. Too often, lesson plans are available behind a pay-wall. The Open Educational Resources (OER) Commons seeks to bypass the pay to teach model and instead links educators with resources available from a myriad of institutions, disciplines, and grade levels.

The 50,000-plus resources cover a wide range of teaching topics and levels of education. The homepage gives users the option of selecting a subject, grade level, and if desired, educational standard. The grade levels range from preschool through graduate education. Any of these options can be selected or ignored depending on what the user needs. The resources favor primary and secondary education; however, there are some surprisingly good resources at the college and graduate level. Higher education content providers come from a wide range of institutions including MIT and the University of Michigan, among others.

In Short: Not all lesson plans are created equal on the site, which means that users might have to invest some time finding the correct plans for their needs. However, it must be emphasized that the lesson plans available are free to the user with little, if any, restrictions on how they can be used. A robust Advanced Search feature also allows users to target their search for very specific resources. As with most open resource repositories, OER Commons allows users to upload their own content, thus contributing to the wealth of information already available.

Recommended.