Search

The paper introduces the UK Open Textbook project and discusses its success factors with regards to promoting open practice and open pedagogy. Textbooks remain a core part of educational provision in science. Open Textbooks are openly licensed academic textbooks, wherein the digital version is available freely, and the print version at reduced cost. They are a form of Open Educational Resource (OER). In recent years a number of openly-licensed textbooks have demonstrated high impact in countries including the USA, Canada and South Africa. The UK Open Textbooks project piloted several established approaches to the use and promotion open textbooks (focusing on STEM subjects) in a UK context between 2017 and 2018. The project had two main aims: to promote the adoption of open textbooks in the UK; and to investigate the transferability of the successful models of adoption that have emerged in North America. Through a number of workshops at a range of higher education institutions and targeted promotion at specific education conferences, the project successfully raised the profile of open textbooks within the UK. Several case studies report existing examples of open textbook use in UK science were recorded. There was considerable interest and appetite for open textbooks amongst UK academics. This was partly related to cost savings for students, but more significant factors were the freedom to adapt and develop textbooks and OER. This is consistent with a range of research that has taken place in other countries and suggests the potential for impact on UK science education is high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The information disciplines are rapidly developing and that development brings twofold challenge for library and information science (LIS) education; in terms of delivering the content, and in terms of the content itself. The former means that, as with any other discipline, it needs to implement new technologies and didactic approaches to provide its students with better learning experiences, greater retention of knowledge, and skills for rapidly changing and challenging labour market. The latter means that LIS education needs to train its students to understand how technical and social changes affect diverse information ecologies and successfully work in such environments. To address these ideas this paper aims to investigate how trends in LIS education are identified, implemented and evaluated in the LIS study programmes, both in terms of technology used for teaching, and in terms of teaching methods. The methodology used to address the research questions and objectives consisted of a literature review of the topic, a content analysis of LIS curricula from a sample of eight European universities that offer education in the LIS field, and an interview study with programme directors from the respective universities. The results have shown that there is a strong and positive culture of innovation in the LIS field that derives from the identity of the discipline and its natural inclination towards responding promptly to social and technical changes. Diverse didactic methods are applied in the analysed study programmes with an aim to offer a more flexible, authentic and individually tailored learning experience. There are obstacles in implementing innovations, and they usually arise from a mismatch between efforts to innovate and how university policies and procedure support those efforts. Another significant obstacle is the general learning culture of a country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conceptual paper will discuss how faculty from The School of Library and Information Science at The University of South Carolina partnered with their university's Center for Teaching Excellence. This partnership resulted in the facilitation of professional development workshops and online tools for peer educators to better serve distance education/online students who are differently-able (students who are medically or socially labeled as having disabilities). National-level online instruction standards, instructional techniques, as well as outcomes and future plans will be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]