Creating and Publishing Openly Licensed/Open Access Content
Creating and Publishing Openly Licensed/Open Access Content
Liv Gjestvang, Ashley Miller, and Alexis Duffy
by Ashley Miller, Alexis Duffy, and Liv Gjestvang (all Ohio State University) (bios)
Introduction
In the summer of 2017, The Ohio State University (OSU), Unizin, and the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) held the first Content Camp, a collaborative authoring event to quickly create textbook-agnostic test banks at scale. The event, which was more than two years in the making, used a web-based tool to streamline the process of authoring, revision, and quiz creation. After successful completion of three test banks for macroeconomics, medical biology, and sociology, OSU began working with Penn State University to develop a new tool to make the process even easier, and has already piloted the new product in a second event in the spring of 2018. This chapter details the history, reasoning, planning, and results of that project.
History
In December, 2015, a group of learning technology leaders in the Big Ten Academic Alliance identified affordability and open educational resources (OERs) as core topics of interest, and in January, 2016, authored the following problem statement around Affordable Content:
Designing programs to engage our campus communities in learning about and creating (or adopting) low or no cost content is a commitment we share across campuses. In addition to sharing this commitment, we benefit greatly as a consortium if we design clear, streamlined ways to share the successful models, programs and platforms we have created on our individual campuses, so they can be adopted and scaled across the Big Ten.
The following month, a group of more than 40 educational technology and other academic professionals met as part of the Teaching and Learning committee within Unizin, a consortium of 11 research-focused institutions committed to addressing some of the most critical issues facing higher education today, including learner success, access, and affordability. This team articulated a commitment to “Improve student learning by increasing access to affordable high-quality course content and analytics” through a strategy of “Encourag[ing] creation, adoption and adaptation of high quality course content (interactive digital texts, adaptive learning modules, videos, problem sets, assessments, etc.) to increase affordability, quality of content, student learning, and access to analytics and data.”
While both the Big Ten and Unizin groups articulated similar goals and were driven by an equally strong commitment to free and open content, neither had existing structures in place to leverage faculty from across disciplines and institutions to collaboratively author and review high-quality content. At OSU, however, the Affordable Learning Exchange team had identified a model for open content development that could leverage both of these large consortia to drive the shared development and dissemination of open content.
The Challenge of Ancillary Ma