In celebration of Open Education Week 2023, the Senate of College Councils, the Natural Sciences Council, and UT Libraries partnered to solicit nominations from students across campus to recognize instructors who increased access and equity by selecting free or low cost course materials for their classes. We’ll be recognizing a few of those nominees this week as Affordable Education Champions!
Affordable Education Champions are instructors who assign free or low cost resources — like textbooks, websites, films, and more — for their courses. Sometimes they author their own materials, and sometimes they’re able to reuse free or low cost work created by others. We celebrate their commitment to fostering access to high quality education at the lowest possible cost barrier for their students.
Today, we recognize and thank Prof. Erin Reilly, who was nominated as an Affordable Education Champion for ADV 365, Audience Development and Engagement.
“Erin Reilly is a creator, educator, and strategist with 20 years of experience inventing new approaches, products, services, and experiences about storytelling, engagement, and learning through immersive technology. As an educator, Erin currently is Professor of Practice in the Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations, as well as founding Director of Texas Immersive Institute, the interactive and immersive media hub at the University of Texas at Austin focused on research, projects, and learning the future of media. Erin has been a guest lecturer worldwide at universities and industry conferences. She is an Executive Committee Board Member of the Infinity Festival, member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Interactive Media Peer Group, Past Board President of NAMLE (National Association for Media Literacy Education) and serves on advisory boards, such as SXSW Pitch and PBS children’s programming, Hero Elementary and Emmy-award winning Sci Girls.”
As the first course in the Texas Immersive sequence, Prof. Reilly’s class is designed around experiences, and especially around using technology like virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI). “These tools are often too expensive for a student to have on their own, so as a professor — I should ensure they are available for them to use and experiment with…” The student who nominated Prof. Reilly as an Affordable Education Champion appreciated this commitment to putting technology like VR within reach of the students in the class. After reorganizing her class to a flipped model that allowed students time to use these tools, Prof. Reilly noticed that her students understood better what virtual worlds were like and what they could do with them. She wrote “Through weekly sandbox demos, students gain better cognitive abilities of spatial literacy and learn to identify the possible interactions that can happen within a 3D environment whether it is a physical, digital or combination of both.” Because of this focus on using technology collaboratively, the class was also able to come together into a stronger learning community.
Providing free access to these tools was the right thing for her students’ learning in this class, but Prof. Reilly also believes in leveling the educational playing field in general. She wrote of her decision to lower the cost barrier for her students “There are too many things in this world that divide us but as instructors, we can combat this.” In her view “Making education affordable to everyone advances our society…. Making our materials affordable and accessible helps to address the unequal access to opportunities, experiences, skills and knowledge that will prepare our students for full participation in the world of today and tomorrow.”
If you are a faculty member who would like to discuss finding and using OER and other free or low cost course materials in your class(es), please contact Heather Walter, Tocker Open Education Librarian (heather.walter@austin.utexas.edu).
In celebration of Open Education Week 2023, the Senate of College Councils, the Natural Sciences Council, and UT Libraries partnered to solicit nominations from students across campus to recognize instructors who increased access and equity by selecting free or low cost course materials for their classes. We’ll be recognizing a few of those nominees this week as Affordable Education Champions!
Affordable Education Champions are instructors who assign free or low cost resources — like textbooks, websites, films, and more — for their courses. Sometimes they author their own materials, and sometimes they’re able to reuse free or low cost work created by others. We celebrate their commitment to fostering access to high quality education at the lowest possible cost barrier for their students.
Today, we recognize and thank Thomas Jesús Garza, who was nominated as an Affordable Education Champion for E 316N, World Literature.
“Thomas Jesús Garza is University Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies and Founding Director of the Texas Language Center. He teaches Russian language and literature, language pedagogy, and contemporary Russian culture. He has been traveling to and researching in Russia since 1979 and has lived in Moscow for over six years. A native Texan, Dr. Garza received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1987. During his more than 30 years at the University, he has received numerous prizes for undergraduate and graduate teaching, including the Texas Excellence Award, the President’s Associates Award, the Harry Ransom Award, was inducted into the University Academy of Distinguished Teachers in 2003, selected for a Regents Outstanding Teaching Award in 2009, and chosen a “Texas Top Ten” instructor by the Texas Exes in 2018. He recently completed a book manuscript on filmic portraits of machismo in contemporary Russian and Mexican cultures and is currently working on a new project on Russian actor and bard, Vladimir Vysotsky in the Americas in the 1970s.”
“No student should ever have to make the choice between buying course books or eating lunch.”
Like many of the other Affordable Education Champions, Dr. Garza recognizes the role accessibility to textbooks plays in promoting equity among the student body. He writes, “The issues of equity and access to a quality higher education are extremely important to me. As [a first generation college student] myself, I understand how challenging undertaking college courses can be, especially when that difficulty is compounded by the excessive cost of books and course materials.” When students don’t have to worry about how they will manage to pay for expensive textbooks, they can focus more fully on the class content. The student nominator for Dr. Garza mentioned that they used the money they saved by not having to purchase textbooks for this particular class to pay for needed medication. This exemplifies the difficult financial decisions some UT students have to make. As Dr. Garza says, “No student should ever have to make the choice between buying course books or eating lunch.”
Furthermore, the student nominator appreciated that the format chosen by Dr. Garza (PDFs uploaded to the class Canvas page) allowed them to go back later to read or reread texts when they had more time to fully appreciate their nuances. They wrote that they planned to return to the texts in the future because of the quality of the discussions held in class and that “[it] made me feel cared for because he understands that we already spend so much money on courses and their materials and that there are ways of accessing wonderful literature without putting any burden on the students. Since a lot of them were in pdf form, I still have the ability to go back and read the ones I loved or save them for when I have time.” Using free materials in courses is a way of approaching teaching in a holistic manner. Students are balancing many responsibilities. Giving them flexibility for how they access texts allows them to engage with the material in the way that works best for them.
Dr. Garza’s class addresses trauma and healing, and the diversity of the readings reflects the many different ways to approach this complex topic. Nevertheless, he was “pleasantly surprised” to discover that many of the texts he wanted to use were already available in digital formats that he could link to in Canvas.
If you are a faculty member who would like to discuss finding and using OER and other free or low cost course materials in your class(es), please contact Heather Walter, Tocker Open Education Librarian (heather.walter@austin.utexas.edu).
In celebration of Open Education Week 2023, the Senate of College Councils, the Natural Sciences Council, and UT Libraries partnered to solicit nominations from students across campus to recognize instructors who increased access and equity by selecting free or low cost course materials for their classes. We’ll be recognizing a few of those nominees this week as Affordable Education Champions!
Affordable Education Champions are instructors who assign free or low cost resources — like textbooks, websites, films, and more — for their courses. Sometimes they author their own materials, and sometimes they’re able to reuse free or low cost work created by others. We celebrate their commitment to fostering access to high quality education at the lowest possible cost barrier for their students.
Today, we recognize and thank Deborah Jacobvitz, who was nominated as an Affordable Education Champion for HDF 342, Development of Psychopathology from Infancy through Adolescence.
Deborah Jacobvitz is the Phyllis L. Richards Endowed Professor in Child Development, Department of Human Development and Family Sciences. “[She] specializes in the field of parenting and social and emotional development in children. Her research focuses on the links between family relationships, emotions, health, and development, with a particular focus on the transmission of caregiving across generations, attachment security across the life course and the effects of marital conflict on children’s well being. Her studies address how early caregiving experiences shape how we remember, organize and perceive information and the relationships we form with others. In her work, Dr. Jacobvitz is interested in developing interventions to help families and children in need of support. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, St. David’s Foundation, the Hudson Foundation, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the Egg Nutrition Center and the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health.”*
There is a direct link between Dr. Jacobvitz’s emphasis on free and low-cost materials and her genuine care for those whom she teaches. In their nomination, a student quoted from the course syllabus, “My top priority in this course is YOU and YOUR learning experience” and went on to say that Dr. Jacobvitz was “one of the most caring and selfless professors I’ve met during my time at UT.” Furthermore, they said that since they didn’t worry as much about buying expensive materials for the course, they experienced less stress and were able to focus more fully on the class itself. In other words, having low-cost materials as an option led to the student feeling more engaged in the content and more connected to their professor.
When asked about what led her to choose affordable materials for her course, Dr. Jacobvitz wrote, “I noticed there were students in my class that skipped buying textbooks even though it would hurt their grade because they could not afford them. . . .These students asked if they could purchase older used editions which had out-of-date material.” After she adopted the new approach, she noticed an increase in students being prepared for class, participating in discussions, and performing better on class assignments.
While she acknowledges that finding and providing free and low cost materials may take a little more time than requiring a traditional (often expensive) textbook, Jacobvitz feels that it was worth it. She also suggests that faculty who teach similar courses at different universities work together to suggest readings and other resources in the public domain. This has the advantage of bringing together an academic community that goes beyond the bounds of UT. Besides the clear benefit to the student experience, Dr. Jacobvitz pointed out that providing these types of materials aligned with her belief in equal access, as students were not prohibited from accessing up to date materials by a lack of funding.
If you are a faculty member who also believes in open access and would like more information about finding OER and other free or low cost course materials, we encourage you to contact Heather Walter, Tocker Open Education Librarian (heather.walter@austin.utexas.edu).
In celebration of Open Education Week 2023, the Senate of College Councils, the Natural Sciences Council, and UT Libraries partnered to solicit nominations from students across campus to recognize instructors who increased access and equity by selecting free or low cost course materials for their classes. We’ll be recognizing a few of those nominees this week as Affordable Education Champions!
Affordable Education Champions are instructors who assign free or low cost resources — like textbooks, websites, films, and more — for their courses. Sometimes they author their own materials, and sometimes they’re able to reuse free or low cost work created by others. We celebrate their commitment to fostering access to high quality education at the lowest possible cost barrier for their students.
Today, we recognize and thank MJ Johns, who was nominated for their CS 303E class, Elements of Computers/Programming. “MJ Johns (they/them) received their M.E.T in entertainment technology with a concentration in game design from Carnegie Mellon University and their B.A. in computer science from The Ohio State University. MJ is a mobile app developer, game and experience designer, and founder/director of the indie game studio Astire Games.”
In an email, Prof. Johns shared the reasons they create affordable courses: “When I was in college I was working part time and paying my own way, and there were several occasions where I had to choose not to take a class I wanted because the materials required were too expensive. I don’t want any student to choose not to take my class because they can’t afford the materials or textbook.” They elaborated on their process for identifying and creating materials, writing, “I do a lot of research to find free resources for students, and I also create a lot of them myself (I always try to include a mixture of video and reading sources to improve accessibility).” This hard work was reflected in the student nomination, which was especially appreciative of the materials Prof. Johns created themself and of the breadth of materials they assigned.
If you’re looking to make a course more affordable, Prof. Johns has some advice. They recommend to “look for partnership opportunities around campus where such resources and materials could be offered to students for free – the campus libraries and labs have been very supportive and helpful whenever I have tried to make this work.” With partners like the libraries and other campus units, faculty can find access to book chapters, scholarly articles, and even software and hardware needed for the course – all for free for the student. “As for textbooks, my advice is to find out if there are websites or articles that offer similar concepts without the price barrier.” Prof Johns concluded by reiterating their commitment to creating affordable courses, stating, “It takes a bit of extra effort to make sure there are options for students, but in my mind it is well worth the extra time because there will be students who couldn’t take your class otherwise!”
Need help finding OER and other free or low cost course materials? Contact Heather Walter, Tocker Open Education Librarian (heather.walter@austin.utexas.edu).
In celebration of Open Education Week 2023, the Senate of College Councils, the Natural Sciences Council, and the Libraries partnered to solicit nominations from students across campus to recognize instructors who increased access and equity by selecting free or low cost course materials for their classes. We’ll be recognizing a few of those nominees this week as Affordable Education Champions!
Affordable Education Champions are instructors who assign free or low cost resources — like textbooks, websites, films, and more — for their courses. Sometimes they author their own materials, and sometimes they’re able to reuse free or low cost work created by others. We celebrate their commitment to fostering access to high quality education at the lowest possible cost barrier for their students.
Today, we recognize and thank Dr. Kiril Avramov, who was nominated as an Affordable Education Champion 14 times by students in his EUS 348 class, Intelligence and Espionage in the Eastern Bloc (cross-listed as GOV 324E and REE 335).
Previously he was the Acting Vice-Rector for International Relations and Research at the New Bulgarian University (NBU) in Sofia, Bulgaria and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at NBU. He studied previously at Gustavus Adolphus College (USA/MN), the University of Aberdeen (Scotland), University of Sofia (Bulgaria), Central European University (Hungary), and NBU. He taught in the Department of Political Science at the University of Sofia until 2005 and, from 2006-2010, was also the Director of the international consultancy and research institute ‘Political Capital’ in Bulgaria. In 2010, he was appointed as the Director for International Relations of Political Capital at the firm’s headquarters in Budapest. Dr. Avramov was a Fulbright Senior Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) at the University of Texas at Austin in 2015-2016. He earned a full scholarship for his PhD research at the University of Sofia and received an ‘Open Society Institute-Sofia’ scholarship for his year-long PhD specialization at the Central European University in Budapest.”*
Dr. Avramov, who shared his thoughts on this course with us via email, called EUS 348 “a course that is an actual labor of love that deals with meaningful and diverse topics that require a wide array of core theoretical and specific issue-focused texts, multiple audiovisual materials, and an AI discussion platform simultaneously to provide relevant context to a very diverse student body.” This variety of sources could become prohibitively expensive, so as one student noted in their nomination, “He [Dr. Avramov] retrieved a mass amount of readings for us, free of cost.” For Dr. Avramov, this strategy was intentional. “To keep the balance between narrowing the scope and the number of sources and keeping the price at a minimum, the natural choice was to seek, combine and incorporate free or affordable source materials.” Students recognized and appreciated this work, noting that the low cost of this course allowed them to buy other textbooks, to fund general living expenses, and, as one student wrote, “I could save money as I’m about to graduate and need to start having money to live on my own.” Students were required to buy one affordable program and found it an integral part of the course. According to one student nomination, “The one program we did have to buy has been very impactful in facilitating conversations with our classmates.”
The experience of teaching this intentionally affordable course has made Dr. Avramov a believer in creating courses this way where possible. He wrote, “Even though crafting a course syllabus based on free or accessible source materials could be taxing in terms of time and effort investment, the results from this investment are more than worth it. I firmly believe that easily accessible quality information does transform lives for the better!”
Need help finding OER and other free or low cost course materials? Contact Heather Walter, Tocker Open Education Librarian (heather.walter@austin.utexas.edu).
In recognition, the Libraries is hosting events to raise awareness of Open Educational Resources (OER) and introducing faculty who are using the technology for the benefit of their work and their students.
Events
OER Faculty Panel, March 7, 10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.: Join UT faculty members as they discuss the benefits, challenges, and rewards of incorporating OER into their teaching practices. This event is free and virtual. Register here.
OER Tabling Event, March 8, 11:00 a.m. – 1 p.m.: Stop by the PCL lobby to learn about OER initiatives happening at UT. Ask questions, complete our poll, or just come see what OER is all about.
But first, a primer…
What is open education? The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) defines it as “resources, tools and practices that are free of legal, financial and technical barriers and can be fully used, shared and adapted in the digital environment.” Open education expands access to the resources of higher education (like open textbooks!) and enables the sort of collaboration that can engage students in new ways (like contributing to those open textbooks!).
It won’t shock you that cost remains a significant barrier to the pursuit of higher education. While the biggest costs, like tuition and housing, are generally beyond the reach of most instructors to impact, the cost of course materials is tangible and significant. At UT, students enrolled full-time in the fall and spring semesters can expect to spend $714 per year — and depending on their major, it could be much more.
Open educational resources, or OER, are learning objects, like textbooks, websites, images, videos, and more, that are generally free of cost AND free of the legal barriers that restrict instructors from customizing them for their students’ needs. Replacing expensive course materials with OER can save a student tens to hundreds of dollars per course.
Today, I’ll be highlighting the South Asia Open Archives. The South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) is a rich, curated collection of historical and contemporary resources from and about South Asia. The SAOA collection contains hundreds of thousands of pages of books, journals, newspapers, census data, and magazines with a focus on social and economic history, literature, women and gender, and caste and social structure. The collection includes documents in English and in other languages of the region such as Hindi, Urdu and Bengali.
SAOA is administratively hosted by the Center for Research Libraries, and is the product of a broad consortium of 26 current member research libraries in South Asia and around the world, including the University of Texas Libraries. It is enriched by substantial contributions of content, human and material resources from a community of libraries, research centers, archives and other institutions partnering to bring these resources out for global scholarship and pedagogy.
Some of the titles that have been digitized with direct support from the University of Texas include: Baghi, Viplav, and Viplavi Tract. All three titles have a Leftist/Marxist focus and engage with workers and labor issues.
In keeping with the OA Week theme for this year of Open for Climate Justice, I did a search for climate,in the SAOA Collection, and found over 1200 results ranging from census information, Indian Assembly debates, newspapers, correspondence, and books. SAOA has been digitizing and will be publishing collections of colonial records related to public works (irrigation), forests, land settlement, trade and navigation, and famine that will be available to support the work of environmental historians and climate scientists.
You can find more information about SAOA within the collection in JSTOR, on Twitter, and on Instagram. To suggest sources to add to SAOA or learn more about joining or participating in SAOA, please email them at saoa@crl.edu. UT Austin faculty, staff, and students with questions about SAOA, may also reach out to Mary Rader, South Asian Studies Liaison Librarian. To learn more about open access at UT, please see our Open Access blog or our Open Access LibGuide.
Part of UT’s mission is to “contribute to the advancement of society through research, creative activity, scholarly inquiry and the development and dissemination of new knowledge”. One way we can help fulfill that mission is by making more of the University’s research and scholarship available open access. Open access (OA) is the free, immediate access to research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment (definition from SPARC).
One way UT Libraries is trying to facilitate greater access to UT Austin research is through open access deals with publishers. The University of Texas at Austin signed an agreement with Cambridge University Press (CUP) in 2021 that gives the UT community access to over 400 CUP journals and gives UT Austin authors the option to make their articles in any of those journals OA without needing to pay an article processing charge (APC). We were able to get all of this for only a very modest increase in price over our previous deal.
From January 2021 (when our deal went into effect) through June 2022, there have been 77 articles published by UT Austin authors, of which, 60 are available open access on the CUP platform, and a further eight are available OA on open repositories like arXiv and PubMed Central. If we had to pay those APCs individually, they would have cost us $117,043.50 in 2021 and $62,147 so far this year.
Giving our authors the option to publish OA with Cambridge allows us to share the knowledge being created here with people in Austin, in Texas, and around the globe. Here’s just one indication of the importance of sharing our research more widely — these 77 articles have been downloaded over 64,000 times.
UTL is excited about this Cambridge deal for several reasons. CUP journals are valued by our faculty, students, and staff both as journals to read and journals to publish in. CUP includes many journals in the fine arts and humanities; disciplines which are not always well represented in open access publishing initiatives. CUP offered us a deal that is financially sustainable for us long-term and which increases access to the research being done at UT. The CUP deal includes unlimited OA publications by UT authors. This means we don’t have to monitor a fund, we know exactly how much it will cost us this year, and we don’t have to tell any authors “sorry, this year’s funding has run out”.
Our agreement with CUP is part of a larger effort to engage with and support open access initiatives that help create a more sustainable (both financially and operationally) and equitable scholarly communication ecosystem for readers and authors.
UT authors who are interested in publishing with a Cambridge University Press journal can find out more about their journals on the CUP website. The process of selecting open access for accepted articles is relatively straightforward. More information about all our open memberships, and contact information for those with questions, are available on our Open Access LibGuide.
It is no secret that the Benson Latin American Collection preserves one of the most important Spanish colonial archives in the United States. Within the pages of hundreds of volumes and archival boxes in its stacks are countless historical gems documenting the lived experience of colonized people, colonizers, and everyone in between. However, these perspectives are largely inaccessible: archaic penmanship and obscure writing conventions encode these histories on brittle paper.
Detail of a document listing the instances in which Mixquiahuala’s corregidor, the district’s royal administrator and judge, defrauded the Tepatepec Pueblo, circa 1570–1572, Genaro García Manuscript Collection.
For years, the LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Office has been experimenting with digital technologies to transform this “unreadable” Spanish colonial archive into accessible humanities data for scholars. However, we tried something new this past year and reversed the equation: We convened colonial Latin Americanists online to transform handwritten words on pages into digital text that they could then use to make the digital humanities (DH) more accessible. This resulted in the “Spanish Paleography and Digital Humanities Institute,” a free online program that provided scholars with practical training in the reading and visualization of 16th- to 18th-century manuscripts in Spanish. The program’s syllabus and logistics were designed by Abisai Pérez Zamarripa, LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship graduate research assistant and doctoral candidate in history, and myself. Anyone with advanced Spanish-reading proficiency was invited to apply.
“I found this institute thoughtful, generative, and inspiring. The coordinators made every effort to show the participants relevant tools and encourage our progress. It was uniquely helpful to identify DH methods and tools that would make sense in an early modern context and to discuss questions that relate to our field.” — Fall 2021 participant
Geographic distribution of 2021–2022 institute participants
Colonial Latin Americanists from all over the world applied. While we were only planning to lead one institute, the overwhelming response to our call for applications prompted us to offer two, one in the fall (November–December 2021) and another in the spring (January–March 2022). In all, we accepted 60 participants, including 35 graduate students, eight junior faculty, eight tenured professors, five archive and library professionals, and four independent researchers. By the end of the academic year, we had trained scholars in 11 countries and 18 U.S. states who had varying experience in Spanish paleography and the digital humanities.
“The facilitators were very supportive, and the workshop itself was an invaluable opportunity to meet scholars from across the U.S. and Latin America despite not being able to travel, and to experience a variety of digital humanities tools relevant to our work.” — Dr. Mallory E. Matsumoto, Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies, The University of Texas at Austin
Various Early Modern Spanish handwriting styles represented in the Benson Latin American Collection
One of our main objectives was to help participants obtain and hone Spanish paleography skills. We invited experts from Germany, Portugal, France, and Mexico to provide introductions on specific colonial institutions and their records to expose students to specialized writing conventions and abbreviations. Each Friday, we would break the cohort into groups so that they could collaboratively read and transcribe the week’s case study in a shared Google Doc, which enabled us to give them live feedback and corrections on their transcriptions.
“The group transcription sessions every Friday were invaluable as they allowed us to decipher and discuss doubts with colleagues throughout the [transcription] process, while learning from those with greater knowledge.” — Spring 2022 participant
The spirit of collegiality during these sessions was truly inspiring. We witnessed how scholars, especially those with advanced Spanish paleography skills, actively supported each other in deciphering the texts. After the institute ended, some commented that they considered this group work as “one of the most enriching experiences from the institute.”
A corrected document transcription in FromThePage
After the collaborative transcription sessions, participants continued to hone their paleography skills through assigned weekly homework. Each scholar transcribed two to four pages in various handwriting styles using the University of Texas Libraries’ instance of FromThePage, a platform that enables collaborative transcription work and version tracking. Once they were done with a page, Abisai and I reviewed and corrected the transcriptions, which FromThePage documented and showed, as seen above, to further the students’ understanding of the scripts and abbreviations.
Published institute transcriptions in the Texas Data Repository
Besides learning how to read the archaic penmanship, scholars were simultaneously helping us enhance the accessibility of the Spanish colonial collection. One the one hand, the cohorts transcribed, and consequently made intellectually accessible, over 90 documents (1,000+ pages) preserved in the Benson Latin American Collection. We are currently publishing them in the Texas Data Repository and will soon ingest them in the University of Texas Libraries’ Collections portal with the images of the original materials to broaden access.
Training of a handwritten text recognition model for a Spanish colonial handwriting style in Transkribus
On the other hand, participants also helped us leverage machine-learning technologies to automate this work in the future. As part of the “Unlocking the Colonial Archive” NEH-AHRC grant project, we are reusing these transcriptions to train handwritten text recognition (HTR) models for each of the handwriting styles we commonly find in Spanish colonial documentation. We are then running these models on untranscribed materials at the Benson and in other digital archives to obtain usable automatic transcriptions. To see a list of participants who made a significant contribution to this effort, visit the project website.
With transcriptions in hand, students then used them to learn several free and open-source digital humanities tools. Each Monday, we demonstrated how to extract, visualize, and analyze data from these transcribed texts in different platforms, including Recogito, Voyant-Tools, ArcGIS, and Onodo. As a capstone experience, we asked participants to develop and present a pilot digital humanities project using these tools and texts relevant to their research.
“I honestly did not know what to expect going into this institute. My focus was to improve my paleography skills with the digital programs as a benefit. Now, not only am I more confident in my paleography skills, but I have a plethora of digital tools to use for my projects.” — Spring 2022 participant
Network visualization developed by a spring cohort member, Francisco Javier Fernández Rivera, Universidad Iberomexicana de Hidalgo, who considered the DH workshops “a great opportunity to learn about our documentary past through technological advances.”
Given the positive reception and subsequent demand for such training, we will be leading another round of institutes this fall, August 15–September 30, 2022, and next spring, January 23–March 10, 2023. So if you are interested, check out the call for applications and join the collaborative “unlocking” of the Spanish colonial archive!
“I think it is a very complete and ambitious program. You taught me many tools that changed my way of doing history, of thinking about the social sciences and the humanities. I am very grateful to you. I hope you continue to be very successful and that this project continues to grow.” — Fall 2021 participant
These institutes would not have been possible without the support of these individuals:
Dr. Manuel Bastias Saavedra, Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory and Adjunct Professor at the Institute of Latin American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin (Germany)
Dr. Berenise Bravo Rubio, Researcher-Professor at the National School of Anthropology and History (Mexico)
Brittany Centeno, Preservation Librarian, UT Libraries
Dr. Guillaume Gaudin, Researcher-Professor at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès (France)
Dr. Lidia Gómez García, Researcher-Professor at the Meritorious Autonomous University of Puebla (Mexico)
Ryan Lynch, Head of Special Collections, LLILAS Benson (United States of America)
Dr. Kelly McDonough, Associate Professor at the Spanish and Portuguese Department, The University of Texas at Austin (United States of America)
Dr. Patricia Murrieta-Flores, Professor in Digital Humanities and Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Centre at Lancaster University (United Kingdom)
Dr. Javier Pereda, Senior Researcher at the Arts & Humanities Research Council and Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design and Illustration at Liverpool John Moores University (United Kingdom)
Theresa Polk, Head of Digital Initiatives, LLILAS Benson (United States of America)
Dr. Miguel Rodrigues Lourenço, Researcher at the Center of the Humanities, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal)
Susanna Sharpe, Communications Coordinator, LLILAS Benson (United States of America)
Katherine Thornton, Digital Asset Delivery Coordinator, UT Libraries (United States of America)
Krissi Trumeter, Financial Analyst, LLILAS Benson (United States of America)
This initiative was generously sponsored by:
National Endowment for the Humanities (United States of America)
Arts and Humanities Research Council (United Kingdom)
LLILAS Excellence Fund for Technology and Development in Latin America
Albert A. Palacios, PhD, is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator at LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, The University of Texas at Austin.
With the arrival of Vice Provost and Director Lorraine Haricombe, the Libraries leaned into Open Access as a strategy for equitable access to resources and as a budgetary countermeasure in a the face of skyrocketing publishing costs. A facet of the work that has gotten extra attention is Open Educational Resources – OERs – defined by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition as “teaching, learning and research resources released under an open license that permits their free use and repurposing by others. OERs can be textbooks, full courses, lesson plans, videos, tests, software, or any other tool, material, or technique that supports access to knowledge.”
In the fall of 2019, the Tocker Foundationprovided $355,000 for a collaborative project between the UT Libraries, the Austin Public Library (APL) and Austin Community College (ACC) to promote the adoption, development and distribution of OERs. Funding from the gift subsidized the hiring of a dedicated librarian to develop and execute a plan for broad adoption of OERs at UT, as well as for the award of open education grants, education and training on OERs and joint promotion of open education with partner institutions APL and ACC.
In fall 2020, the Libraries hired Ashley Morrison – a former UT iSchool alum and GRA who had landed a permanent position at the North Carolina State University Library, but whose interest in open education called her back to Austin – to become the first Tocker Open Education Librarian at the university.
A little over a year after pioneering the position at UT, Ashley talks with us about her love of open access and OERs, the foundation she’s building and perceptions of the enterprise so far.
Tex Libris: How did you become interested in Open Access and OERs?
Ashley Morrison: I first learned about open access and open education as movements in graduate school, but conceptually, democratized access to and production of knowledge is something that always spoke to me (and was a big part of why I wanted to become a librarian!). As a first-generation college student who was responsible for most of the cost of my education, it’s easy to understand the power and potential of OER to transform course material access and have a positive impact on the financial well-being of students. While textbooks and course materials are just one factor contributing to the rising expense of higher education, it is a tangible and addressable obstacle through the availability and adoption of OER and other OA materials.
TL: What is your assessment of the OER landscape at UT? In what ways can OERs benefit students/faculty/researchers at the university?
AM: There is a small but growing community of UT instructors, staff, and students who already use and advocate for the adoption of OER, and they are my partners in driving awareness of OER on campus. Through my personal interactions and through more scaled survey-based outreach, we know that faculty at UT are largely receptive and willing to consider OER as required course materials. We also know that they often need more support to make such a big change to their curriculum, and I love being able to offer some of that support as they search for, evaluate, and adapt OER for use in their classrooms.
The most obvious benefit of OER for students, and what gets most people interested in OER, is the eliminated or significantly reduced financial barrier to access course materials. Most OER is available at no cost, and printed materials are generally available at the cost to produce them. But what I’ve heard others say and I definitely observe to be true is that with OER, you come for the free access, but you stay for the pedagogy. The open licenses conferred to OER by their creators allow anyone who uses them to make copies and customize the resources freely. That means they can be translated into new languages, modified to better reflect the student body of a particular institution or classroom, updated with new research or case studies, and more. It also enables faculty to engage students as editors and creators in the production of OER. Students can contribute to open textbooks, create open websites, and more. Students are not just knowledge consumers but knowledge creators, and that’s a really transformative concept for many of them.
TL: What projects have you undertaken since you took on the job?
AM: This year has been a busy one! There are a few projects that have been especially fulfilling, including a partnership between UT Libraries and students in Natural Sciences Council and the Senate of College Councils that produced our first faculty recognition program, the Affordable Education Champions. Through this campaign, we invite the student body to nominate faculty whose choices to assign free or low-cost materials have had a real impact on them.
I also really enjoyed working with colleagues from the OER Working Group to launch our first OER-focused instructor learning community, with grant funding from the Faculty Innovation Center providing small stipends to our participants. We spent six weeks with the ten selected instructors discussing OER and other affordable course materials as tools to foster inclusion in their classrooms, and we hope to offer more communities like this in the future.
Finally, one I’m very excited about this year is the Open Education Fellows pilot program. This program is designed to offer our small cohort of faculty fellows financial and programmatic support in their effort to adopt or adapt existing OER or develop new resources to fill gaps in the OER landscape.
TL: What sort of reception have you received from potential stakeholders on campus?
AM: It’s been a very encouraging reception! From students to staff to faculty to administration, open education is generally received with curiosity and interest. This isn’t to say that there aren’t some concerns expressed, but most stakeholders I’ve spoken with are open to learning more about the financial and pedagogical benefits of using OER in the classroom.
TL: Do you coordinate with institutions outside of UT? If so, how does that influence your local strategy?
AM: Yes! I’m very lucky that the open education community actively seeks collaboration, which makes a lot of sense given that connection is a principle of open education. I am regularly in touch with a small group of librarians called the OER Ambassadors, which is a program facilitated by Texas Digital Library. More recently, I’ve also helped convened an informal group of practitioners across the UT System, which aligns strategically with the Momentum on OER (MOER) effort sponsored by the System. Each of these groups is really valuable because they give me a chance to connect with colleagues doing similar work, though each of our OER programs may be in different stages of maturity. I learn a lot from hearing what’s worked well for others, what’s been challenging, and how they’re implementing best practices and in some cases mandates from legislation related to OER. These colleagues are incredibly generous, and their insights have directly informed the development of many of our OER programs at UT.
TL: How did the health crisis impact your work? You came on in the middle of the pandemic, at a time when OERs would’ve been really beneficial, but I imagine that you were also limited in opportunities to hit the ground and start building networks.
AM: While the pandemic did inhibit my ability to knock on doors and host physical programming that was central to UT’s OER advocacy efforts in previous years, my experience was that it engendered a great sense of empathy between faculty and students that opened them up to conversations about OER in a way that they may not have been before the pandemic. There is a heightened sense of awareness of the struggles we’re each facing right now, and for many members of our UT community and their families, financial vulnerability has been a really evident challenge. I have seen faculty go to great lengths to mitigate any of the struggles that they can for their students – from being more flexible about assignment deadlines to revising testing procedures to reevaluating course materials that cause financial burdens for some students. While faculty continue to have so many of their own challenges to address during this health crisis, I have seen them prioritize the well-being of their students repeatedly. OER has been one tool for doing this.
TL: What’s the biggest challenge you’ve recognized since you arrived? What’s the biggest opportunity?
AM: One of the biggest challenges I’ve observed is that while so many faculty are interested in using OER, the right OER isn’t there for every class just yet. This especially comes up in my conversations and searches with faculty teaching upper-division courses. It’s not surprising since most of the large-scale, funded OER projects are aimed at introductory level courses, but it’s still disappointing when someone is really excited about adopting OER and just can’t find what they need. In those cases, we explore other free and affordable options, like searching UT Libraries’ vast collections to identify licensed materials that would be free for students to access. These faculty are also often interested in developing their own OER to address these gaps in content, which I see as one of UT’s greatest opportunities to impact not only our students but anyone, anywhere who wants to learn. However, developing OER takes a lot of time that our faculty often don’t have, and the work is not always recognized through the existing reward structures of the university (such as promotion or tenure). The Open Education Fellows pilot program is our first step to seeing what it would take to support faculty authors and OER publishing projects, and I’m very excited to learn and identify opportunities to scale that program in the future. With funding, I’m optimistic that we can enable UT community members to create more open, public knowledge.
TL: What do you hope to achieve in the short-term – next couple of years – and what about the long-term?
AM: I mentioned already my hopes for scaling OER adoption and development through the Open Education Fellows program, but beyond that, another short-term goal I have is to support faculty who are interested in assessing the impact of adopting OER and other free resources in their classrooms. Studies outside of our institution overwhelmingly show that students enrolled in courses using OER perform as well or better than students enrolled in courses using commercial textbooks. Some studies are even able to demonstrate that the impact to outcomes like final grades are outsized for historically underserved groups like first-generation students, students with financial need, and BIPOC students. I’m eager to partner with faculty interested in replicating or expanding on these studies and contributing to the scholarship of teaching.
A longer-term goal is really more about a cultural shift, and I believe we’re at the start of it now. I want OER (and affordability, more generally), to be a key part of the University’s strategic priorities. It makes sense to have the UT Libraries guide our campus OER efforts as a thought leader and programmatic coordinator, but open education won’t be a formidable movement on campus without administrative support outside the Libraries. It is critical, for example, that faculty contributions related to OER – adopting, adapting, developing, and co-creating with students – are formally recognized and valued in promotion and tenure guidelines. I am optimistic that the work of the Sustainable Open Scholarship Working Group will advance this conversation and lead to more institutional support for OER, but the shift we need will take time at a university of our size.
TL: Given user familiarity with traditional publishing, how do you change minds about the fairly novel concept of OERs?
AM: It’s definitely easy to think of OER as the wild west of publishing – no peer review, no quality control, no graphic design value. But that’s not the case! So far, the most effective way to ease minds has been to actually show people high-quality examples of OER in the wild. I often point to examples from OpenStax, though they aren’t the only publisher of beautifully-produced, peer-reviewed OER with the ancillary materials that instructors often value. (And to be clear, not all OER is like this, just as not every commercial textbook is.) The point is that OER can look a lot like the proprietary textbooks they may already be using, and doing hands-on exploration is the only way to determine if any kind of course material is right for you, whether it’s published openly or commercially.
