Welcome to Open Education Week (March 7-11, 2022)! Please join with the Library in supporting Open Educational Resources (OER) — media released under a license that allows access with few restrictions and no cost. The use of OER helps to create a more equitable and inclusive learning environment in which students of all income levels can enroll in the classes they want, not blocked by the exorbitant costs of required texts.

Over the past ten years, there have been 1,640 OE Week events in which 1,004 Open Education Resources have been shared, and 73,007 people have attended events or gained access to Open Education resources, assets, and repositories from 192 countries and in 34 languages.

This year, the UVA Library invites you to attend an Open Ed Week event on Wednesday, March 9, from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Eastern Time, sponsored by the State Council for Higher Education Open Virginia Advisory Committee. The event will offer four tours demonstrating how OER and/or Open Pedagogy are being implemented in courses in a variety of educational contexts by colleagues in Virginia. There will also be a summary of VIVA’s Virginia Course Materials Survey along with information on VIVA Open Grants available for OER. Register for the event now!

Current Library OER initiatives include:

• Affordability and Equity grants — Three grant recipients have been selected for the program’s inaugural cohort: Anna Borovskaya-Ellis of (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures), Stella Mattioli (Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese), and Kate Neff and Matthew Street (Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese). These faculty members will develop open educational foreign language resources to aid language acquisition, listening skills, and cultural knowledge.
• Faculty and staff workshops — The new workshop schedule to be announced on March 14 will cover such topics as: planning an OER project, using Pressbooks to publish open texts, saving and disseminating OER through UVA’s Libra institutional repository, OER copyright and licensing, creating and sharing video as an open educational resource, and creating and sharing interactive resources using H5P. All events will be posted to the Library Events Calendar.
• Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) Campus Action partnerships — The Library is joining with the UVA Student Council, including the growing Student Access Support initiative and the Council’s Textbook Access Office, to raise awareness about the increasing cost of textbooks and inequitable publishing models, and educating undergraduates about how OER can provide alternative or supplemental options to students.
• OER specialist and instructional designer Bethany Mickel is part of a team of UVA faculty and staff participating in the year-long AAC&U Institute on Open Educational Resources. She is also completing the Open Education Network Certificate in OER Librarianship.