We economics professors are missing a chance to teach a cardinal lesson about the unchecked rise of prices.

As he explained, “[Paywalls are] creating a fundamental barrier between academics and everyone else—kids, the public. … It’s a problem for everyone.”

Academic libraries can help promote the adoption of open educational resources, but ultimately the push for open content has to be about more than textbooks, advocates said this week during the Open Ed Conference.

Join SPARC for the first ever OpenEd Advocacy Day before the 11th Annual Open Education Conference (#OpenEd14)

• Date: November 18, 2014
• Time: 9:00am - 3:30pm
• Place: Russell Senate Office Building, Room 188
• All participants must be registered! Please contact Nicole Allen with questions.

Taking advantage of the 2014 OpenEd Conference's Washington, D.C. location, the OpenEd Advocacy Day will give participants a unique opportunity to engage face-to-face with policymakers and advance OER awareness in one of the world's most politically powerful cities. Coordinated by SPARC, the event will run from 9:00am to 4:00pm on November 18, the day prior to the start of the conference (which runs November 19-21, 2014).

The Advocacy Day will begin with a training run by professional advocates to prepare participants for successful meetings, including effective talking points, answers to tough questions, and etiquette. Then, participants will spread out across Washington, D.C. for pre-scheduled meetings at key political institutions, including Congressional offices, Federal agencies, inter-governmental organizations, and foreign embassies. Each participant can expect to attend 1-3 advocacy meetings with relevant targets.

Advocacy training includes:

• Talking points and tips on making effective arguments for OER
• How to address common questions from policymakers
• Tips on Washington, D.C. etiquette
• Printed handouts to bring to meetings

Advocacy meetings may include:

• Members of Congress and/or staff from their offices
• Officials in Federal agencies, such as the Department of State or Department of Labor
• Key IGOs and NGOs, such as the World Bank
• Officials in relevant embassies and foreign missions

The Advocacy Day will also occur back-to-back with OpenCon 2014, a conference for students and early career researchers on Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data on November 15-17. Select OpenCon 2014 attendees will join the OpenEd Advocacy Day to lend their important voice as the next generation and share their newly-improved advocacy skills. Click here to sign up.

Registration for the conference is separate and available here.

For more information contact Nicole Allen at [email protected].

“What is your generation going to do? You don’t have a choice. You will make a mark. Will it be the mark of apathy? Or will you make the internet what it could be?”

October 1, 2014

Yesterday SPARC's Director of Open Education Nicole Allen testified at a New York City Council Higher Education Committee Hearing on Reducing the Cost of College Textbooks.

Download Nicole Allen's Testimony
[pdf] [odt] [docx]

CUNY's University Dean for Libraries and Information Resources Curtis L. Kendrick also testified. His testimony is available here.

SPARC has four member libraries in New York City: Columbia University, CUNY, New York University, and Rockefeller University.

Photo: Nicole Allen with New York City Council Higher Education Committee Chairperson Inez Barron following the hearing. (CC BY 4.0)

“Because we know that education is a cornerstone for progress…we’re going to do more to help citizens in other countries, especially students, access the incredible online educational tools and resources we have in the States.”

Yesterday President Obama announced a new initiative to promote open education as part of an update to the U.S. Open Government National Action Plan. This exciting development represents an important milestone in U.S. advocacy efforts — a national commitment to open education straight from the White House — and also adds to a growing international movement for advancing open government through openness in other areas. While the goals of the new initiative are relatively small in scale, it will contribute positively to open education both in the U.S. and abroad and also provide a significant avenue for future advocacy efforts.

The National Action Plan update entitles the initiative "Promote Open Education to Increase Awareness and Engagement" and includes three action items to be carried out in various collaborations between the Departments of Education, Labor and State and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP):

Obama announced the initiative in a speech at the 3rd anniversary meeting of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a multilateral effort to secure commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.

Last month, SPARC participated in a stakeholder meeting convened by OSTP to discuss how open education could be advanced through OGP. The participants identified several key areas where the goals of open education and open government overlap, including international collaboration, open licensing policies for federally funded resources, and increased transparency in government spending and procurement processes relating to educational materials.

Image: OER advocates including SPARC's Nicole Allen (center back) stand outside of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C. after a discussion on open education and open government (CC BY 4.0)

This week, members of the Open Policy Network — a coalition that supports open licensing for publicly funded resources that SPARC joined as a founding member earlier this year — submitted a letter of support for this section of the plan to the Minister of Education, Science and Sport, who also serves as Slovakia's Digital Champion. While the plan will almost certainly be scaled back before it is finalized, advocates inside Slovakia say that the open education section will remain part of the plan.

Conversations are ongoing in other countries, including Moldova, Tunisia, Sierra Leone, and South Africa. We expect this list of countries to expand as programs such as Europe's Opening Up Education initiative roll out, and as the body of evidence demonstrating the positive impacts of OER on teaching and learning continues to grow. Obama put it perfectly, “Education is a cornerstone of progress — if we want good governance we need an educated and informed citizenry.”

A new briefing paper on state-level open educational resources policy was released yesterday by the Education Commission of the States (ECS), a non-partisan think tank that provides education policy advice to U.S. states. Entitled “Open source textbooks can help drive down the overall cost of college,” the brief provides an overview of trends in OER policy to address the rising cost of college textbooks.

The brief states, “There is growing national and international interest in OER as a way to help financially distressed states reduce costs and save students millions of dollars....While several states have used legislation to encourage the use of electronic and digital learning resources, such resources are not necessarily freely usable as OERs — and therefore can still be expensive for students.” It concludes that, "Open Educational Resources are an emerging policy option as states, postsecondary systems and institutions consider how to best develop libraries and collections of OERs."

There are several key takeaways from the brief:

• State leaders are increasingly interested in OER as a solution to the high cost of college textbooks, which has become an important part of the postsecondary affordability debate.
• States including California, Florida, Minnesota, North Dakota and Washington have passed legislation to support the creation and use of OER through legislation.
• Non-legislative initiatives are gaining traction in states including Arizona, Minnesota, New York, Texas and Virginia.
• Important considerations for OER policy include funding, meeting faculty needs for quality and support, and offering students print options and a positive digital experience.
• Future trends include working with K-12 schools to incorporate open textbooks into P-20 curriculum and dual enrollment programs.

SPARC is actively engaged in state-level advocacy on Open Access, most recently through AB 609 in California, which currently awaits the Governor's signature. We are eager to explore opportunities to advance OER on the state front as well. As the ECS brief rightly points out, states are hungry for solutions to the rising cost of college textbooks, and in our view, supporting the creation, use, and improvement of OER is the most direct pathway to textbook affordability - and toward innovation in teaching and learning practices too. Read more about OER on SPARC's page here.

Download a PDF of the briefing paper here.