When searching for scholarly documents, researchers often stick with the same familiar handful of databases. Yet, just beyond these limited horizons lie dozens of alternatives with which they could search more effectively, whether for quick lookups or thorough searches in systematic reviews or meta-analyses. Searchsmart.org is a free website that…

Extended reality (XR), which encompasses virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR), offers powerful affordances for improving teaching and learning experiences in a post-pandemic world. Increasingly, many governments and institutions around the world are making major investments in XR technologies to prepare education…

Data science and informatics tools are developing at a blistering rate, but their users often lack the educational background or resources to efficiently apply the methods to their research. Training resources and vignettes that accompany these tools often deprecate because their maintenance is not prioritized by funding, giving teams little time…

Higher education institutions have been playing a pivotal role in the emergence and elaboration of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. Initially, pioneering institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have led the conceptualization of OER, providing models of sustainable initiatives. Following the forerunners,…

Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) have gained more prominence in education of late; however, the question of their theoretically sound implementation remains relatively understudied. The current article addresses this gap through the explanation of how a MUVE platform Second Life was used in an undergraduate course for pre-service teachers.…

This chapter discusses common tools and resources for building a hybrid course in a higher education setting and provides recommendations for best practices in Learning Management Systems and Open Educational Resources.

Educators within Higher Education (HE) and K-12 share in the need for high quality educational resources to assist in the pursuit of teaching and learning. Although there are numerous differences between the two levels of education, there are commonalties in the perceptions of the purpose, practical uses, and challenges that abide in the use of…

This paper offers insight from an informal cross-cultural mentoring experience of course development in higher education framed by the UNESCO Chair on Open Technologies for Open Educational Resources and Open Learning project. The Open Education for a Better World is a tuition-free international online mentoring program established to unlock the…

As Open Educational Resources (OER) increasingly receive attention from academics, educational foundations, and government agencies, exemplars will emerge that lower student textbook costs by moving away from commercial publishers through self-publishing or curating web-based resources. Joe Moxley's "Writing Commons" serves as a scaled…

OEPS is a cross-sector project led by the Open University in Scotland (OUiS) and funded by the Scottish Funding Council. The project began in late spring 2014 and runs until the end of July 2017. It has its origins in OER projects carried out by the OUiS over the preceding four years. In most cases these involved close partnership between the…

Across the country, districts are choosing to #GoOpen and transitioning to the use of openly licensed educational resources to improve student learning in their schools. Openly licensed educational resources enable districts to reallocate significant funds currently spent on inflexible, static learning materials to resources and activities that…

Open educational resources (OER) are educational materials with an open license so that they can be freely copied, modified, and reused. While the rising cost of textbooks is a concern in higher education, over 50% of the surveyed educators stated that they are unaware of the OER and how they could replace the traditional textbooks. In addition,…

The EdHub Library is an online teacher professional development platform that serves 250 school districts as part of the Network for Educator Effectiveness in Missouri. It has a collection of more than 300 online activities. This design case describes the efforts of re-developing EdHub due to technical and usability issues of the first generation…

One particular topic likely on the minds of many university faculty, staff, and administrators starting a new academic year is budgets. While budget constraints are nothing new to libraries, many academic departments are starting to see more cuts in areas of faculty research and curriculum development. Academic libraries are in a prime position to…

The paper describes the concept of a federated ecosystem for Open Educational Resources (OER) in the German education system. Here, a variety of OER repositories (ROER) (Muuß-Merholz & Schaumburg, 2014) and reference platforms have been established in the recent past. In order to develop this ecosystem, not only are metadata standards…