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…

We advocate for greater emphasis in training students about data management, within the context of supporting experience in reproducible workflows. We introduce the "L"ancaster "U"niversity "ST"atistics "RE"sources (LUSTRE) package, used to manage student research project data in psychology and build…

While digital products have made significant inroads into the educational resources market, textbooks and other print materials still command about 60 percent of sales. But whether print or digital, all of these commercial offerings now face threats from a burgeoning effort to promote "open" resources for education--that is, materials…

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…

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,…

Taking credit for digitalization and platformization, China has initiated its open science infrastructure implementation and made an effort to focus on open access (OA) journals and data sharing over the past two decades. With the continuous development need, issues and concerns have caught in attention, including data accessibility, research…

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…

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…

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,…

This paper presents a description of the metadata harvester software development. This system provides access to reliable and quality educational resources, shared by Mexican Universities through their repositories, to anyone with Internet Access. We present the conceptual and contextual framework, followed by the technical basis, the results and…

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…

Why has the rise of the Internet--which drastically reduces the cost of distributing information--coincided with drastic increases in the prices that academic libraries pay for access to scholarly journals? This study argues that libraries are trapped in a collective action dilemma as defined by economist Mancur Olson in "The Logic 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…