In undergraduate life sciences education, open educational resources (OERs) increase accessibility and retention for students, reduce costs, and save instructors time and effort. Despite increasing awareness and utilization of these resources, OERs are not centrally located, and many undergraduate instructors describe challenges in locating…

In our Open Educational Resources (OER) advocacy work, we have encountered various challenges considering formulating a vision and policy on Open Education and implementing these visions and policies. Among these issues are a lack of proper definitions and terminology and lack of support for formulating and implementing a vision and policies for…

In the face of surging online education around the globe, it seems quite necessary and helpful for learners and teachers to have the plethora of online resources well sorted out beforehand. To some extent, the efficiency and accuracy of resource search and retrieval may determine the quality and influence of online education. In this research,…

The OER Universitas (OERu) is a consortium of more than 30 higher education institutions on five continents. It was founded in 2011 to provide learners everywhere with learning opportunities and pathways to official recognition or credit. The OERu maintains a very economical base with very low expenses. It supports a sustainable learning…

In this "Optimizing AI in Higher Education: SUNY FACT[superscript 2] Guide, Second Edition," you will find updated information to reflect the changing landscape of generative AI technology. We offer practical suggestions for how to help educators and students achieve AI literacy and find the right methods of using or eschewing generative…

The adoption of large language models (LLMs) in education holds much promise. However, like many technological innovations before them, adoption and access can often be inequitable from the outset, creating more divides than they bridge. In this paper, we explore the magnitude of the country and language divide in the leading open-source and…

This bibliometric analysis explores the rapidly growing field of open education, offering insight into its nature and the wide range of academic topics it covers. This study applies co-citation and co-word analyses approach to critically review 402 publications from the Web of Science database. The aim is to identify emerging topics, seminal…

While open textbooks offer opportunities to enhance inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility (IDEA), it is often seen as an afterthought in open textbook publishing processes. By examining existing literature, this paper dispels myths surrounding open textbooks and IDEA, including that openness does not equal inclusion, access or…

The adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) can, on the one hand, increase access and quality in higher education, but on the other hand it is raising concerns among universities and researchers about its economic sustainability. This is mainly because, unlike traditional online learning, in OER-based approaches learners do not have to pay to…

Open Educational Resources are free or low-cost, openly licensed course materials used in place of more expensive, commercial ones. Data collected from an open-access institution in Florida was analyzed using multiple regression to determine the relationship of Open Educational Resources with short-term student outcomes. Short-term outcomes of…

Lesley Gumb joined the New England of Higher Education (NEBHE) in late September 2019 as its Open Education Fellow to help build upon the grassroots efforts that have been underway for years in the Northeast aiming to lessen the burden that textbook costs place on higher education students and their families. Like so many of her colleagues doing…

Traditional commercial textbooks used in postsecondary courses are often problematic due to their rigidity, tendency to mirror the dominant culture, and the substantial cost imposed upon students (Junkala et al., 2022; Lambert & Funk, 2022; Wu, 2022). Although replacing these texts with open educational resources (OER) can facilitate more…

The escalating cost of textbooks presents a considerable barrier for students in higher education. Open educational resources (OER) have emerged as a viable solution to the problem, offering freely available learning materials that can potentially alleviate the financial burden on students and enhance their academic success. OER not only reduces…

The Smart Education of China, a large education data platform for the aggregation and application of high-quality educational resources, is vital for China to stimulate the balanced development of education and to reduce students' learning burden. This study focuses on the long-term mechanism of the Smart Education of China, adopting TOE framework…

This research study examined the leadership awareness and understanding of Open Educational Resources (OER) for educational access and affordability of teaching and learning resources in Malawi, Africa. According to UNESCO: United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (2023) low-income countries, like Malawi, have limited…