Keywords

Open Educational Resources, OER, Scholarly Communication, Humanities

Abstract

As textbook affordability and access to information become important topics on university campuses and within the population more generally, finding ways to decrease book costs in a humanities classroom while providing the best possible resources for students emerges as a multi-disciplinary strategy that requires cooperation across campus. Open Access texts are a way to offer content for free, but humanities assembling this type of text in the humanities is often restricted by copyright and intellectual property. Utilizing materials found in public domain or with a Creative Commons license, however, provides an opportunity to create Open Access texts. In spring 2016, a literature professor, humanities librarian, scholarly communication librarian and adjunct, and an instructional designer at the University of Central Florida (UCF) collaborated to create a full literature course anthology based on this principle. While the project has an air of simplicity, the group had to overcome many obstacles before the text was ready to use in class. In this roundtable, we will discuss how we navigated the multi-faceted world of Creative Commons licenses, permissions, translations, and textual formatting to deliver a cohesive open text to students free of charge. We will also discuss issues related to platforms, access, and the scalability of creating open access materials in the humanities. We will provide insight and strategies for creating a digital anthology of open access texts that can be utilized and distributed to students in a humanities course. By highlighting the pedagogical, archival, and technological necessities of this project, we will deliver key information for reproducing and individuating a similar project. In the end, this session will demonstrate how a project of this nature can serve as a model for creating open access materials in the humanities, while addressing textbook affordability and student reception.

Publication Date

11-4-2017

Document Type

Conference Presentation

College

Information Technologies & Resources

Location

Orlando (Main) Campus

Department

University Libraries, English, Center for Distributed Learning

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