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Sustainability and Justice: Challenges and Opportunities for an Open STEM Education

Author(s): Carrie Diaz Eaton1, Kaitlin Bonner2, Karen Cangialosi3, Bryan Dewsbury4, Maggie Diamond-Stanic5, Jason Douma6, Michelle Smith7, Jeremy M Wojdak8, Robin Taylor9

1. Bates College and QUBES 2. St. John Fisher College 3. Keene State College 4. University of Rhode Island 5. Bates College 6. University of Sioux Falls 7. Cornell University 8. Radford University 9. RTRES Consulting

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Summary:
Combining understanding of OER sustainability and equity and justice to carve out ideas for the future of STEM open education.

Licensed under CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International according to these terms

Version 2.0 - published on 08 Feb 2022 doi:10.25334/937V-SK47 - cite this

Description

Open Educational Resources or OER are teaching materials that reside in the public domain and are available under an open license. While the creation of high quality materials and cyberinfrastructure to share these resources is important, OER are much more than static resource repositories. Vibrant OER communities function as collaboration hubs and often include librarians, instructional technologists, instructors, education researchers, funders, open source software developers, and college administrators. Together these individuals work as a community to respond to changes in the education landscape, support student learning impacts both in terms of cost savings and student retention, and solve issues related to broadly sharing open resources on the web. This essay provides general information about OER, describes communities developing OER for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education, and presents insights about sustainability challenges. The sustainability challenges are organized according to multiple dimensions: cultural and social, economic and financial, and technological and environmental. In addition, OER provide important opportunities to address and promote social justice and open and accessible education philosophies. Knowing more about the OER landscape, sustainability challenges, and educational justice opportunities can help instructors use and contribute to this growing movement to reshape the landscape of undergraduate education.

Notes

After revisions - less focus on the meeting and more emphasis on key ideas and outcomes.

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