Abbey K. Elder

Less than 6 months after publishing, our 🪱 Introduction to Soil Science Second Edition 📙 textbook has hit...

3k downloads ⬇️
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#Soil #SoilScience #OpenAccess #OER

🙏 Thank you Amber Anderson and @openaccesselder.bsky.social

Check it out here 👇
doi.org/10.31274/isu...

Senators to vote next month on support for open educational resources - Inside Iowa State

I was very excited to see that the Resolution in support of #OER proposed by our campus committee has been featured at the top of the Faculty Senate meeting overview written up in our university newsletter this week!
www.inside.iastate.edu/article/2026...

January 2026 Resource Highlight: OER Beyond the Gen Ed Curriculum This month’s blog post was contributed by Abbey K. Elder, Open Access & Scholarly Communication Librarian at Iowa State University. Introduction Because many open education programs focus…

I got to write this month's Resource Highlight blog post for @iowaoer.bsky.social, and decided to make it a feature of some fun #OER available for the electives and mid/high-level courses that don't get enough love!

Check out the few I picked out to feature this month: iowaoer.com/2026/01/13/j...

It's hopefully a good sign that more people are reflecting on meaningful learning now, though I wish it hadn't taken this much of a push to get back around to it!

Being in the office the week of New Year's feels a bit like being in a haunted house. It's eerily silent but every once in a while you hear laughter in the distance, or glimpse a figure out of the corner of your eye (typically when one of the other 10 people here gets up to refill their coffee)

Wikipedia on the Tenure Track Jane Sancinito is Assistant Professor of History at University of Massachusetts Lowell. She is an ancient historian, focusing on merchants, artisans and working people in the Roman Empire, a numism…

"[M]y portfolio stands out because of the gamble I took on Wikipedia. I also know that by every metric available, that gamble has paid off, for me and, far more critically, for my students." Read why and how Dr. Sancinito included the Wikipedia assignment in her tenure narrative: wp.me/p4LBez-uU0

If you are intimidated by all the comprehensive guides going over everything to know about accessibility, this is a great entry point to one piece of the conversation: updating headings! This is an easy way to make a website more accessible and it's good to see it written about conceisely!

Open Curriculum Projects Launch in Oregon and Beyond Open Oregon Educational Resources is delighted to share our openly licensed course materials with an equity lens in Human Development and Family Studies, Sociology, and Criminal Justice…

Congratulations to our peers at Open Oregon Educational Resources for the launch of their open curriculum projects, a suite of peer-reviewed open textbooks with linked course packs and print options available. This is a great example for others in the #OER space!
openoregon.org/open-curricu...

Thanks @cogdog.bsky.social for sharing this excellent article from earlier this year, further cementing my belief that Tel Amiel's work on platformization should be required reading for those in the #EdTech space! This article co-authored by Almeida, Damiati, & Amiel: doi.org/10.5007/2175...

And double kudos for the team for sharing the instrument used in their assessment openly and in multiple languages!
inclusiveeducationlab.com/isat2/

Kudos to @profjhangiani.bsky.social, Clint Lalonde, Josie Gray, & folks across British Columbia who worked on this new report on institutions' capacity to support #OpenEducation. It is an excellent read & a great model for the rest of us!

PDF Link to report: bccampus.ca/wp-content/u...

"Diamond Open Access on the rise" above multicolored diamond.

Lyrasis, the Big Ten Academic Alliance Center for Library Programs and the California Digital Library have been awarded a grant to advance community-governed, open access scholarly publishing in the United States. Read more about the #DiamondOA mapping project here, https://ow.ly/QCKC50Xu6vU.

We've very lucky to be standing on the shoulders of giants with this one. Huge shout-out to the folks at OpenRN, @openstax.org, and the many #Nursing educators that have contributed to #OER projects over the last decade. Without all their work, a project at this scale wouldn't be possible!

Featured quote over a photo of a swan on a pond. Full quote in post.

One of my favorite quotes from the article:
"This initiative is about more than cost savings—it’s about creating inclusive, adaptable tools that meet the evolving needs of health care and higher education," Dr. Dawn Bowker, director of nursing education and clinical associate professor of nursing.

Students save big in new nursing curriculum with zero textbook costs - University Library

The Iowa State University Nursing program has just announced its launch of the nation’s first RN-to-BSN program with no cost for course materials. 100% of the nursing curriculum uses #OER: free adaptable learning materials developed and shared by experts across the US and beyond.

I created a bilingual checklist that classifies each action by career stage (all, mid-career, senior) and potential career risk (low, medium, high).

Use it to see what you already do or what you want to commit to next. ✅

📄 Download the checklist: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... #OpenAccess #DiamondOA

I will add the recording to my watch later, then! Thanks for the recommendation

Next up at #OpenEd25... I was going to be attending "A Positive Agenda for Open Education as a Public Good" ... but it is Day 3, so I will watch the recording later and send good thoughts to the team from the @opened.bsky.social table

This backs up previous studies that #OER are generally helpful for students, but particularly for those who may not be able to afford their materials. But the amount and complexity of the data here is much more than that. I look forward to the full report coming from the AAC&U team later! #OpenEd25

The team has a lot of data exploring ties between #OER + other factors (institution, course, the student). There is a pattern here: the affect of OER on withdrawal rates is stable across the board, but it helps students in one or more underrepresented groups (e.g. Pell eligible students) more

I'll leave it to the researchers to share their work in their own words, but some highlights:
- Course withdrawal rates saw a significant decrease across courses using #OER, though this was also affected by context, especially by variables in the students' life and needs.

Course, Student and instructor data table. Includes items like course name, year, term, discipline, first year, material cost, student birth year, total credits, full time or part time, SAT score, instructor status, and more.

A lot of data was used to get a more complete picture of the courses, instructors, and students being studied, to help the researchers understand where variables might be affecting what they found. "Pulling this data was an experience," Heather Miceli notes. #OpenEd25

It was also important for the research team to find instructors who were teaching the same courses pre-OER and post-OER, to better compare the outcomes across that data.

Presentation slide with the title Methodology and icons for institutional questionnaires, course and student data, focus groups, and instructor surveys.

To meet all of their research goals, the team had to take multiple approaches, integrating an institutional survey (does your institution have support for #OER?), collecting course data, running focus groups, and surveying instructors. #OpenEd25

As part of this research, the team thoughtfully considered how to limit bias and also get more robust data. For example, they wanted more context about individual courses and instructors' #OER adoptions, to account for ideal adoptions (integrated into LOs) and less ideal scenarios (basic flips)

High impact practices webpage screenshot. List includes capstone courses, collaborative assignments, eportfolios, internships, service learning, and more.

As the presenters share, High Impact Practices have evidence that they deepen learning within course settings and are proven to work for all students. And #OER can likely fall into this as well.

The team working on this research project wanted to establish a generalizable foundation to make evidence-based arguments for #OER use, discern what conditions yield the best results for students, and eventually, integrate #OpenEd into AAC&U's list of High Impact Educational Practices.

Next up at #OpenEd25 Day 3, I am attending "Beyond Affordability: Early Insights from a Multi-Institutional Study on #OER and Student Success" from folks doing research through the AAC&U.

If you're interested in learning more about Karen's work with open pedagogy and open science, please check out her site for the OCTOPUS project (it's quite an acronym!): karencang.net/uncategorize...

As with many of the presentations at #OpenEd25, I am so glad to be learning with and from the speakers here. Karen is always a wonder to hear from and I am lucky to be listening in this room and sharing with you all! But I'm going to cut off my live posts here to engage in Q&A more thoughtfully.