National Emergency Library

The Internet Archives is making available a service they call the National Emergency Library to serve all the displaced students.  This collection of over one million e-books is available if you register for free.  Read the announcement here, and scroll down and click on the FAQ for any lingering questions you might have.  You can "borrow" up to 10 e-books for 14 days.

Five Essential Online Learning Strategies

We are one week away from all online classes.  Are you feeling a little anxious about that?  Dr. Jennifer Bachner from Johns Hopkins University put together these five online learning strategies to get you started.

Taking your course online

Read this guest column from Inside Higher Ed that has some practical advice about how to convert your class to an online delivery mode.

Virtual Library Services

The physical campus is closed until April 3, but rest assured Beaver Nation, the virtual library is open for business!  We'll be monitoring our email and online chat and text services from home and we'll be ready to answer your questions.  You can call and leave me a message, and I'll get back to you.

So, the strangest thing about working from home?  I can see outside! 

The first thing that came up in my email this morning is this guide from the Chronicle of Higher Education covering some of the basics of moving your class online.  It is a free download, no username or password is needed.  Just register and you'll get the collection.

Here are the half dozen articles included in the guide:

• As Coronavirus Spreads, Moving Classes Online Is the First Step. What’s Next?
• Going Online in a Hurry: What to Do and Where to Start
• How to Be a Better Online Teacher
• 4 Lessons From Moving a Face-to-Face Course Online
• Live From My Living Room, It’s My Classroom!
• Resources for Giving Students Online Feedback

Taking your class online? New resources available!

A lot of academic publishers have opened their catalogs to support faculty taking their classes online.  Here is a Google doc listing some of the "Vendor Love" now available.

Covid-19 Resources

If you haven't yet hit the saturation point for information about the pandemic, one of our e-journal publishers WILEY has put together a couple of resources that you may find interesting.

Coronavirus Research and News - free articles about the Covid-19 coronavirus.

Scitrus Novel Corona Outbreak Newsfeed - more free articles, a mix of medical research and news-related articles from a wide variety of publications.

Enjoy the information and be well!

Kanopy delays

I just received a notice from Kanopy, one of our online streaming video services, that they are experiencing overwhelming demands for service due to so many students trying to access their content.  I was unable to get the Kanopy page to load from our list of databases just now.  They are working to increase the bandwidth so that all can be served.  They ask for patience from their users and apologize for the inconvenience.

Awareness of OERs grows!

We've been trying to do our part in making BVU faculty more aware of open educational resources (OERs).  We are not alone!  This report from SPARC summarizes a faculty survey that shows awareness growing nationwide.

More on OER copyright

If you attended the Faculty Friday presentation on Open Educational Resources on March 6, thanks for coming!  I hope we made you more aware of OERs and how to locate them. 

This blog entry just popped up in my email and does a good job of explaining the different types of "copyright" commonly associated with OERs

Open Education Repositories

Mason Open Metafinder  MOM (covers 21 OER platforms, George Mason University)

OASIS searches open content from 97 different OER repositories and contains 385,629 records.

Open Textbook Library (UMN) We will soon be a member of OTN, but there is already a lot available here for anyone.

OER Commons (covers K-12 and higher education)

OpenStax (Rice, peer-reviewed) Primary textbooks.

COOL4Ed (California Open Online Library) textbooks, courses, faculty showcases by discipline for inspiration.

Lumen Learning

MERLOT

Smithsonian Open Access Images

Lots more links here: Finding OERs from University of the Pacific