Open Educational Resources
for and as assessment
Eliana Elkhoury, Jako Olivier & Travis N Thurston
The urgency to reimagine assessment in higher education has been amplified by the move to remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic and more recently by the rollout of various generative artificial intelligence tools. There is a global need for instructors to rethink their assessment practices to evolve into more innovative, authentic, and empowering assessments. There are various ways to rethink assessment practices, the aim of this book is to examine the use of open educational resources for and as assessment. Using open educational resources for and as assessment presents an innovative way to prepare learners for a new set of skills. Openness in higher education, when embraced in a deliberate and pedagogically sound manner, centers transparent and student-centered learning outcomes; collaborative learning activities; and positioning students as contributors. Furthermore, using OER has the potential to create fit-for-purpose assessment practices.
Proposals due by October 15, 2023
Call For Chapter Proposals
We seek to collect the ideas and experiences from instructors using OER for and as assessment through conceptual, theoretical, and empirical chapters. This anthology will serve as a collection of open-access resources for educators.
Potential topics:
Chapters will be grouped into themes, with each theme in a section. The introduction will be written by the editors. The possible broad themes are:
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- Assessments as open educational resources in undergraduate and graduate education
- Students’ experiences with OER assessment
- Professional development and OER assessment
- Instructor experience with OER assessment
- Renewable assignments as OER assessments
- Ethics and academic integrity
- Micro-credentials or digital badges and OER assessment
- Artificial intelligence and OER assessment
- Differentiated OER assessment
- Self-directed learning oriented assessment and OER
- Assessment as belonging within the OER context
- Compassion in OER assessment
- Trust in OER assessment
- Language and OER assessment
- Quality assurance/enhancement in OER as assessment
- Data-driven OER assessment
- Multimodal OER assessment
- Social media and OER assessment
- Technologies for OER assessment
- Collaborative OER assessment
- Equity in OER assessment
- Internationalization within the scope of OER assessment
Publication Scope, Revision Process, and Timeline
Audience:
This book is aimed at an academic audience but will also provide instructors and learning designers with cases and examples from the practice of using OER in assessment design. In response to calls for reimagining assessment, this book will provide readers with tangible ways of using OER in assessment in the different disciplines. The call for chapters is open to higher education staff, educators, and researchers worldwide.
Submission Guidelines:
We invite interested authors to submit 300-400 word abstracts to propose their chapter ideas (full chapters can be between 4000 and 7000 words, excluding references). Styling guidelines will follow APA 7th edition for heading structures, formatting, and references. Submissions should include author and co-author bionote up to 150 words each.
Editorial Process:
The editorial team is committed to mentoring new and experienced authors, and we are happy to meet with potential authors to discuss chapter ideas. We are committed to transparency and equity, and our editorial process We are committed to transparency and equity, and our editorial process draws from the Anti-racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices guidelines.
Chapters for inclusion will be selected by the editors using an anonymous review process. All submissions, regardless of whether or not they will be included in the collection, will receive some form of feedback to provide authors with guidance on revising their work. Authors whose work will be included in the collection will receive more extensive revision-based feedback. After authors revise their chapters, the entire book will go through an anonymous peer review process. Full chapters will also be reviewed for academic honesty and plagiarized material. Chapters will be published as an open-access volume under a BY-NC Creative Commons license.
Timeline for Submission and Publication
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- August 1, 2023 Call release https://forms.gle/Z7cUjwRBe7tQbQW36
- September 1, 2023 – Proposals due
- October 1, 2023- Notify authors of accepted proposals
- October 2023 - Optional meeting to discuss chapter structure and answer questions.
- March 1, 2024 – Full submissions due AND start the review process
- May 30, 2024 – Notify authors of review decisions
- June 28, 2024 – Final and revised papers due
- August 30, 2024 - The special issue to be published
Editor Contacts
Questions about proposals can be directed to the editors via email:
Eliana Elkhoury eelkhoury@athabascau.ca
Jako Olivier jolivier@col.org
Travis Thurston travis.thurston@usu.edu
Editors
Eliana Elkhoury, PhD
Athabasca University
eelkhoury@athabascau.ca
Dr. Elkhoury is an assistant professor at Athabasca University, she is also the team lead of the alternative assessment project. She has extensive experience in teaching and learning in K12 and higher education settings within both Canada and internationally. Eliana’s latest work includes providing professional development to educators on alternative ways of doing assessments. Dr. Elkhoury has published and presented on STEM education, equity in education, and alternative assessments. Her current research interests include: Innovation in teaching and learning, Alternative assessment in multiple disciplines, faculty development, and teacher education.
Jako Olivier, PhD
Higher Education at the Commonwealth of Learning
jolivier@col.org
Dr. Olivier is an Adviser: Higher Education at the Commonwealth of Learning, Burnaby, Canada. Before this he led the UNESCO Chair on Multimodal Learning and Open Educational Resources (OER) and was a Professor at North-West University, South Africa until August 2022. His research interests include: open and distance learning, self-directed learning, multimodal learning, OER, blended learning, e-learning, multiliteracies, multicultural education, language planning and subtitling. He has acted as editor for the books Contextualised open educational practices: Towards student agency and self-directed learning, Open Educational Resources in Higher Education, and Radical Solutions for Education in Africa: Open education and self-directed learning in the continent.
Travis N Thurston, PhD
Utah State University
travis.thurston@usu.edu
Travis Thurston is the Director of Teaching Excellence in the Office of the Provost and Chief Academic Officer at Utah State University. He earned his Master of Educational Technology degree from Boise State University, and earned his P.hD. in Curriculum and Instruction with emphasis on Instructional Leadership from Utah State University. His teaching and scholarship focus on digital-age teaching and instructional design, creating autonomy-supportive learning environments, and student-centered engagement strategies. Dr. Thurston has published interdisciplinary studies on the scholarship on teaching and learning, and is the lead editor of Resilient Pedagogy: Practical Teaching Strategies to Overcome Distance, Disruption, and Distraction.
About Empower Teaching Open-Access Series
The Empower Teaching Open-Access Book Series features a variety of peer-reviewed books focused broadly on the multi-disciplinary work of teaching in higher education. Books in the series align with the mission of the Center for Empowering Teaching Excellence (ETE) to bolster the culture of teaching excellence for students, staff, faculty and administrators. The books in this series share insightful and innovative perspectives on teaching and learning, and through a partnership with USU Libraries the books are offered in an online and open-access format to amplify the voices of authors and contributors in the series.