#OpenEd21

Open access publishing provides a rich, varied array of educational material, yet many of our undergraduate students remain closed access learners. They expect a textbook to give them all of a course’s content and believe they can learn by going page by page through the text. This presentation demonstrates how we can teach all students to instead become "open access learners" who can build their own toolkits and find information beyond what we alone could give them. Making this transition challenges both students and educators. Many students may lack the tools, confidence, or cultural capital to find information without an instructor’s guidance, so teaching open access learning strategies helps to shrink an equity gap. And as educators, we must adopt new approaches too: our students have access to knowledge beyond what we curate for them, and the growth of interdisciplinary work in undergraduate programs means that students will often be exploring topics outside our own areas of expertise. This presentation shows how we and our students can thrive in this new environment. The session is based on ideas from the open access textbook STEM Writing: Mindsets, Tools, and Techniques (forthcoming, North Broad Press, CC BY-NC 4.0).

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

• Identify ways in which some students struggle to navigate open access environments
• Use a wider range of educational tools and resources in their teaching
• Improve student self-regulation, especially for interdisciplinary work
• Teach all students to make better, more extensive use of open educational resources