Workshops and Events
The OER Department provides multiple trainings, workshops, community discussions, and other events throughout the year on topics related to copyright and licensing, accessibility, OER project management, collaborative content creation, and more. Join the Open Educational Resources Teams channel for news, updates, and opportunities.
Open Education Week is an annual event that gathers learners and experts around the world to share achievements, explore trends, and build community among open education practitioners. The event takes place during the first week in March.
Find more information about upcoming and past Open Education Week events on our OE Week page.
Open textbooks can alleviate the burden of educational costs for students and provide faculty with content that can be customized for their courses. Open textbooks are full, real textbooks, used by many faculty across the country, including here at UTA. They are licensed to be freely used, edited, and distributed. Many are also accompanied by customizable slides, test banks, and other supplemental materials.
Attend an Open Textbook Workshop to discover open textbooks in your field. After the workshop, you’ll be asked to write a short review of an open textbook from the Open Textbook Library. Your review will benefit other faculty considering open textbooks, and you’ll receive a $200 stipend for your participation and written review.
Upcoming workshops
- Tuesday, February 13, 12-1pm (Central Library 315A). RSVP: https://open.umn.edu/network/workshops/open-textbook-workshop-2-13-24
- Monday, March 4, 12-1pm (Central Library 109). RSVP: https://open.umn.edu/network/workshops/open-textbook-workshop-3-4-24
- Wednesday, April 10, 1-2pm (Central Library 109). RSVP: https://open.umn.edu/network/workshops/open-textbook-workshop-4-10-24
Stipend policy information
- At this time, we can only award stipends to UTA employees classified as faculty. Stipends will be processed upon receipt of a complete textbook review.
- Faculty must attend an Open Textbook Workshop in order to be eligible to submit a textbook review to the Open Textbook Library. After attending a workshop, faculty will be notified of the review submission deadline, typically six weeks after the workshop date.
- Faculty may receive up to three stipends for submitting textbook reviews. Stipends may be awarded only once per academic year, and faculty must attend an Open Textbook Workshop each time they submit a textbook review.
In this workshop, staff members from the UTA Libraries' OER Department will give an introduction to the Pressbooks publishing platform. Pressbooks is an open-source platform based on WordPress, which is used at UTA to host the OER books published through Mavs Open Press. This workshop will cover importing content, adding and organizing chapters, and formatting text and give an overview of interactive content including H5P and Hypothes.is.
Upcoming sessions:
- Tuesday, March 26, 10-11am (Central Library 315A). Events calendar: https://events.uta.edu/event/introduction_to_oer_publishing_in_pressbooks
- Wednesday, April 24, 1-2pm (Central Library 315A). Events calendar: https://events.uta.edu/event/introduction_to_oer_publishing_in_pressbooks_2194
In this virtual workshop, staff members from the UTA Libraries' OER Department will give a brief overview of web content accessibility guidelines and describe how OER texts published with Mavs Open Press are checked for accessibility compliance.
Upcoming sessions:
- Friday, March 29, 2:30-3:30pm (Virtual). Save to your calendar.
- Friday, April 26, 11am-12pm (Virtual). Save to your calendar.