The Open Education Sociology Dictionary (OESD) is a free online dictionary for students, teachers, & the curious to find meanings, examples, pronunciations, word origins, & quotations.

Our organizing toolkit for student governments and other student leaders provides instructions and tips on how to bring open textbooks to your campus.

This section is designed to build confidence about what Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) means for the future of education by closely studying the operations, limitations, and theoretical value of a Large Language Model (LLM) like ChatGPT. To this end, this section seeks to explain what language modeling is and how this process contributes to an LLM’s tendency to generate inaccurate information. Additionally, this section considers how the design of an LLM—specifically, the collective knowledge it is trained upon—can contribute to the perpetuation of biases. Lastly, this section encourages critical thinking about the value of an LLM from a theoretical standpoint regarding the writing process and collaborative learning. By the end of this section, you should be able to articulate how an LLM like ChatGPT operates, as well as the value and limitations of this design within the evolution of learning.

This is a complete contemporary translation of Plato's Euthyphro. While the dialogue is made famous by the Euthyphro dilemma, the text offers a rich picture of the difference between relying on one's prior knowledge (like Euthyphro) and remaining open to inquiry (like Socrates).

This is an excellent contemporary translation of the first book of Plato's Republic. It introduces the dialogue's central question ("What is justice?") and portrays Socrates as embodying the ignorance for which he is known while refuting the definitions proffered by his interlocutors. Since many philosophers think that this book was originally a standalone dialogue that was subsequently connected to the remainder of the text, it is a great option for classes to read (more or less) a full dialogue that features multiple interlocutors. Woods' translation has the further advantage of not Latinizing Plato's Greek, which may make pronunciation less intimidating for students who are challenged by the interlocutor's names.

This playbook provides the higher education community with guidance on how to envision, design, facilitate, evaluate, and sustain communities of practice. Communities of practice offer higher education faculty, students, and leaders a range of benefits, such as facilitating resource sharing, individual and collective goal achievement, group problem solving, evaluation of practices, and emergent learning.

The playbook particularly emphasizes three under-explored elements of the communities of practice experience: equity, digital technologies, and continuous improvement. Approaching these elements with intentionality can ensure a reflexive, accessible process that supports all community members. This playbook provides actionable strategies for all who want to learn more about structuring and facilitating communities of practice. It also explicates ways to engage our three-pronged approach through the lifecycle of a community experience.

This open-access textbook is for those who want to write exemplary social research. It provides an extensive outline of each step of the research process: outlining practical tools for conceptualizing its beginnings, generating proposals, getting ethics approval, relaxing from the stresses of research, writing academically, conducting a literature review, drafting a methods section, collecting the right data, formulating the findings, and sharing the results. Woven throughout each chapter are testimonies of other students who have likewise persevered through the research process, relating their obstacles, solutions, and motivations to each stage of the research process to illuminate not only the technical goals of research, but also the emotional maturity that research entails.

This resource is a fact sheet for students to learn about primary and secondary sources.

Machiavelli's classic contribution to the "mirror to princes" genre, widely seen as one of the foundational texts of modern philosophical philosophy.

This laboratory manual for Principles of Biology II with ancillary materials was created and revised under a Round Thirteen Mini-Grant. Topics include evolution, bacteria, protists, plants, fungi, sponges and jellyfish, flatworms and nematodes, mollusks and annelids, arthropods and echinoderms, chordates and mammals, and mammalian anatomy. The lab manual is separated by chapters, as are the PowerPoint slides and lab quizzes.

In this section, you will gain insights about privacy and confidentiality concerns related to a form of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) known as Large Language Models (LLMs) and, specifically, OpenAI’s policies about ChatGPT.

The full extent of privacy and confidentiality risks in relation to ChatGPT, which relies on collective intelligence for information gathering and dissemination, has not been fully realized. Users should be mindful of OpenAI’s terms of use, particularly as those terms are subject to change. Though OpenAI claims to not share private user information, the language around such statements is vague and contradictory, and there is a strong possibility that personal information may be monitored by human proctors. Moreover, educators who are bound to the legal obligations outlined in FERPA should be particularly concerned about how student privacy could be potentially violated by using ChatGPT and other GenAI technologies.

After reading this section, you should be able to articulate and discuss OpenAI’s significant terms of use and privacy policy, consider the potential privacy and intellectual property violations contained within the collective intelligence paradigm, and communicate your own concerns about privacy and confidentiality in relation to GenAI technologies.

This is a complete ebook version of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

EBook includes a bibliography of translations, glossary of proper names,
introduction and full text.

This document provides a checklist tool for managers and leaders in distance education centers and online departments to utilize when prioritizing projects and determining workload allocation. It includes sections on assessing project alignment with organizational goals, evaluating resources needed, considering risks and constraints, and scoring/ranking projects. The checklist encourages objective analysis of proposed initiatives to aid in decision-making on what projects should move forward.

The increasing concentration of scholarly communications, courseware publishing, and
data analytics into the hands of fewer commercial vendors continues to raise concerns,
particularly in the absence of evidence that publishers have any interest in mind other
than their short-term revenue and profit growth. The focus on protecting revenues even
in the face of deep academic budget cuts, the relentless lobbying to protect “inclusive
access” practices that limit student choice, and the reluctance to abandon practices that
disadvantage researchers point to the conclusion that the academic community can
protect its values only by increasing control of its own content and infrastructure.

The past year has seen more deals that led to more concentration, loss of diversity, and
ultimately to the academic community’s lessening control over its own destiny. However,
there are also positive signs: a large merger failed, Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) was
launched as a concerted effort to build a community-owned infrastructure, and some
legislative progress was made. Much remains to be done, but the opportunity to tip the
scales in favor of the interests of the knowledge community is significant and must be
pursued.

This 2021 Update to the SPARC Landscape Analysis further explores these trends.
Supplementing observations first published in the SPARC 2019 Roadmap for Action, this
document suggests organizational changes in academic institutions to both (1) manage
increasing strategic and ethical challenges and (2) deploy tools and analyze data to
better understand the needs and protect the interests of individuals and communities.
The recommendations underscore the need for the academic community to take control
of its own content and infrastructure both to best serve its own interests and to protect
and further its values of equity, inclusiveness, and academic freedom.

As the collection of available OER – the OER commons – has grown, a collection of institutions and
organizations that contribute to and draw on the commons has developed around it. Sustaining this
“OER ecosystem” of content and stakeholders that transform the content into innovative approaches
in the classroom to improve student experiences is vital to realizing the potential impact of OER. To
inform this report, we conducted over 20 stakeholder interviews, as well as a literature review of OER
and other open-driven industries.

This is a collection of primary sources on Roman games and spectacles in their various forms, created for a second-year undergraduate class on spectacles in Greece and Rome at the University of British Columbia. This book is intended for use in upper-level academic studies. Content Warning: The content of this book contains animal cruelty and animal death, blood, classism, death, sexual assault, violence, and other mature subject matter and potentially distressing material.