Browsing by Subject "Open educational resources"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Ending Book Hunger: Social Publishing and the Power of Mission-Driven Innovation
    (Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law, 2015) Shaver, Lea
    Around the world, billions of people find that books are too expensive, too difficult to find, or are simply not being published in the languages that they speak. The problem of “book hunger” is pervasive across the developing world, and for lower-income adults and children in the United States. This market failure comes at an enormous social cost. The lack of affordable and appropriate reading material is holding back education as a path out of poverty. Fortunately, a solution exists. This book examines the growing sector of “social publishing,” an emerging non-profit sector driven by the belief that all people should enjoy opportunities to read, regardless of their income or native language. This book offers a descriptively rich, accessible account of the inspiring world of social publishing, drawing upon extensive interviews with organizational leaders driving the evolution of this emerging sector. Case studies of organizations both in the United States and abroad explore the many challenges social publishers face – including geographic, cost, and language barriers – and the innovative solutions they are developing to forge a new business model for low-cost, multilingual, truly multicultural publishing. The book’s central objectives are to document the emerging practices of social publishers, to generate insight about what makes their efforts successful or unsuccessful, and to derive broader lessons from this particular case study of social innovation. A key theme of this research is the role of social mission in driving business model innovation. To deliver books that are appropriate, attractive, and affordable to neglected readerships, social publishers cannot simply imitate the established business models of for-profit publishers. Instead, they are forced to innovate radically different strategies in the areas of content acquisition, production, and marketing. These innovations include free-to-the-reader pricing, digital distribution, open licensing, and distributed authorship. A full appreciation of these innovative business models for social publishing is central to solving the problem of book hunger sustainably and at scale. More broadly, understanding the phenomenon of “mission-driven innovation” can also inform other initiatives in philanthropy, nonprofit management, social innovation, public policy, and corporate social responsibility.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Not open for all: accessibility of open textbooks
    (Ubiquity Press, 2021) Azadbakht, Elena; Schultz, Teresa; Arellano, Jennifer; Library and Information Science, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering
    In order for open educational resources (OERs) to be truly open to all, they must be accessible to learners with disabilities, including those with visual, auditory, physical and cognitive disabilities. This study sought to determine the accessibility of a randomly selected sample of 355 open textbooks using a custom rubric based upon the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C’s) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), version 2.1, primarily at the Levels A and AA. Included books fell into one of four format types: HTML files/websites, PDFs, Microsoft Word documents and EPUBs. The average number of ‘fails’ – instances in which they ran afoul of a rubric category – across the whole sample was 5.93 and the median was 6, out of a total of 14 or 15 categories, depending on the format type. Overall, most of the books did not meet basic accessibility requirements, such as including alternative text for any images, properly coding/tagging any tables and following a logical heading order structure.