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We implement an inductive, case study approach to explore the motivations and methods of five successful social entrepreneurs. Our findings show that founders noticed, felt, and responded to someone else's pain, demonstrating compassion as the genesis of the business venture. Successful social innovation, however, was the result of the creation of an organization structured to include diverse stakeholder input and participation in the decision-making process. Thus, compassion motivates entrepreneurs to pursue broad gains as opposed to singular interests and enhances a willingness to incorporate others' ideas through an open-strategy process. Our study suggests that interaction with stakeholders can impact the structure of the firm, the business model it employs, and intended and unintended business consequences.

The Open for Antiracism program supports faculty to change their teaching practices to be antiracist through the affordances of open educational resources (OER) and open pedagogy. This study aims to raise questions about how professional development impacts student outcomes, and how faculty perceive the utility of OER and open pedagogy to support antiracist teaching and learning.

An evaluation plan examined how faculty participants perceived the effectiveness of OER and open pedagogy to make their classes antiracist. Students compared their experiences in treated classes with those in other classes. Participating faculty completed pre- and post-surveys and a subset sat for interviews.

Faculty participants felt prepared to implement antiracist practices using OER and open pedagogy. Eighty-seven percent reported they were highly likely to recommend the program and 80% plan to continue using open pedagogy. Eighty percent of students reported they were more active or engaged than in other classes and that they examined biases of the discipline.

This study raises the question of how antiracist teaching approaches impact student outcomes over a longer term. Further, how can changes to teaching strategies impact institutions? Do teams of instructors offer support in ways that lead to a greater voice within an institution?

Leadership educators face unique challenges in identifying relevant reading materials for their courses. This paper explores the utility of course packs as a tool to address the limitations of traditional textbooks. We describe the process of development for designing a course pack for an undergraduate Leadership Education course. Following this, beneficial outcomes and limitations of course packs are identified and strategies for overcoming the limitations are presented. The paper concludes with reflections of faculty that have implemented a course pack along with recommendations for implementation.

Today’s digital and mobile learning environment has contributed to the increased availability of and interest in e-textbooks, and many school systems are conducting trials to evaluate their effectiveness. The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze instructors’ levels of use (LoU) of e-textbook features and innovations at a southeastern US community college. This study also evaluated the effectiveness of e-textbooks compared to paper textbooks on student achievement during a pilot period of e-textbook implementation.

Using a survey research design, the LoU of the Innovation framework was applied to identify and analyze instructors’ LoU rankings for eight e-textbook features. The study also used historical data on student demographics and final course grades to evaluate student achievement between text formats. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to answer the research questions.

Results showed that e-textbook features were used at a low to non-existent level by instructors and that there was no significant difference in grade average between text formats among students. However, interactions between text format, age and gender were found.

This study added to the body of knowledge regarding e-textbook efficacy. While many studies stop with the conclusion that there is no difference in student outcomes between text formats, this study addressed a gap in literature on how to improve student performance with e-textbook technology by using the LoU of an innovation framework.

As publishers and academia swiftly head towards e-textbooks, it is important to understand how students feel about using e-textbooks as a primary learning tool. This paper discusses results of a small-scale study looking into how a group of language learners view and use e-textbooks as learning tools in ESL classrooms. The paper concludes by offering teaching implications that could ease integrating e-textbooks in language classrooms in a more effective and efficient manner.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning materials openly licensed so that others may retain, reuse, revise, remix or redistribute (the 5Rs) these materials. This paper aims to raise awareness of OER by providing a rationale for using these learning materials and a strategy for educators to get started with OER during the collective crisis and beyond.

Using a broad research base and anecdotes from personal experience, the authors make the case that OER improves student access to learning materials and improves the learning experience in both PK-12 and higher education contexts.

The authors define and describe the benefits of OER to provide practical suggestions educators can implement during the pandemic and beyond.

To support educators in finding and using OER, this paper highlights repositories that include a breadth of various learning materials across subject areas and educational contexts. The authors provide specific suggestions for finding, personalizing and contextualizing OER.

This work not only provides an overview of OER with particular considerations for educators during the COVID-19 pandemic but also makes the case that OER should be integrated into classrooms beyond the pandemic.