Exploring Open Access and Open Education in the Social Sciences, this panel marks International Open Access Week broadcast online and hosted by Bocconi University in Milan.
Benedetta Calonaci explores whether the systematic adoption of open textbooks in university courses could represent a crucial improvement towards the right to education for millions of students. Her presentation will outline the current Italian situation of open textbooks in the social sciences, as seen from the observation point of an academic library. Ongoing trends and elements of resistance will be highlighted, as well as good practices and key factors that can lead to an "open" and "digital" transition, with profound consequences for both universities and society.
Professor Giovanni Puccetti then describes a new open access collaborative project at the University of Milan, which includes an open access Mathematics textbook. This project also includes a Moodle platform to build assignments and exams, with materials and sources made freely available on the web.
Finally, Andrea Angiolini, a publisher, will discuss how open textbooks and open educational resources in the higher education market are in an unstable balance between maximum inclusion and economic / organizational sustainability. He will argue that the real challenge is to propose effective and suitable study tools both for curricula and for the needs that societies express.
Mira Buist-Zhuk will moderate the roundtable.
Program:
2:00-2:15 – Welcome and introductions
2:15-3:00 – Benedetta Calonaci (University of Florence) - “E-textbooks and OER in social sciences: state-of-the-art and trends as from the experience of an Italian academic library”
3:00-3:30 – Professor Giovanni Puccetti (University of Milan) - “Open Access textbooks: yes we can (must)"
3:30-3:45 – Break
3:45-4:30 – Andrea Angiolini (Il Mulino Publishing House) - "Toward a higher education of patrons?"
4:30-5:45 – Roundtable
Speakers
Benedetta Calonaci is Collection Management and Development Librarian at the University of Florence's Social Sciences Library. She is also responsible for the European Documentation Centre and is a member of the support staff of the University of Florence Research Observatory. She is also a member of EUniWell Alliance, where she is involved in the Open Education and Open Science Working Groups. Benedetta is also a member of the Intra-Alliance Library Network FOR EU-LIB.
Giovanni Puccetti is Professor at the University of Milan. His main interests cover Mass Transportation problems, Quantitative Risk Management with an emphasis on Risk Aggregation and Dependence Uncertainty. He has co-authored several algorithms in Applied Probability, including the Rearrangement Algorithm. He is Editor-in-Chief of the international open access journal Dependence Modeling.
Andrea Angiolini is the Editorial Director at il Mulino Publishing House, where he also runs the digital publishing sector. He is a member of academic and professional board at the Italian publishing association. Il Mulino - founded in 1954 - is one of the main non-fiction, academic and higher education publishing houses in Italy. It manages three digital platforms: Rivisteweb (journals), Darwinbooks (monographs) and Pandoracampus (e-learning platform for textbooks).
Mira Buist-Zhuk is Academic Information Specialist at the University of Groningen Library. She leads and coordinates the Open Education pillar of the University’s Open Science programme. Mira is also actively engaged in shaping and developing services as well as infrastructure to support and train academics in the area of open educational resources, open practices, open textbook publishing, and open pedagogy. Mira will be the discussant.
Please note that video and audio will be recorded throughout this event. The recording will be made available, in part or in full, on the channels of CIVICA (Youtube and Zenodo), its members and partners. By participating in this event, you automatically agree to be recorded. If you do not consent to being recorded, please discuss your concerns with the event's host.
This event is organized in the framework of CIVICA – The European University of Social Sciences. The CIVICA alliance brings together ten leading European higher education institutions in the social sciences. The alliance's mission is to create an inter-university campus for collaborative teaching, research, and innovative learning, while fostering academic excellence and global civic engagement. CIVICA was selected by the European Commission as one of the pilot European Universities in 2019 and confirmed as a successful alliance in 2022 for its full roll-out under the Erasmus+ program. Read more on civica.eu.
