In the twenty-first century, numerous challenges face higher education as assessed by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, with some of the most profound ones centered on student learning and success, which are further compounded by the concern for affordability and accessibility. To address these concerns, the field of education has witnessed an increased interest in open education resources (OERs), or publicly available intellectual property in the form of teaching, learning and research resources such as full courses, modules, textbooks and other tools.
The Data Ethics Repository is an OER in the form of a resource library that allows users to browse through a collection of resources that are sorted according to topics and media type. The “Topics” section allows browsers to learn further about a particular topic of interest while exploring what is available, while the “Media Type” section allows browsers to select content based on what is a preferred means of interacting with content. The search engine of this OER allows browsers to further explore content within the OER based on unique terms.
The creation of this OER was a collaborative effort between Dr. Sarah Egan Warren, teaching assistant professor of the Institute for Advanced Analytics (IAA), and Ms. Lesa Bressanelli, 2023 graduate of the M.S. in Technical Communication program. All the resources shared through this OER were contributed by Class of 2023 students of the M.S. in Analytics (MSA) program from the Institute for Advanced Analytics. During their unit in data ethics, students reviewed, curated and compiled these resources on data ethics in a master Google spreadsheet. This was so that they could better understand the relationship between ethics and data science and how it was applicable to them. Though, this compilation presented the opportunity to create something that could be shared beyond IAA. Serving as a capstone project for Ms. Bressanelli, she worked alongside Dr. Egan Warren and MSA students to launch the OER over the course of four months. Following the capstone project, the OER is now managed by the IAA.