MRHF: Multi-stage Retrieval and Hierarchical Fusion for Textbook Question Answering

Textbook question answering is challenging as it aims to automatically answer various questions on textbook lessons with long text and complex diagrams, requiring reasoning across modalities. In this work, we propose MRHF, a novel framework that incorporates dense passage re-ranking and the mixture-of-experts architecture for TQA. MRHF...

Supporting open educational practices through open textbooks

There has been little research into the impact of textbook costs on higher education in the United Kingdom. To better understand textbook use patterns and the issues faced by UK students and educators the UK Open Textbooks Project (2017–2018, http://ukopentextbooks.org/)) conducted quantitative survey research with United Kingdom educators in...

Innovation opportunities for academic libraries to support teaching through open education: A case study at TU Delft, the Netherlands

Opportunities for academic libraries to enrich their products and services through facilitating open education (OE) in higher education are presented in an overview of good practices. A case study of open textbook publishing was performed at TU Delft to study how these products and services could stimulate educators to adopt OE. A simplified...

“Kallipos”, the first open academic textbooks initiative during the years of crisis in Greece and its sustainable continuation

In this paper, we explore the challenges towards the adoption/use of Open Educational Resources (OER) within the Greek Higher Education (HE). To achieve this objective, first we present “Kallipos”, a large-scale open access textbook publishing initiative that was launched in 2013 by the Hellenic Academic Libraries Link (HEAL-Link) consortium....

Breaking the Stigma: Faculty and Student Perceptions and Experiences with OER

Over the last few years, Affordable Learning Georgia, an initiative of the University System of Georgia, has been releasing Textbook Transformation Grants to promote creation and adoption of open educational resources across USG institutions. Many of the faculty at Kennesaw State University, located just outside Atlanta, Georgia, have taken...

The Open Science training handbook: Written by 14 international experts during the FOSTER Book Sprint

In February 2018, FOSTER Plus and TIB organized a book sprint in order to author an Open Science training handbook collaboratively. For one week, we brought together 14 experienced Open Science educators in Hanover to answer a number of questions: What works, what doesn’t? How can you make the most of limited resources? With their help, we are...

THE NETHERLANDS: GROUND TRANSPORT BELOW SEA LEVEL

EUROPE: A HETEROGENOUS 'SINGLE MARKET'