Changes to OrganicERs!

In the summer and fall the OrganicERs website was updated to improve the website and make it more compliant with international standards. 

1. We implemented a privacy policy (https://organicers.org/content/privacy-policy) and tweaked the settings to let visitors know about our use of cookies.  These changes were designed to make us compliant with the EU GDPR’s  data protection law.  You may have noticed the new message about cookies when you arrive at the site. 
2. We implemented terms of use and acceptable use policies (https://organicers.org/content/policies-and-terms-use).
3. We put into practice new Copyright policies (https://organicers.org/content/copyright-issues-organicers).  We are implementing Creative Commons Licenses (https://creativecommons.org) for materials shared in the OrganicERs repository, so that instructors know where they stand when they download materials from our website with plans to use these materials in their own classes.

These changes are intended to facilitate another forthcoming update to the site.  Community members will soon have the option to request that their learning objects be peer reviewed.  We understand that peer review of academic materials can be significant to the professional advancement of our members; tenure committees and Deans have higher regard for that work.  We anticipate that submitted materials might include:  case studies, active learning materials, and experiments and demonstrations with a significant active learning component. Examples of active learning materials would be clicker question sets, JiTT prompts, handouts for other active learning methods and so on.  Our review guidelines suggest that the submitted materials should include:  learning objectives, an answer key, and a guide to use.  Lastly, the materials should not contain any commercially copyrighted materials.  And we encourage a copyright of CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike).  When the changes have been implemented, we’ll have author instructions on the website.  If you have questions about any of the planned updates, please contact Jennifer Muzyka at jennifer.muzyka@centre.edu.

Another planned update is that we are working on our search algorithms on the site.  When you have a chance, please test the search feature.  Let Jennifer know about your experiences, especially when you’re disappointed by the results.  That way we can work on improving search.