Acknowledgements
This Open Educational Resource (OER) began in the summer of 2022 from the support of a grant to fund its creation. This grant was award by the St. Francis Xavier University Student Union, without this grant this OER would not be created. The reason behind the creation of this OER is that St. Francis Xavier University is offering a new selective psychology course on cognitive neuroscience that needed a class resource for content. Since there are very few options between textbooks and pre-existing OERs that could support this courses content, it was decided to create a new OER. Simultaneously allowing us to create a more equitable learning environment to better support our students. The initial grant supported the early stages of this OER like the outline and framework, content collection, use of Pressbooks, etc.
This OER is also giving us an opportunity to do research on student involvement with creating and contributing to OERs. It will give students the experience of creating content and the opportunity to be involved in authentic learning allowing them to explore content rather than necessarily being directed to content.
This OER will be adapted and altered to maintain relevancy, accuracy, and supportiveness for students and users.
Acknowledgement from the 2023 PSYC 384 Students
This open-source textbook was developed for future students studying cognitive neuroscience by the current students in Dr. Erin Mazerolle’s cognitive neuroscience class (PSYC 384) of 2023 at St. Francis Xavier University, Canada. The students were contributing authors and collaboratively provided content for this freely accessible textbook. They were responsible for writing, editing, formatting, readability, and aesthetics. They also provided each other with valuable editorial comments which led to the current copy of this textbook. The students were responsible for developing subsections of chapters based on their own areas of interest related to cognitive neuroscience. These students value equal accessibility to learning material and view open educational resources as a vehicle to move science forward, further, and faster.
The first draft of this textbook was developed from lecture notes and existing OER content by a hired summer student with wages covered by the St.FX student union. As university students, we understand first-hand, the financial burden of having to purchase textbooks, whether it be a physical copy or access to an online version. Our professor, Dr. Erin Mazerolle, is extremely passionate about open education and open-source teaching. Our class has adopted an appreciation for the overwhelming advantages of openly licensed teaching material. Not only is it freely accessible to everyone, but it is also customizable and can be tailored to include locally relevant material.
The St.FX PSYC 384 students of 2023 would like to extend appreciation to the following guest speakers for inspiring the creation of this OER:
Margaret Vail, the Psychology Liaison and Data Librarian for educating our class on copyright and creative commons and Meredith Cudmore-Keating for introducing us to the adverse educational and financial advantages of open educational resources. Finally, a special thank you to Dr. Erin Mazerolle, without whose guidance, encouragement and support, this textbook could not have been developed.
