The Library's Role in Supporting Open Educational Resources - schedule

The open educational resources (OER) adoption in higher education institutions has grown exponentially in the last ten years. While a great deal of focus is on the benefits of OER to students (affordability, access, and success) and faculty (agency and freedom), less attention is given to those who are doing the hard work of leading, implementing and managing these OER projects. This keynote presentation will highlight the work done by librarians in advancing awareness of and advocacy for open education. How can librarians provide meaningful support and be an integral partner to the different stakeholders on campus to encourage and sustain OER adoptions? More importantly, I will share how we as a community can ensure that our work is supported, valued, and celebrated.

As libraries support OER across an institution, that support looks different in each discipline. In teaching future educators, building early awareness of OER for pre-service teachers creates a foundation for future growth. In a higher education institution's College of Education, librarians and instructional designers interact with both faculty educators and students that are completing a degree to become PK-12 educators. Libraries can help build OER awareness through in-class instruction, outreach pop-up events, and online resource guides. The Library began this project in an effort to raise awareness of OER concepts before the students begin their professional teaching careers. By gaining awareness while they are in teacher preparation programs, the Library hopes that the new teachers become aware of the possibilities of OER and champion these resources in their future schools. This session explores how the library supports each of these intervention methods, with strategies that are applicable to multiple academic disciplines. We will explore strategies for determining initial awareness in the student population, intervention implementation strategies, and potential challenges encountered during a multi-year Library led OER awareness implementation. Participants will gain ideas for strategies to increase awareness of OER concepts and resources, and consider ways libraries can build the foundation to support faculty and students in understanding and using OER.

This session will look at the impact of using an OER for a 1-credit information literacy course at the undergraduate level. Special attention will be paid to the rationale for adopting an OER, incorporating OER with other course materials, lingering obstacles and issues, assessment, and a reflection on moving forward. Participants will also have an opportunity to offer feedback and discuss how to tackle OER adoption while maintaining a pedagogical focus on the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy.

Texas A&M University has had an Open Educational Resources Task Force since 2017, and one of the early activities of this task force was to brainstorm ways to engage faculty with the concept of open education. A subcommittee of this task force which met to consider this question proposed several ideas, one of which was to create a Community of Practice that would give faculty the opportunity to learn more about open educational resources, and require them to re-envision their teaching with open pedagogical practices in mind.

In this session, Lisa Louis, Head of Research and Learning at Bell Library, and Kellie Smith, Assistant Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Faculty Excellence, will discuss the concept of a faculty community of practice, the design of the community of practice on open educational resources, and the outcomes from this past year as well as plans for the future.

The purpose of OER is to help educators create their own content and/or curriculum using open resources and sharing that content with others in the field of education. As librarians we need to work towards finding ways to curate these resources to help educators find, use, and share the created content. We need to be the repositories of this information so that we can encourage our teachers and students to create original content that can be shared worldwide. In this session we will discuss the current statewide OER tools in K-12 and Academia, and how we can grow those resources to ensure that our students; both K-12 and college, have the best, most accessible resources possible to enable their success. Lastly, how can we build a bridge between the K-12 and Academic environment for OER that will help our students succeed?

Open educational resources are a value add from multiple perspectives. Primarily, they reduce cost to students. However, they also have benefits from the following perspectives: faculty publishing, marketing and recruiting, and educational equity. Some fields have a much easier time in finding and using OER than others. This session will discuss some of the current limitations to OER (primarily in fields where material is harder to find) and approaches for filling some of these gaps.

An Education Information Librarian, a Government Documents Librarian, and an Instructional Designer will show participants how to create an OER lesson using government documents. Gain hands-on experience with open pedagogy approaches that can be applied to a variety of disciplines as participants build a lesson about an aspect of World War II. These approaches can be used to encourage faculty to integrate OER and primary source materials into courses. The workshop will conclude with questions and a discussion of experiences as well as suggested applications for future use. Participants will receive a list of resources to take with them.

We know that faculty adoption of OER can help save students money. However, a positive, engaged student learning experience isn't guaranteed without careful thought and planning into the larger design of a course. In this session, an eLearning and OER librarian will discuss the dual nature of her role and how her past work as an instructional designer enables her to support OER efforts in her library. Participants will learn about backwards design and instructional design methods to help support faculty in designing an aligned course that incorporates OER. Participants will walk away with resources and tools to help get their faculty started with course redesign.

As Open Educational Resources continue to facilitate equity and access in higher education, many academic reference librarians are finding themselves integrating new OER-related roles into their work day. Librarians already possess many of the skills and tools needed to lead the way in Open Education movements at their institutions, but the tried and true reference interview is the key to success. This session will examine the role of the reference interview and other skills in assisting faculty in finding and integrating OER into their classrooms. As Tyckoson (2003) stated, “Our tools will evolve and change continually, but the process of communicating with the patron to determine her or her information need will not.” Participants of this session will explore: The ways in which librarians are a natural fit and central to the Open Education movement; Best practices for the OER-related reference interview and working with faculty; How to clearly define roles for the library/librarians that will be working with OER.

Textbook costs have risen at a rate much higher than inflation and are often a burden on students. More importantly, costly textbooks lead to a two-tiered learning environment in which some students have the resources necessary to succeed while others do not. Providing equal access to materials increases student success and retention.

In the fall of 2018, two librarians embarked on a project to create a zero-cost textbook path for students through the Central Washington University’s new General Education (Gen Ed) curriculum. Funding for the project was acquired via grant from the Washington Student Achievement Council, which then allowed the project to offer $1,000 stipends to instructors, provided they replace current for-profit textbooks with zero-cost (to the student) resources in a new Gen Ed course. Participants included several instructors from each college on the university campus, and from each Knowledge Area and Pathway within the Gen Ed program.

Finding materials for the wide array of topics was challenging, but the volume of free information available, in combination with licensed CWU library materials, included more than enough content to provide willing professors with quality materials aside from traditional textbooks. The cost savings to students was phenomenal. For the first year, the project saved students between $358,000 and $600,000, depending upon whether they purchased the least expensive or the most expensive copy of the previously required textbook, as was available in August 2019. The project will affect 5,200 students. This session will cover this project from the grant application to assisting professors in discovery of appropriate resources, to determining the cost-savings to the students. The project also includes surveys of the faculty and students as part of the grant and will have a basic analysis of the data Fall 2019 course data.

Our institution is a medium sized, Hispanic-serving, research university with an extremely diverse student body, a strong campus culture of advocacy and activism for the environment and a history of student activism leading to additions to library collections. What sometimes gets lost in the shuffle when working in this environment are the needs of our students who are financially insecure. As such, our institution does not yet have a dedicated affordable textbook or OER program. One of our student groups has recently started reaching out to the library to help raise awareness of student needs around high textbook costs. The student group is experienced in working with other students, but in the library, we are working with them to help craft a message that is appealing to faculty as well as students to help them achieve their goals. To date, we've held a panel for Open Education Week 2018 and are planning an exhibit for Open Access Week 2019. This session will discuss some of our difficulties and success in facilitating student-led activism for this important topic, our plans in continuing with our plans to take this to the wider campus community, and how to start creating library-student partnerships at your institution.

Technical services and collection management librarians at Mt. Hood Community College wanted to add OER created by their faculty to their Library Collection, just as they would any commercially published book by their faculty. However, the lack of standardized metadata made cataloging problematic. This session will share two strategies for overcoming these challenges: an OER MARC template they created for ebooks, and an OER digital publishing service to standardize publication data that informs library cataloging.

Science and engineering texts are some of the most expensive books for students. With specialized information, tests and more, it is difficult to create new and low or no-cost items that are applicable across universities or even across programs. At Oregon Institute of Technology, the library is in its second year of supporting open, low, and no-cost materials specific to the sciences and engineering. with a $10,000 expenditure from the library budget, we saved students more than $220,000 in the first year. This session will talk about building the program, measuring success, and sustainability.