It’s Open Education Week, which is a great chance to highlight the Open Education Collection in the Scholarly Communication Notebook (SCN). If you’re new to the SCN, welcome! Here’s some background about the SCN and its relationship with an open book to be published later this year by ACRL; that book also includes a section on open education with some of the smartest contributors in the landscape.
It’s also International Women’s Day, so take a moment and reflect on the leadership of women around the world who’ve contributed to the growth of open education and every other aspect of our lives. We can think of numerous women who inspire us daily, many of whom we’re lucky enough to have worked with. Thank you.
If you’re new to open education, it’s your lucky day, or week, as there are lots of opportunities to learn about open educational resources (OER) and related practices, including in the SCN. Just to make sure we’re on the same page, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) describes open education as encompassing “resources, tools and practices that are free of legal, financial and technical barriers and can be fully used, shared and adapted in the digital environment.” The resources SPARC refers to are often called open educational resources, or OER. Creative Commons defines OER as “teaching, learning, and research materials that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.”
In the SCN, you’ll find an Open Education Collection that includes lots of general and specific resources about open education, some foundational and others that explore more advanced issues. These resources are themselves open, so they’re OER about open education. Some of these projects were created with the direct support of the SCN, like “OER for LIS: Toolkit for Building and OER Librarian Course” by Steven Bell, “Trans Inclusion in OER” by Stephen Krueger and Kat Klement, and “OER Community of Learning” by the Scholarly Communication Team at Texas State University Libraries. Others have been added by our wonderful friend and colleague, Regina Gong, who is a widely, nay, universally respected leader in open education. As the Curator for the Open Education Collection in the SCN, Regina scanned the landscape to identify open content that is useful for teaching and learning about OER and open educational practices. She built the collection to nearly 50 resources (at time of publication) that LIS instructors, students, librarians, and allies in other roles might use to learn more about open education and how they can advance it. Regina has built a great collection that we’re confident will continue to grow. If you know of something that isn’t there but should be, here are instructions for adding content to the SCN.
We hope you’ll take this week as an opportunity to learn something about open education and to celebrate the impact it has had and continues to have! In a few weeks, the SCN team is convening in Inverness, Scotland for OER23, where we’re presenting on our work (session: More than a Textbook: Librarianship as a Case Study for Building a Community and Opening Up A Discipline; full program). We’re excited to see friends and make new ones!