This is the latest post in a series announcing resources created for the Scholarly Communication Notebook, or SCN. The SCN is a hub of open teaching and learning content on scholcomm topics that is both a complement to an open book-level introduction to scholarly communication librarianship and a disciplinary and course community for inclusively sharing models and practices. IMLS funded the SCN in 2019, permitting us to pay creators for their labor while building a solid initial collection. These works are the result of one of three calls for proposals (our first CFP was issued in fall 2020; the second in late spring ‘21, and the third in late fall 2021).
Today we’re excited to share materials for an “Introduction to Open Education” course (available via Google Drive, and in the SCN OER Commons Hub). This work was created by Sarah Hare, Open Education Librarian at Indiana University Bloomington and Ali Versluis, Acting Head, Research & Scholarship Team at the University of Guelph. They describe the course as “providing an intensive opportunity to become conversant in foundational topics related to open education.” By the end of the course, students will be able to define and explain core concepts related to open education. They will be able to identify resources used to find and create OER and will be familiar with methods for evaluating relevance and suitability. Learners will also be able to identify key stakeholders and craft meaningful, persuasive pitches that will resonate with these individuals. Students will critically engage with the open education movement, tackling issues such as underrepresented voices, accessibility, and labor.
Here are Sarah and Ali to introduce their course:
In 2018, we created and taught a week-long, intensive course at the FORCE 11 Scholarly Communication Institute (FSCI) in collaboration with our colleague Lillian Hogendoorn. The course, titled The Basics and Beyond: Developing a Critical, Community-Based Approach to Open Education, focused on introducing open education to novices while also moving beyond foundational concepts to delve into more complex issues, devoting significant amounts of time to interrogating the purported values of the open education movement, as well as our own values as practitioners. The FSCI iteration of the course was well-received by participants, who greatly appreciated the mixture of discussion and hands-on activities. Given this, we felt confident that the resulting syllabus, slides, and activities could be utilized in other contexts or as informal learning objects for library professionals interested in open education.
The OER about Open Education (meta!) that we are sharing in the SCN is a revised version of that FSCI course. While the original FSCI course was 15 hours of synchronous instruction, we have edited the content to be more modular. Concepts or pieces can be reconfigured or adapted to fit other contexts, including workshops, trainings, and online instruction. The first three days of the course provide a foundation by defining OER and Creative Commons, delineating differences between affordable course material solutions and OER, exploring various OER repositories and evaluation tools, and learning about open pedagogy models. The fourth day of the course uses this foundation to explore and interrogate more complex issues, including labor, technocracy, accessibility, openwashing, and the intersection between privacy and openness. We have structured the content so that anyone with some background in scholarly communication (but perhaps no familiarity with open education) is able to learn from the resources firsthand or efficiently adapt them to teach a Library and Information Science course that covers these topics. Speaker notes included in the slide decks give instructors ideas for how to cover the content, as well as guidance for facilitating activities.
There are five activities embedded within the slide decks and listed in a separate document for instructors to adapt to their context. These include:
- CC-BY-NDebate: This activity requires students to apply their understanding of the 5 Rs and Creative Commons and construct their own personal stance on ‘how open does open have to be?’ Instead of applying a general rule about whether CC-BY-ND does/does not qualify as an OER, the activity emphasizes the messiness inherent in OER work and the difficulty in striking a balance between advocating for open and respecting creators’ decisions about how to share their work.
- Campus mapping: Students create a visual representation of opportunities and potential partners on their campus through a series of guiding prompts. After completing each stage, they are asked to reflect on the map holistically, considering what this might mean for partnerships, technology, funding, and promotion for open education efforts.
- Finding OER: Students assess OER repositories by exploring a specific topic in more detail. After searching for resources in a variety of formats, students reflect on what was challenging, what gaps existed, and how they might teach others to find OER.
- Ethical considerations of open pedagogy: After learning about the benefits and considerations inherent in doing open pedagogy work, students break into groups to discuss a question together and then come back as a group for larger consensus building.
- Critical reflection and statement of praxis: Throughout the lecture on critical issues, students are prompted to reflect on why, how, and for whom they support OER. Students then compose a brief statement of praxis to guide their open education efforts, after which they work in pairs to help each other refine their statement. A sample statement is provided.
We also include some instructional strategies that we used successfully and tips for integrating them based on context. We hope that these materials will help LIS students and practitioners learn more about open education and become familiar with associated critical topics in order to facilitate relevant, nuanced conversations in the future.
About the Authors
Sarah Hare is the Open Education Librarian at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Sarah leads IU’s Course Material Fellowship Program (CMFP), which supports and incentivizes instructors to adopt affordable course materials. Her research centers on OER, library publishing, and information access and privilege.
Ali Versluis (she / hers) is currently the Acting Head of the Research & Scholarship Team at the University of Guelph, which resides on the ancestral lands of the Attawandaron people and the current treaty lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit. Prior to running point on strategic and operational matters for the R&S Team, Ali was an Open Educational Resources Librarian. She tweets half-baked thoughts, organized labor wins, and vociferous appreciation for the Toronto Raptors @aliversluis.