Editors’ Note: This post is by AJ Boston, Curator of the Scholarly Sharing Collection of the Scholarly Communication Notebook and Scholarly Communication Librarian at Murray State University. AJ is an innovative and often entertaining colleague that we’ve been thrilled to work alongside. We’re always interested in what AJ thinks, so it’s a pleasure to share this post.
In November 2022, I sent Will, Maria, and Josh (SCN leads) a report on over forty items that I spent time considering for the Scholarly Sharing Collection in the SCN. This collection is intended to host materials about authors’ rights, institutional and subject repositories, library publishing, and closely related topics. Like Jill Cirasella (curator of the Open Access Collection), I kept asking myself “which of [these] open resources are open educational resources?” Many of the relevant objects I came across on OER Commons weren’t what I consider OER per se. Because of the narrow way in which I chose to define OER, the collection you see as of today is not overwhelmingly large.
Examples of objects that are both open and relevant included things like research articles (at PLOS, Frontiers, etc.), general websites (Think. Check. Submit; figshare; Pressbooks), or links to metadata records of unarchived past presentations. While these objects can form the basis for education in a classroom, they aren’t really what I would consider to be pedagogical in themselves, in the same way you wouldn’t expect to see “egg” or “flour” listed on a restaurant menu. These are raw ingredients.
There’s good stuff out there not included in this collection that would make great additions. Everyone who teaches a scholarly communication course has a whole semester’s worth of content that could be adapted. I know this firsthand, because I built many assignments from scratch for a (non-LIS) scholarly communication course this past fall, and have so far not adapted and made them open. Perhaps my biggest takeaway from this project is just what a challenge that time can be for faculty interested in building and sharing OER. I’ve always heard this anecdotally to be the case, but now I have the “thick” understanding of experience.
I’ve been weighing in my head whether editing my assignments for a wider audience is going to be worth the time and effort. As Josh counseled me on this point, I won’t know until I know. In fact, this is the case for everything that we do in scholarship. Writing papers, delivering presentations, making closed things open: we won’t really know what needs that our efforts may meet until we make the effort.
At the start of this post, I noted there are objects in OER Commons that are open, but not yet what I consider to be pedagogical. I myself have created pedagogical objects, but have so far chosen to keep them closed. How can I be a proper advocate for open if I don’t practice what I preach? So, should I spend some time this year adapting my materials? Laying the case out like this makes the choice look clear. Maybe this resonates with some of you. Let me know. Maybe the 2023-24 academic year can be our ‘adapt-a-thon’ year.