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Open Peer Review: Part 2.3 Open Education

Late last year, we announced that we would be releasing portions of our forthcoming book, Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Culture: Law, Economics, and Publishing, for open review as they were ready. Work on this project has progressed slower than we’d like due to the pandemic and the different pressures it has placed on everyone’s lives, but we’re steadily moving forward, extending grace and understanding to all involved (and trying to extend the same to ourselves; which is easier said than done). Today, we’re happy to invite comments on drafts of the Open Education Section. Reviewers will benefit from taking a look at information about Part 1 and other sections of Part 2 to understand how this section relates to the others, and the whole.

The Open Education Section is edited by Lillian Hogendoorn, Curator of Digital Experience Librarian at the University of Toronto. Previously, Lillian was the Manager of Digital Access and Open Educational Resources at eCampusOntario. She also teaches the Library Juice Academy Introduction to Open Educational Resources course. Her extensive experience and knowledge places her in an excellent position to lead this section, and we’re very proud to work with her. She’s also brought on some rock star contributors that we’re excited to have. We hope you’ll consider reading their drafts and providing your feedback to help us get the most accurate snapshot possible of this dynamic area of work. Lillian introduces the section and guiding questions below, along with links to the drafts and info for reviewers. The big guidance we want to reinforce is to be the reviewer you wish you had by providing thoughtful critical feedback without berating or belittling. These drafts will be available for comments for a period of six weeks ending on January 21, 2022. – Josh, Maria, and Will

Here’s Lillian:

While Open Education is not new to scholarly communications work, it’s starting to take centre stage in the role of many ScholComm librarians and departments. There are a vast number of learning opportunities to get foundational knowledge about Open Education and OER, from conferences to courses, from Twitter threads to journal articles. There are certification opportunities and mentorship programs abound. There are even fully open textbooks on open education.

So why, in a world where there are so many avenues to learn about open education, would we compile this section? I asked myself this many times over the course of the last two years. What makes this work unique, and how does it help folks learn about Open Education in a way that adds value to the ever-expanding Open Ed space?

This section is largely written by early career librarians for aspiring librarians. It is for those ready to dip their toes in the Open Ed waters. With so much heart and thoughtfulness, each author included has tried to pass down what they wish they had known, what they could tell their former selves on the cusp of their journey in open education work in libraries.  And now we are all inviting critique in service of care in hopes that even one future reader feels excited and inspired to not simply dip their toes in, but elegantly swan dive into the depths of open education work.

As you make your way through this section, I invite you to consider these questions for yourself:

  • Would this have appealed to you as a library school student? Would it appeal to you now if you were an instructor?
  • Are there things that have been overlooked? How might we include them?
  • Is the section too sparse, too detailed, or just right?

I have no doubt that Open Education work in libraries will continue to evolve and change. Foundational texts have yet to be published, and large waves have yet to hit the shore. This text is meant to lay the foundation for future practitioners to make those waves, and I am so happy to be a small part of that.

  1. Introduction to Open Education, featuring:
    1. Defining Open Education and Open Educational Resources by Lillian Hogendoorn
    2. A Short History of OER by Emily Carlisle-Johnston
    3. Benefits, Barriers, and Myths by Camille Thomas, Ariana Santiago, and Laura Miller
  2. Libraries and OER, featuring:
    1. Why Libraries? Why Librarians? by Regina Gong
    2. How Libraries Support OER by Abbey K. Elder
    3. Day to Day OER Work by Amanda C. Larson
  3. Open Pedagogy, featuring:
    1. Defining Open and OER-Enabled Pedagogy adapted from Robin DeRosa and Rajiv Jhangiani
    2. Critical Information Literacy and Open Pedagogy by Will Engle and Erin Fields
  4. Current Issues by Margaret McLaugnlin, Ali Versluis, and Sarah Hare

*links deactivated after review period closed

Instructions for Reviewers

We’re using Google Docs, set to allow comments via the links above. When you open the documents, you may see comments in the drafts that indicate areas where the authors would like particular feedback, or noting that they will be making future additions. Some formatting and citation adjustments still need to be made, along with the addition of discussion questions and other supporting materials; however, these drafts represent a close-to-final version of the content as we envision it being published. The book will receive professional copyediting from ACRL, so your time may be better spent focusing on content and substantive feedback rather than grammar and punctuation (but if that’s your thing, knock yourself out).

Anonymous review is permitted (log yourself out of Google!). Reviewers who wish to have their review acknowledged should sign their review with their preferred spelling. Critical feedback is welcome and appreciated; abusive or combative comments will be deleted and/or ignored. Be the reviewer you wish you had; help make this work the best it can be. For more information, please see this process overview and conduct expectations doc.

Thank you in advance to everyone who will take the time to share constructive ideas with us. We appreciate it!

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SCN at CNI

We’re grateful for the opportunity to participate in the virtual portion of the CNI conference next week. Our session, Taking a Page from the Scholarly Communication Notebook to Transform LIS Education, was pre-recorded, and provides a brief (~16 minutes) introduction to the SCN; how we got here, the current state of affairs, and where we’re heading. We’re always interested in feedback and suggestions, so reach out any time. Enjoy!

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Meet the Curators!

“Design a project big enough to capture the talents of others. This will allow you to do something bigger than you can do alone, and to learn from others smarter than you.”

This advice was given to one of us by an early mentor, which was given to him by his mentor. It struck a chord, and we’ve generally tried to bring people into our collaborations because we know it makes our projects better, and we hope it helps those folks, too, by providing an opportunity (for presentations, publications, funding, and, we hope, some fun) and a network of support and collaboration.

For some time we’ve been developing the Scholarly Communication Notebook, which we hope will become the locus of an active, inclusive, empowered community of practice for teaching scholarly communications to emerging librarians. We researched and identified a platform (OER Commons), and we are providing financial awards to content creators through three calls for proposals (third call coming soon; previous call for reference).

Now we’re thrilled to share that we’re welcoming six content experts to help us identify, collect, and describe existing open learning content related to their topical area. Please help us us welcome this impressive group of colleagues:

  • Sara R. Benson, Copyright Collection
  • Jill Cirasella, Open Access Collection
    • Jill is the Associate Librarian for Scholarly Communication at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She leads the Mina Rees Library’s scholarly communication initiatives, promotes open scholarship across campus, and contributes to university-wide scholarly communication efforts. Her priorities include enabling public access to GC-authored scholarship and providing instruction about open access, copyright, fair use, publication contracts, research metrics, and more. Jill’s research focus is scholarly communication, very broadly construed: recent and current projects include anxieties surrounding open access, attitudes about practice-based library literature, and the lived experiences of hard of hearing librarians. She is committed to advancing ethical, community-led open access initiatives and currently serves as Chair of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. Twitter: @jillasella
  • Arthur “AJ” Boston, Scholarly Sharing Collection (library publishing and repositories)
  • Regina Gong, Open Education Collection
  • Hoa Luong, Open Data
    • Hoa Luong is an Associate Director at the Research Data Service, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the point person for the Illinois Data Bank, known as the institutional data repository, to help Illinois researchers share their research data. Hoa leads and works with subject liaisons at the Library to curate datasets in the Illinois Data Bank and provides data management plan (DMP) review, as well as coordinates workshops and educational outreach. Hoa received a B.S. in Food Sciences and M.S. in Library and Information Science, both from the University of Illinois.
  • Rachel Miles, Research Impact
    • Rachel Miles is the Research Impact Librarian at Virginia Tech, where she supports researchers in improving and assessing the impact of their research through education of Open Access (OA) and author rights; provides specialized support for citation analysis, bibliometrics, altmetrics, network visualization, and emerging applications of impact data at individual, department, institutional, and other group levels; and supports best practices in developing and maintaining research profiles. Her research primarily focuses on the awareness and usage of research impact indicators, such as bibliometrics and altmetrics, among Library and Information Science (LIS) faculty and academic librarians at R1 institutions. Twitter: @metric_guru

As you can see, this is an all-star team, and we couldn’t be happier to be working with them. They’re going to be scanning the environment for a target of 30-50 open objects that are appropriate to their content area, creating metadata, depositing the resources into the SCN, and writing up a summary of their work: what’s covered, what’s missing and needs development, etc. You might see them at disciplinary conferences talking about their work, or crowdsourcing from their communities. If you know of great open content in these areas that’s appropriate for learning about the topic, please reach out to them. If you’ve created such content, send it along! Or add it yourself, if you like. Just let us know so we can endorse it and get it into the right collection/s. We’re also planning to introduce a “What/Why Scholarly Communication” collection for content that spans all or most of these areas. Will, Maria, and Josh will curate that collection.

We’re very excited to collaborate with these folks (and with you) and to see this progress and growth of the SCN!

Here’s more background on the SCN on our project site, and here’s a post reflecting on the relationship between the open book that we’re working on, and the SCN.

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New to the SCN: Open for Health

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 our first CFP (fall 2020). A second CFP was issued in May ‘21 (closing in early July), and a third call will be issued toward the end of 2021.

Today we’re excited to share “Open for Health: How Open Access Can Create a More Equitable World” (available in the SCN OER Commons Hub as well as IUPUI ScholarWorks ), by Caitlin Pike. Caitlin created a detailed lesson plan and slides that may be useful to anyone interested in teaching health sciences students at all levels about the intersection of scholarly communications and social justice. Here’s Caitlin to introduce her project:

Open access (OA) publishing has steadily gained traction as an alternative to traditional publishing models since its introduction in the early 2000s. Social justice, including equitable access to information and bridging the digital divide, are also concepts familiar to many librarians. As a result, these ideas create a natural intersection for advocacy as health information professionals and health faculty with an interest in teaching students about scholarly communications.

In this lesson plan, there is an optional reading list to review the literature related to OA, health equity, and social justice to provide background on the topics depending on student familiarity. A brief PowerPoint lecture is included to provide an overview, and then students will break into groups, and each group will be given a topic with questions to spark discussion on the subject. Questions such as “Historically, how has access to health information created benefits or barriers to users?” or “When thinking about medical research, what stakeholders are concerned about open access and why?” Each group will select a notetaker to keep track of the responses, and time will be given at the end of the class to report out and have a wider discussion with each other.

The concept for this lesson plan began as a workshop for health sciences librarians at the 2019 European Association of Health Information and Libraries Conference in Basel, Switzerland. It was also adapted and presented as a webinar for the Medical Library Association in 2021. My goal was always to try to find a way to influence students’ perceptions of the main topics, because I truly believe that teaching the next generation of academics to change the status quo is the best way to get ourselves out of relying on for-profit publishers. I also wanted the lessons to be personal and relatable, and my hope is that students will leave the session with a better understanding of what under-served groups in their communities would benefit most from open access initiatives, as well as being able to more confidently advocate for OA among their peers and superiors.

About the Author

Caitlin Pike is the Research Engagement and Scholarly Services Coordinator at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) University Library. She also serves as a health sciences liaison librarian, where she provides instruction and in-depth literature searching expertise to the IU School of Nursing students and faculty. Caitlin completed a second master’s degree in public health in 2019 from the Indiana University Fairbanks School of Public Health with a concentration in Social and Behavioral Sciences. Her research interests include open access, social justice, and developing relationships with students to facilitate library outreach. She has over five years of experience working with adult learners, and she received her MLS from North Carolina Central University in 2013.

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New to the SCN: Equity and Consent in Open Education

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 our first CFP (fall 2020). A second CFP was issued in May ‘21 (closed in early July), and a third call will be issued toward the end of 2021.

Today we’re excited to share “Equity and Consent in Open Education” (available in the SCN OER Commons Hub as well as in Google Drive), by Natalie Hill and Jessica Dai. Natalie and Jessica created case studies and teaching materials that ask participants to consider how our advocacy for OER and related open practices might have disparate impacts, particularly on those with less intersectional power and privilege. Here’s Natalie and Jessica to introduce their content:

“Equity and Consent in Open Education” aims to foster culturally responsive and equity-minded LIS professionals who are better equipped to engage in open education with students, scholars, and community members from historically underrepresented backgrounds and/or with marginalized identities. The lesson plan includes a slide deck, three case studies, and discussion questions to guide students toward equity-centered practices. Though originally developed for graduate Library and Information Science (LIS) students, the lesson plan can and should be adapted for different audiences and contexts.

Openness is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Though many open practitioners discuss and leverage open education as a means of democratizing education and information access, we must remember that learners and scholars face harm when we adopt openness with a paternalistic mindset. Working in the open is not without its risks, and these risks manifest differently for individuals based on their identities, background, and status. Keeping this reality in mind, LIS professionals need to leverage feminist and critical pedagogical frameworks to build informed consent into our open educational practices to best serve all of our communities, especially the communities that have historically been excluded out of participation. With this contribution to the Scholarly Communication Notebook, we hope that LIS instructors center equity and consent earlier with their students, so they are better equipped to navigate these situations as practitioners.

We intentionally selected openly published pieces—and where possible—we selected pieces written by scholars of color. As a framework for thinking about social justice in open education, Lambert’s (2018) article asks us to integrate the three principles of redistributive justice, recognitive justice, and representational justice into our open educational practices. Open education is not just about saving students money (redistributive justice) and we must reckon with ways to prioritize the inclusion of experiences of marginalized groups in our educational materials (recognitive justice), especially as told by members of those marginalized groups (representational justice). Bali‘s (2020) chapter challenges readers to think beyond paternalistic and colonial mindsets that frame open education through technical concerns around licenses and permissions rather than as an endeavor to improve the human experience. Though an OER may have remixing and revising permissions, what happens when abled educators continue to claim social justice as a value without taking the appropriate steps to make their OER accessible? Belarde-Lewis (Zuni/Tlingit) and Kostelecky’s (Zuni Pueblo) 2021 chapter use tribal critical race theory (TribCrit) to challenge information practices that historically and currently exclude Native and Indigenous ways of knowing. The authors use selected tenets of TribCrit such as “Colonization is endemic to society” and “Indigenous people have a desire to obtain and forge tribal sovereignty, tribal autonomy, self-determination, and self-identification” to analyze three Zuni projects. Orozco’s (2020) book chapter offers a practical example of applying informed open pedagogy in an eight week credit-bearing library course. As students collaboratively create a zine for their final project, they encounter and reflect on their engagement with all six frames in the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. All of these pieces have shaped the development of this lesson plan, so we thank all of the authors for pushing the conversations about what it means to be educators and library practitioners working to make libraries the social justice institution we claim it to be.

In alignment with open educational principles, we encourage instructors to modify Equity and Consent in Open Education to local and instructional contexts. We ask that you engage with any changes to this lesson in the same way we are asking students to engage, i.e. with critical, ethical, and equity-informed lenses.

About the Authors

Natalie Hill is an Instructional Designer with the University of New England. She is dedicated to open education advocacy and increasing representation of historically underrepresented groups in teaching, learning, and research materials. Most recently, she served as the Open Education Librarian with the University of Texas Libraries. She holds an MLIS from Drexel University and a BA in Literary Studies from the University of Texas at Dallas. Find Natalie @ChillNatalie on Twitter.

Jessica Dai (she/her) is the Equity and Open Education Librarian at West Virginia University. She has an MLIS from the University of South Carolina, an MA in Communication Studies from West Virginia University, and a BA in English from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Her professional interests include anti-oppression in LIS, open education, feminist and critical pedagogies, and the intersections in between. Find Jessica @ralphratheriled on Twitter.