Author: jbolick

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New to the SCN: Making OER with and for PreK12

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 “Making Open Educational Resources with and for PreK12” (available via Pressbooks and in the SCN OER Commons Hub). This work was created by Anita Walz and Dr. Julee Farley, both of Virginia Tech. As we collectively look to expand collaborations between higher ed and PreK12 educators, and to support the creation of open content for that environment, it’s important that we engage in knowledge and respectful ways. Here are Anita and Julee, adapted from the resource, to introduce their work:

Higher education and PreK12 are vastly different domains. Well-intended, collaborative relationships do not always result in hoped-for creation of useful and reusable learning materials for PreK12 classrooms, nor of effective partnerships. This toolkit is designed to address known gaps in knowledge and practice which limit the development of generative relationship-building processes between higher education faculty and PreK12 educators. The toolkit is intended to prepare and position practicing and future academic librarians and interested higher education faculty, staff, and students consulting with librarians to address these gaps related to outreach to PreK12, and expand use and re-usability of learning resources through informed practices regarding copyright, open-licensing, and accessibility. Designed for use in formal graduate-level library and information science courses and relevant for self-study by academic librarians already in practice, this toolkit includes videos, presentations, transcripts, activities, guides, assignments, and assessment tools for learning and delivery by librarians to faculty and students in higher education, and for use by interested instructional designers, other faculty, staff, and graduate students seeking to improve their service to PreK12 educators.

Introduction

Higher education has a long history of outreach, sharing, and collaboration with formal PreK12 education. Some attempts have been more successful than others. In sharing this openly-licensed toolkit and the curriculum resources within, we hope to raise the success rate of partnerships initiated by higher education in service to and collaboration with PreK12 administrators and teachers, expand the number of healthy, sustainable partnerships between higher education and PreK12, and broaden the availability of usable, customizable, open educational resources created with and for for PreK12 teaching environments.

Origins of the Toolkit

This curriculum guide and toolkit originated from a series of consultations between the authors, a Higher Ed – PreK12 liaison, and an open education and copyright librarian. It initially culminated in a series of documents including curator and OER contributor checklists, release forms, and contributor agreements developed to support university students and faculty to create and share open educational resources. We presented this work at the Open Education Conference 2021 under the title “Boundary Spanners: Bridging Gaps Between Higher Education and PreK12.” After our presentation, we decided to pursue more formal documentation of the project and its resources. In our search for a publication venue, we realized that the Scholarly Communication Notebook (SCN), a resource for training graduate students, especially those enrolled in library and information science programs, may be a natural fit for developing the types of skills librarians and others in higher education need to assist others in forming respectful, informed, and productive working relationships with PreK12 audiences.

What is the Toolkit?

The openly-licensed toolkit includes editable course materials — readings, slides and presentation transcripts, sample communication templates, assignments and partnership evaluation forms — intended for self-study and mediated graduate and undergraduate instruction. The toolkit covers diverse areas of knowledge in a linear progression, including working with minors, educational standards-related issues, copyright, open-licensing, and acceptable uses of third-party works, communication skills, empowering teachers to provide their expertise, and adapting and sharing openly-licensed works. Each section of the toolkit contains presentations or readings, and either self-assessment or reflection questions. Some sections contain communication templates and customizable forms.

This toolkit is designed for higher education faculty and librarians, instructional designers, graduate students, and undergraduates who aspire themselves — or to assist others — in building respectful and productive outreach relationships with PreK12 teachers, and to create relevant open educational resources for use within the PreK12 context.

We’d love to hear about interest and use, and receive feedback! Here’s a form for providing that if you’d like: https://bit.ly/interest_hek12.

About the Authors

Anita Walz

is the Assistant Director of Open Education and Scholarly Communication Librarian at Virginia Tech where she founded and oversees the Open Education Initiative and OER grant program. She actively supports instructor adaptation, creation, and public sharing of open educational resources of various formats, including open textbooks, primary source collections, and emerging formats for learning resources such as interactive calculators and virtual reality animals. She holds a masters in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has worked in government, international, school, and academic libraries for the past 21 years.

Julee Farley, Ph.D., is a boundary spanner and evaluator whose work focuses on increased access and equity for under-resourced populations. She works with PreK-16 educators and researchers to create mutually beneficial research-practice partnerships, research impactful interventions, and design inspirational outreach and engagement experiences. Julee began this project while working at the Center for Educational Networks and Impacts at Virginia Tech; go to juleefarley.com for more recent updates about her work.

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New to the SCN: Introduction to Open Education (Instructional Materials) 

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.

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Happy Open Education Week from the SCN Team!

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!

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Happy Fair Use Week! Check out the Copyright and Fair Use Resources in the SCN

Happy Fair Use and Fair Dealing Week! Fair use is an essential tool enabling creativity and scholarship. We build on the works of others when we create something new and without fair use, much of that creativity would be stifled due to the inability to afford licensing fees, inability to determine the correct copyright owner (in the case of orphan works), or, in some cases, when the copyright owner simply refuses to grant permission (wherein fair use is still justified, thankfully). This is not just any Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week . . . this is the 10th Anniversary of the celebration of Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week! This is the perfect time to highlight the Copyright Collection in the Scholarly Communication Notebook. And who better to tell you about the collection than Sara Benson, Associate Professor and Copyright Librarian at the University of Illinois Library, who curated the collection of open access works about copyright in the collection.

The task was no small one: to gather relevant openly licensed works about copyright that would be relevant to library and information science students and professionals. While this sounds easy enough, there are not as many truly open access works as I would have liked (works with an open license in addition to being paywall free) and some of the works are aimed at K-12 audiences while others are aimed more at law school students.

I think I managed to find a good balance of works, including these open access fair use resources:

One of my favorite copyright tools of all time, though, and not to be missed, is affectionately called the Peter Hirtle “copyright chart” or, officially named: the Copyright Term and the Public Domain Chart. This tool is essential to my daily work as a copyright librarian. Whenever I have a question about an older book, I look at this chart to help me determine whether it is still in copyright. Published in 1945? Missing a copyright notice? It’s in the public domain! Related hat tip to the great work librarians are doing at NYPL, who recently found that up to 75% of books published before 1964 may be in the public domain due to formalities required at the time (VICE coverage by Claire Woodcock).

I encourage you to check out the many open resources about copyright included in the SCN collection. If you’re the creator of something that belongs here, or you’re aware of a resource that could be included, we’d love to know! If you’re interested in adding it yourself, here are detailed instructions. And, exercise your right to fair use!