Celebrating Open Ed Week with Regina Gong

Dr. Regina Gong was the curator of the Open Education Collection in the Scholarly Communication Notebook. Before her current role as Associate Dean for Student Success and Diversity in Copley Library at the University of San Diego, she led open education programs at Michigan State University, and before that, at Lansing Community College. If you’ve been working in the OER space for long, you know Regina’s work, and if you aren’t familiar, you really should be. She is deeply knowledgeable, experienced, and infectiously enthusiastic. We have welcomed every opportunity to work with Regina, who also contributed to the Open Education Section of Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge. She’s also, very deservedly, a LJ ‘23 Mover & Shaker. Below, Regina shares information about the collection of materials she curated. Essentially, it’s OER about OER. For clarity, the Open Education Collection is a catchall of resources that are endorsed by the SCN and bear the tag, “Open Education.” Regina focused her effort in the related Scholarly Communication Notebook Group folder structure in order to ease navigation. The top folder is called “OER (Overview).”

Introduction

OER Commons is a rich resource which hosts a plethora of resources that provide an overview and introduction to open educational resources (OER) and related practices. Faculty, teachers, librarians, instructional designers, academic staff, administrators, and students from different institutions and organizations create, remix, and share these materials to support teaching and learning. These resources available allow for a better understanding and clarity about OER and demonstrate how these materials can be used and adapted for teaching and learning. However, the volume of materials, along with the many facets available to filter the results for relevancy, can be overwhelming, especially for those who may not be familiar with OER. For library and information science (LIS) students and others just starting to learn about open educational content and practices, the SCN is a jumping off point to explore and discover open education as well as the community of people who create these materials as tools for empowerment. Indeed, this is an invitation to expand our knowledge, awareness, and commitment to open education for the public good.

Overview of the Collection

The collection consists of materials that introduce OER and provide a deeper dive into the issues that propelled the rise of these openly licensed teaching and learning materials. The Overview folder provides a starting point for learning the basics of OER, what it can do to improve learning, and how educators can use these materials in the classroom. In this section, you will find a number of toolkits, starter kits, and quick-start guides geared towards specific groups such as librarians, faculty, students, and administrators, among others. It is then subdivided into folders as follows:

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA): Open education is often framed as a way to democratize knowledge, access, and opportunities for all learners. Equity and social justice are the pillars of ensuring that OER lives up to its promise of empowerment and freedom. In this section, the emphasis is on foregrounding OER as more than just free and affordable materials. It is curated to bring together a critical perspective on open education and how it can advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice. Resources in this section are interdisciplinary and include works by authors in the United States as well as internationally-created materials. Here, you will find reports, toolkits, templates, and rubrics that guide educators and learners to intentionally incorporate DEIA in their courses, curriculums, syllabi, and assessments. It is not limited to postsecondary education but also includes materials relevant to K-12 educators.
OER Advocacy: A crucial part of OER work is advocacy and the ability to rally key decision-makers to support initiatives. This section provides information on advocating for OER as a student and librarian.
Open Licensing: Open licenses such as the Creative Commons licenses put the “open” in OER. Understanding these licenses and how they can be used to share materials with the world is crucial. This section comprises full courses and modules that discuss how these licenses work. The goal is to provide not just an understanding of Creative Commons licenses but to use it to demonstrate the affordances and freedom that OER enables.
Open Pedagogy: Open pedagogy or open educational practices are a body of activities that build on the opportunity of openly licensed content. For many educators, these practices are a core benefit of engaging with OER. This section consists of materials that demonstrate how this is done in real-life educational settings.
Open Textbooks: Open textbooks represent the majority of OER that are utilized and adopted by educators and learners. This section provides guidance on creating, modifying, and publishing open textbooks. Authoring with students and information about the peer review process that can be used to publish open textbooks round up this section.

Areas of Strengths

The scholarly corpus that makes up the open education field has been increasing since OER was first introduced in 2002. One area of strength is the availability of materials in all formats that provides an introduction and overview of OER. There are a lot of toolkits, guides, handouts, templates, and rubrics that address the many facets of running an OER program, including advocacy and publishing. A growing area of strength is open pedagogy and DEIA. This collection represents that strength since an emerging focus on equity and social justice has gained ground within the field. Open education practitioners have started to realize the value proposition of OER as a liberatory way to challenge knowledge creation and representation.

Areas of Improvement

An area that needs to be strengthened is one that all open education advocates should strive for: representation and inclusion. The materials available on open education and OER are predominantly Western-centric, specifically from the U.S. and Canada. This is not to say that there is a lack of materials about open education and OER from countries outside of North America. The issue is that those materials are not frequently cited, recommended, or referred to. For example, several materials from OER Africa, Europe, and the Global South are not represented in the major repositories (including OER Commons), which has serious implications for their discovery. As curator of this section, it was challenging to find these materials, so I intentionally added them as a resource in OER Commons so that the SCN could endorse them. While it is impossible to curate everything and be everywhere all at once, it is critical that we, as librarians and information professionals, practice what we preach. It is an ongoing effort to ensure that LIS students and emerging OER professionals learn about open education from as many perspectives, worldviews, and positionalities that make up this global community. This collection is a start, and hopefully, it will grow to include and represent the diverse voices waiting to be heard and discovered.

If you are aware of openly licensed materials about open education, here’s how they can be added to the Scholarly Communication Notebook.

September 13, 2023

New to the SCN: Introduction to the Library’s Institutional Repository for Scholarly Communications

Today we’re excited to share “Introduction to the Library’s Institutional Repository for Scholarly Communications” (available via Pressbooks and in the SCN OER Commons Hub). This work was created by Dr. Jennifer Beamer and Sumayyah Jewell. Institutional repositories, or IRs, are at an interesting point in their development and use. Here is Jennifer to introduce their work:

In 2020, Jennifer and Sumayyah began refreshing the nearly 10-year-old institutional repository at the Claremont Colleges Library. Our goal was to start creating documentation about the foundational concepts that we wanted our colleagues to know about. As we were both strong advocates of new and soon-to-be librarians we talked many times about how learning about repositories in library school would be a great idea. So we created a simple guide of how institutional repositories operate within our library. We began documenting the actors and processes of the institutional repository while at the same time internally educating our staff, librarians, and leadership on how our campus’s students, faculty, and staff were interacting with the repository. There are four main areas we have addressed: Libraries and the Institutional Repository, Contents of the Library Repository, Labor and the Library Repository, and Organizations that Support the Library Institutional Repository. At the end of each chapter, there are a few brief questions for exploring and diving deeper into the content presented.

We chose to create a Pressbook in the hopes that we can add more content in the future and possibly case studies. We would love others to get in touch with us and give us feedback on our simple content to date. We realize that it’s a basic introduction for now. This resource is meant for librarians and library students – especially those who may be new to scholarly communication and or have no experience with institutional repositories. It presents how library workers are thinking as they undertake open-access publishing, manage institutional repositories, and assemble digital collections. The simplicity of the current version was well received internally. The feedback thus far has been that it is a good start and more content would be welcome. Please email Jennifer (jenniferb@claremont.edu) with any feedback.

About the Authors

Jennifer Beamer is the Head of Scholarly Communication and Open Publishing Services at The Claremont Colleges, a liberal arts college consortium comprised of seven colleges in Southern California. She believes in the library’s open publishing program by building collaborative relationships with partners from within the Library and across the campuses. Additionally, Jennifer provides leadership, outreach, and education on the scholarly communication ecosystem, including open access advocacy, open science practices, open educational resources, copyright and fair use, and research impact.

Sumayyah Jewell is the Digital Preservation Archivist at the Leonard Cohen Family Trust in Los Angeles, and a future Librarian. She is passionate about facilitating the discoverability and preservation of knowledge. Sumayyah’s areas of expertise include practical experience in reference, scholarly communications, digital asset and repository management, digital preservation, community archives, resource sharing, and open access scholarship.

September 7, 2023

You Can Only Cook with What’s in the Pantry

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.

April 24, 2023April 24, 2023

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.

April 11, 2023April 11, 2023

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

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.