Tag: Curators

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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.

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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.

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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.