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 21, 2023September 21, 2023

Off to the Printer!

Folks, this is a big moment! We’ve been working towards an open textbook about scholarly communication librarianship for a long time. It was the core of our initial collaboration, which goes all the way back to 2016. A lot has happened (ahem) in the interim. Last fall we submitted the complete manuscript of Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge to ACRL. In May, we got the copyedited manuscript back and spent most of the summer working through changes. Recently, we reviewed two rounds of proofs, shared cover ideas with our designer and gave design feedback. Last week the formatted book went to the printer! Yesterday, we were in the September issue of The Syllabus from ACRL newsletter, and on Monday, we shared the beautiful cover, which we’re thrilled with.

The front cover for Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge, edited by Bonn, Bolick, and Cross. Features colorful graffiti in the top half, and title and bylines in bottom half.

It sounds like ACRL is excited about it, too! Here’s their description:

The intersection of scholarly communication librarianship and open education offers a unique opportunity to expand knowledge of scholarly communication topics in both education and practice. Open resources can address the gap in teaching timely and critical scholarly communication topics—copyright in teaching and research environments, academic publishing, emerging modes of scholarship, impact measurement—while increasing access to resources and equitable participation in education and scholarly communication.

Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge is an open textbook and practitioner’s guide that collects theory, practice, and case studies from nearly 80 experts in scholarly communication and open education. Divided into three parts:

What is Scholarly Communication?

Scholarly Communication and Open Culture

Voices from the Field: Perspectives, Intersections, and Case Studies

The book delves into the economic, social, policy, and legal aspects of scholarly communication as well as open access, open data, open education, and open science and infrastructure. Practitioners provide insight into the relationship between university presses and academic libraries, defining collection development as operational scholarly communication, and promotion and tenure and the challenge for open access.

Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge is a thorough guide meant to increase instruction on scholarly communication and open education issues and practices so library workers can continue to meet the changing needs of students and faculty. It is also a political statement about the future to which we aspire and a challenge to the industrial, commercial, capitalistic tendencies encroaching on higher education. Students, readers, educators, and adaptors of this resource can find and embrace these themes throughout the text and embody them in their work.

Look at the absolutely phenomenal list of folks involved in the finalized TOC! We’re expecting publication in print to coincide with Open Access Week in late October, with an OA version available to download a bit earlier on the ALA Store. There are almost 80 contributors to the book, with a broader community of support, and a non-profit publisher supporting open publication. How’s that for community over commercialization?

There are already a couple of LIS scholcomm courses using a preprint version of the book this fall, and those instructors have been really positive about the book and related materials in the Scholarly Communication Notebook (SCN). We’re in touch with a few more folks who are looking forward to using it, too. We’re planning to develop an instructor’s companion to support use in LIS classrooms. If you’re teaching a course or workshop that could use all or part of the book, get in touch! We’d love to know more, and to talk about how we can support each other.

It’s been such a privilege to be a part of the development of this work and members of this community! We’re excited to finally see it coming out! We have so much gratitude to our peers who edited sections, all the authors, ACRL folks, especially our editor Erin Nevius, all the folks that helped to shape our thinking along the way, and many others. Onward and upward!

Maria, Josh, and Will

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 11, 2023April 11, 2023

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:

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.

March 8, 2023

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!