Open Education 2014

This panel will combine three presentations around the theme of how libraries can play a role in supporting the adoption of OER. Each presenter will speak for 15 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of joint Q&A.

Providing a Push: Five Ways Academic Librarians Can Encourage Faculty to go Open
Steven Bell, Temple University

Librarians are typically perceived as academic support professionals who wait to be asked to take a role in a new campus initiative. But owing to the library's campus neutrality and connections with the disciplines, is often the case that academic librarians are well suited to adopt a leadership role in advancing reforms in scholarship and publishing. Academic librarians can also adopt more aggressive strategies to proactively promote OER to faculty. Academic librarians can apply their experience in promoting the value of open access to their communities to an OER initiative. In this presentation, attendees will be introduced to five actions academic librarians can take to introduce faculty to the benefits of adopting OER in their courses. These approaches will include projects that incentivize faculty to use OER, bringing OER advocates to campus to promote the benefits, creating internal support communities, and organizing campus events to promote the value of shifting to openness in higher education.

Library Piloted OER Adoption: From Flight to Foundation - Transforming OER from Concept to Concrete
John Schoppert, Columbia Gorge Community College

Libraries are a central component of any campus, but are often overlooked by all they serve. Yet libraries are a unique catalyst for change. Because libraries are at the intersection of student instruction, faculty support, and administrative duties, they are perfectly situated for taking OER initiatives from an idea to a sustainable framework. In this session, the director of the Columbia Gorge Community College library will show how the CGCC library moved from an initiative of OER adoption to building a concrete, workable plan that includes student involvement, faculty adoption, bookstore concerns, administration acceptance, and foundation funding support. What were the pitfalls along the way? What can be avoided? How do you create a working program? How many signatures do you need? This session will also include advice on engaging faculty about OER advocacy and creating a sustainable OER culture institution-wide.

Leading from the Library: The Power of Academic Libraries in OER Advocacy
Ann Agee & Christina Mune, San Jose State University

The mission of the university library has always been to provide access to quality information resources. Additionally, academic librarians are expected to understand fair use and copyright policies, and are often called upon to provide advice on the legal use of materials. This heritage places university librarians in a unique position to reach out to faculty and promote open educational resources for classroom use. This session explores how librarians at one campus have embraced their heritage and this challenge by implementing multiple strategies to provide and advocate for the use of OER as a replacement for textbooks in the classroom. Strategies include grants for OER authorship and adoption, partnerships with eReader vendors, behind-the-scenes work to match OER with existing courses, and novel faculty recognition events. Learn what worked, what did not work, and how future tactics are being adapted. Participants will come away with multiple potential strategies for assisting faculty in the adoption of OER as an alternative to the textbook.