Open Education 2017

When a large public university set out to offer an alternative textbook grant program, they weren't sure who would apply, and for what reasons. What they weren't expecting was such a varied response for why people felt compelled to join this call to action. For instance, USU's Professional and Technical Writing program has a demonstrated commitment to social justice. Using an OER not only fulfills programmatic commitments to social justice through open access, but would enable this professor to integrate supplemental readings without students feeling as though they are investing in a textbook that goes unused part of the term. A professor teaching a broadcast journalism course was seeking to create a video integrated text to push the boundaries of a traditional textbook, more in line with such a video dependent subject. A third was interested in creating a book on social media case studies. The link between all of these disparate courses is that the professors reveled in the idea of sharing and opening up their courses or having their books being published with an open license so that further elaboration and collaboration could occur, thus increasing the quality of each resource. What's the key to furthering these types of initiatives at other college campuses? Tapping into the stories of the faculty members and hearing from them about whether these newly created resources have enabled innovation in the classroom and opened the doors to learning.

As a profession, academic librarians are accustomed to collaborating with faculty and assisting them with locating quality content for their courses and their own scholarly endeavors. Librarians have also been leaders in the open access movement, advocating for faculty to publish in green or gold standard academic journals, which foster the open sharing of scholarly information. It is logical, therefore, that this group of professions is being called upon to assist in the navigation of these new(ish) open waters of locating, evaluating and creating OER. A significant challenge exists, however; how are librarians being educated and supported (or not) to successfully lead faculty through the creation and use of OER with respect to copyright?

Copyright infringement is a serious crime, and many academics have a distorted misconception that all educational use is fair use, when in fact, it is not. While academic librarians are taking on additional responsibilities to support and endorse its faculty as consumers and creators of OER, are they actually qualified to do so without formal copyright training and support? Many universities lack institutional copyright policies, which further leaves librarians in the dark with no clear guidelines other than their own interpretation of the law. Even for the few individuals of whom have had some level of training in copyright, navigating and applying the law when assisting faculty with OER can be a daunting, stressful, and labor-intensive task.

This presentation will touch on the limited literature, discuss real examples of librarians struggling to navigate copyright law when working with faculty, and offer some suggestions for academic librarians to consider and take back to their own institutions. Most importantly, I hope to spark dialogue amongst participants to raise awareness of this lack of support and training academic librarians receive from their institutions who are starting to heavily promote the use of OER.

Critical information literacy, the metaliteracy movement, and trends toward curating open access content all point to the ways in which The Library is "opening." Librarians are moving beyond the building, beyond the corporate-dominated information industrial complex, and beyond teaching to the CRAP test. Despite this shift, librarians often receive requests for instruction sessions and materials that reflect old, outdated approaches to what librarians should do and what libraries should "own." Furthermore, the focus on teaching students how to find "academic articles," while relevant for disciplinary research, ignores the economic and social inequalities outside the ivory tower. In this session, learn about the paradigm shift in librarianship and information studies and what it means for how you work with librarians at your institution, and teach your students.

Reducing textbook costs and adopting OER became one of the strategic objectives for the 2015-2021 University of Hawaii System Strategic Plan. The System is comprised of 7 community colleges and 3 universities. Librarians were instrumental in bringing the OER conversation to the grassroots level. Librarians leveraged contacts throughout the University of Hawaii System to create a system-wide volunteer UH OER Team that includes librarians, instructional designers, and instructors. The team serves as an advocacy and information-sharing group for all campuses. The tradition of collaboration and information-sharing inherent in the library profession provided a foundation from which OER could take hold in the university system.

Librarians and instructional designers at the two largest community college campuses, Kapiolani and Leeward, established independent OER initiatives on their respective campuses. In summer 2015, these two campuses together received a joint sum of $100K in innovation funding to develop OER on their respective campuses. The two-campus team of three librarians and one instructional designer focused on professional development as the key strategy for increasing faculty awareness of OER and for encouraging adoption. Differences in campus infrastructure and culture resulted in differences in how OER adoption took place. We will highlight the unique challenges that community college librarians experience in their effort to promote OER on their individual campuses. We will also discuss the role of the librarians across this system to make OER a priority across all campuses.

Our campus did not have a formal OER program until November 2016. Since then, a team from our Libraries launched two OER advocacy initiatives focused on students and instructors, respectively. This presentation will show how we drew on resources from the broader OER community to "bootstrap" our program in a short period of time. Specifically, we will discuss the formation and composition of our team, the resources we used to plan and develop our initiatives, practical challenges and lessons learned from program implementation, preliminary results from a student survey on textbook affordability, and our plans for future program development.

For our student-focused initiative, we partnered with our Student Government Association to organize two #textbookbroke tabling events during Open Education Week 2017. We provided a number of interactive activities to encourage student participation, including an engagement board and a short survey. With 350 students participating, this proved to be a very effective way to raise student awareness about OER and gather data on the impact of high textbook costs at our institution.

Concurrently with #textbookbroke, our team also implemented an Alternative Textbook Grants program to support instructors in their efforts to replace commercial textbooks with more open, affordable alternatives. Successful applicants received $1000 in grant funding as well as support from our team on material selection, copyright and licensing, and instructional design. Early projections suggest that the first round of grantees could save students up to $41,419 in textbook costs in the first year after implementing their alternative textbooks.

By sharing about the experience of launching these initiatives, we hope to provide both inspiration and a practical roadmap for colleagues at campuses that are just getting started with OER, as well as helpful data and points of comparison for those at institutions with more developed OER programs.

Librarians are integral change agents in education, particularly higher education. From being gatekeepers to what is in the library to the adoption of new methods of research. When it comes to Open Educational Resources, emerging research (Bueno-de-la-Fuente, Robertson, & Boon, 2012; Jensen & West, 2015) illustrate the centrality of libraries and librarian. In other words, in academia, if OER is to continue to grow, the role of the library and librarians will continue to hold significant value. Responding to diverse sets of stakeholders, librarians are challenged with teaching about teaching and instruction on instruction (Detlefsen EG, 2012). Well prepared to navigate the needs of these user groups, OER librarians require specific instruction for the specialized world of open educational resources.

In keeping with the theme of the conference (Sharing, Gratitude, and Hope), we propose to share a librarian guide to new pedagogy developed with the goal of advancing OER in the academy. The goal for this undertaking was to provide a practical guide for librarians as they traverse the landscape of open educational resources for pedagogical optimization. We aim to "share because we are grateful for what others have shared with us" in developing this guide "and we share because we hope to help to others" interested in engaging in similar projects.

Pedagogical experts agree that the communication of Learners has changes that have yet to be unveiled. Using the concept of WEB DuBois, the veil of the learner foreshadows the learning that is taking place. This presentation will identify the evolution of pedagogies with a brief history then focus on the current strategies of the learning design field. The librarians role in promoting access, affordability, and student success through the use of open textbooks is limited only by their agency, the goal of the guide is to empower academic librarians to navigate the emerging field of OER.