Instructor: Sarah Hare, Scholarly Communication Librarian, Indiana University Bloomington;
Lillian Rigling, Program Coordinator - eCampus Ontario, Canada;
Ali Versluis, Open Educational Resources Librarian, University of Guelph, Canada
The average full-time undergraduate student now pays almost $1,300 per year for new textbooks (CollegeBoard, 2017). A survey of over 2,000 students on 150 different campuses found that if students cannot afford course materials, 65 percent of them will avoid renting or buying texts even though they know not having texts may impact their overall success in a course (Senack, 2014). Open Educational Resources offer a potential solution to this problem. OER are learning objects shared under an intellectual property license that explicitly allows others to retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute the materials freely (Wiley, 2014). Examples of OER include (but are not limited to) textbooks, syllabi and lectures shared under a Creative Commons license.
The concept of Open Education (OE) has been heavily discussed in the last few years, with the discourse centered on improved student retention and the transformation of teaching and learning approaches in higher education. Outreach and programming in the OE/OER area are quickly becoming core components of scholarly communication work, given that this work intersects with copyright, licensing, open access and open data with the aim of creating barrier-free research outputs that can be disseminated into the global knowledge base. Despite these developments, there is still a lack of awareness among librarians, faculty members and administrators about what OE is, how OER can be used and why this matters. For example, the Babson Survey report noted that only 10 percent of faculty reported that they were “very aware” of OER, and 56 percent were not at all aware of OER (Seaman & Seaman, 2017).
This course aims to fill in the gaps, providing an intensive opportunity to become conversant in foundational topics related to OE. Although the course will have a lecture component that will provide a topical overview, the majority of the content will be devoted to in-class activities, role-playing scenarios and discussions. These active learning approaches will be scaffolded to build on each other, ensuring that students have “takeaways” relevant to their own context. This structure will provide much of the foundation for an outreach plan (the culminating exercise for the course), which students will build on and finalize at a later date.
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 within their local context 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.
