Regardless of the measures put in place to prevent or mitigate them, natural and man-made hazards remain a daunting challenge for community leaders tasked with ensuring public safety. Governments and other organizations can provide services to protect and respond to their citizens' needs in an emergency, but ultimately, the relative resilience of a community relies, to a large extent, on the preparedness of the individuals living within it. While individual preparedness is determined largely by personal attributes, another important determinant is the influence of the community on the knowledge base and available resources of its members. To capture the influence that a community can have on instilling and increasing preparedness competencies in its population, Argonne National Laboratory has developed a public preparedness index. The index captures aspects such as disaster public education programs, crisis communication, public communication, citizen preparedness groups, and additional resources such as community shelters and evacuation routes/plans. This index allows community leaders to (1) better understand how well they are equipping their citizens to face potential hazards and (2) identify areas for improvement. As increased emphasis is placed on better equipping communities to face potential hazards, it is vital that those communities also understand how their actions affect the preparedness of their citizens.
As online learning continues to expand, new avenues are being identified to support graduate learners in this environment. Regent University, a private institution located in the southeastern region of the United States, investigated Open Educational Resources (OER) options for providing asynchronous learning experiences to master key competencies, such as writing. After evaluating the OER market and networking with state and national level OER library leadership, these educators sought to build an OER alternative to Pearson's MyWritingLab that would serve the needs of their developmental writing online graduate students. A small team of librarians and professors took steps to integrate this experience into the university's UNIV 500: Foundations of Graduate Success course, evaluate its effectiveness, and create multimodal options for supporting this open learning opportunity.
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