Navigating OER: The Library’s Role in Bringing OER to Campus

Supporting Librarians in Making the Business Case for OER

“…There are, however, challenges to overcome. Faculty voice concerns over lack of familiarity with OER, availability of OER, and the additional time and effort required to use them, while administrators consider the overall business model required to support and sustain them over time (Allen & Seaman, 2014;Belikov & Bodily, 2016;Hess, Nann & Riddle, 2016). Overcoming concerns will require institutional-level efforts and the institutional libraries, because of their pervasive scope and the specific skillset of their librarians, are keenly positioned to become the leaders of OER adoption movements (Woodward, 2017).…”

Incentivizing OER adoption with course development mini-grants

“…One of the most frequently heralded benefits of these materials is their low cost; however, to be truly "open" these educational resources must embrace "free" in the sense of "libre," meaning their adopters are free to adapt, or remix the content. This ability to customize or modify content and, thanks to Creative Commons or similar licenses, republish that content in an online open format can give instructors greater control over their content, with the added feature of rapid update times, to provide the information they feel may be most useful to their students (Hess, Nann, & Riddle, 2016).…”

Open Educational Resources and Institutional Repositories

“…… Preservation is an area for libraries to take a look at where they can help, but right now the burden is on creators of OER to create backups of their work and on users of OER to be sure thatthey have copies of materials they may want to use in the future. (Hess, Nann, & Riddle, 2016) By ingesting OER files and metadata in an institutional repository, the library helps faculty members and students create backups of their content and manage the long-term preservation of OER resources.…”

“…Their modular nature allows instructors to use only relevant components and customize materials for more specific topics and audiences. (Hess et al, 2016) This modular nature can lead to a proliferation of different versions. Each time a text is used and customized, it effectively produces a new edition or version to be archived.…”

“…Some repositories make licensing information very clear, but many do not. (Hess et al, 2016) Libraries interested in producing OER content and making it available via an institutional repository will most likely need to assist faculty in selecting appropriate licensing terms for the content they produce. In addition, a mechanism for storing all of the licensing and copyright information for future reference may be useful.…”