Open Educational Resources and Institutional Repositories

Abstract

This installment of the Balance Point column delves into the ways in which libraries create and store open educational resources (OER) in institutional repositories (IR), addressing issues such as preservation and versioning of OER content, copyright and licensing, funding, and staffing. Drawing on interviews and the literature, programs at institutions such as the University of Minnesota, the University of Kansas, and Grand Valley State University are highlighted.

OER Initiatives at Liberal Arts Colleges: Building Support at Three Small, Private Institutions

“…As Nicole Allen, Steven Bell, and Marilyn Billings (2014) explain, each of them traces their involvement back to that January meeting in Denver. Since 2011, scholarly articles on OER have been published by and about librarians working at North Carolina State University (Raschke & Shanks, 2011), Temple University (Bell, 2012(Bell, & 2017, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (Billings, Hutton, Schafer, Schweik, & Sheridan, 2012), the City University of New York (Okamoto, 2013), the University of California-Los Angeles (Farb & Grappone, 2014), California State University-San Marcos (Mitchell & Chu, 2014), the State University of New York-Geneseo (Pitcher, 2014), the University of Minnesota (Jensen & West, 2015;Ferguson, 2017), Pierce College (Jensen & West, 2015;West, 2017), Virginia Tech (Walz, 2015(Walz, & 2017, Utah State University (Davis, Cochran, Fagerheim, & Thoms, 2016), Cleveland State University (Goodsett, Loomis, & Miles, 2016), the University of California-San Diego (Hess, Nann, & Riddle, 2016), Germanna Community College (Pierce, 2016), Arizona State University (Doan, 2017), Pennsylvania State University (Salem, 2017), the University of Kansas, and Grand Valley State University (Ferguson, 2017). None of these 18 schools, however, is a small, private LAC similar to the authors' institutions.…”

A case study investigation of academic library support for open educational resources in Scottish universities

“…This approach has incorporated learning from the success of social sharing and the removal of traditional repository restrictions (Terrell, 2016). Ferguson (2017) states that for academic libraries to continue to participate in OER conversations, they must adapt to the needs of departments, staff and students. Rolfe's (2016) arguments suggest that institutional repositories may not provide the most effective OER access point, with external websites and SEO potentially broadening exposure and access.…”

“…Subsequently, the SFC funded the Opening Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS) project, which discovered a generally low awareness of OER amongst Scottish higher education educators (De los Arcos et al, 2016). The concept of open resources is in line with the library ethos of providing access to knowledge for all (Borchard and Magnuson, 2017; Ferguson 2017; Jensen and West, 2015; Smith and Lee, 2017), so academic libraries are an obvious candidate for supporting OER in higher education institutions. There has been little research investigating the role academic libraries could play in OER support in the Scottish context (De los Arcos, 2017, personal communication).…”

Open educational resources (OER) in the Spanish universities

“…On the other hand, a growing number of universities have begun to consider IR as a principal point of access to OER produced by their academics and students. Some of the reasons for this revolve around the issue of preservation and versioning (Goodsett;Loomis;Miles, 2016;Ferguson, 2017).…”