International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 93

Know Your Audience(s): Collaborating for Copyright Education
Nearly a century later, however,
creation of and advocacy for OER
at the University of Alberta has been
moderate. The Centre for Teaching and
Learning provides some program support
(Centre for Teaching and Learning,
2019a) and operates a modestly
funded ($75,000 in both 2018/2019
and 2019/2020) OER Awards program
designed to encourage OER creation
and adoption. This support has funded
several small OER projects (Centre for
Teaching and Learning, 2019b). In addition,
two advocacy groups—one driven
by the undergraduate student union,
and the other comprised of interested
staff and faculty from the university—
were developed following a grassroots
and short-lived interest group. Overall,
existing resources are aimed more at
university faculty and staff than at students
and members of the general public.
This modest interest and support for
OER stands in contrast to the university
administrations’ more active effort
to establish the university as a leader
in MOOC development. For example,
the university has partnered with Coursera
to create and deliver over a dozen
MOOCs in the past decade (University
of Alberta, 2019b).
The University of Alberta is increasingly
embracing OER, with several
OER projects emanating from the university,
including the case at the focus of
this paper. The OER project under examination
is a multi-year, grant-funded
project focused on developing copyright
OER: the Opening Up Copyright
(OUC) project. OUC was created with
three goals in mind: enhance the quality
of copyright instruction provided to
students at the University of Alberta;
strengthen copyright education for faculty,
staff, and students in the broader
University of Alberta community; and
develop resources that can be used and
adapted by members of the public and
other Canadian institutions.
The project, which was initially
funded by the university’s Teaching and
Learning Enhancement Fund (Centre
for Teaching and Learning, 2019c), is
a collaboration among several University
of Alberta units, including the
Copyright Office, the School of Library
and Information Studies (which is the
source of the sole faculty member on
the project), the Centre for Teaching
and Learning, the Libraries, and Technologies
in Education. Within this partnership,
the majority of the work is centred
between the Copyright Office and
the library school. The diverse team of
collaborators, following the recommendations
laid out in Lo and Dale (2009),
include an Open Education Program
manager, a Digital Projects librarian,
the Copyright Librarian, the Director
of the Copyright Office, a learning facilitator,
multiple graduate research
assistants, two educational developers,
and an associate professor. While the
overall group involved in the project is
large, most of the work is carried out
by a smaller content team comprised
of the Copyright Librarian, Director
of the Copyright Office, the associate
professor, and the graduate research assistants.
Collaboration has been facilitated
by regular weekly meetings of the
professor and the graduate students and
biweekly meetings of the content team.
Full team meetings are a less frequent
occurrence.
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