International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 100
International Journal of Open Educational Resources
ences, it needs to be reflective of the diversity
and scope of those audiences. A
storytelling approach mandated the creation
of a set of characters that could be
used as first-person proxies for the audience,
and so an array of personas was
developed for the team to use within
and across modules for the purpose of
consistent and interconnected storytelling
(in essence, “OUC world-building”).
Examples of selected personas, which
reflect the variable audiences for the
content, included a librarian, a content
creator, a graduate student, and an employer.
Visual representations of these
personas needed to embody non-normative
facets of ethnicity and gender,
and every effort has been made to question
default assumptions of what (as an
example) an “employer” looks like.
The project team’s interest in diverse
visual representation has added
another layer of complexity to the selection
and use of openly licensed materials,
affecting the OER triangle’s tension
between precision and re-usability.
The selection of representative icons
and images requires considerable care,
but freely-available icons and photos—
much like their commercially-available
counterparts—bias representation towards
white, male, able-bodied depictions
of people and situations (Model
View Culture & Daniels, 2016; NPR,
2017). Though rigorous searches were
often able to surface appropriate material
for use by the project, such as a
non-binary student named Sandy who
appears in several modules, alternate
sources of openly licensed content were
eventually added to the team’s repertoire.
These included The Gender Spectrum
Collection (https://broadlygenderphotos.vice.com/),
Representation
Matters (http://representationmatters.
me/), and the Women of Color in Tech
photo collection on Flickr (https://
www.flickr.com/photos/wocintechchat/).
Maximizing Availability for Re-
Use, Revision and Re-Mixing
A critical focus for the project team,
with a view towards animating all five
of Wiley’s (2014) “R’s of OER”—especially
re-mix and re-use, which form
one apex of the OER triangle—was the
desire to complement our preference
for broad, openly-licensed content with
the use of free open source software
(FOSS) to write, produce, and distribute
project modules. This commitment
increases access to module content by
making it easy for downstream users to
adapt or re-use material without having
to make additional investments in proprietary
tools, software, or distribution
platforms. This commitment to FOSS
tools is not purely ideological or absolute,
however. In an earlier phase of the
project, the project team examined a
wide range of open source tools for collaboration,
scripting, video production,
and interactivity. Though applicable
tools exist for every step of the project
team’s workflow, some proprietary software
has still been used to balance the
accessibility of material with the skills
and knowledge required to adapt it to
new contexts. For example, the team
relies on Microsoft PowerPoint, which
is not gratis but is widely viewed as
a de facto standard for the creation of
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