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 92