International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 113

Rural Librarians’ Journey to Understanding Students’ Role in OER Outreach
to offer assistance in choosing open
material for these revamped courses,
but there was sadly no response. This
may have been due in part to the fact
that for some of those 10 faculty members,
the whole course-redesign was to
take place in one month’s time. When
met with such silence—inspired by
unfamiliarity with Open Educational
Resources, in addition to heavy course
loads and other responsibilities—the librarians
at Adams State have turned to
the underserved students themselves to
encourage advocacy.
We acknowledge the necessity
of faculty involvement in our continued
OER outreach; however, we have
decided to shift most of our focus from
the faculty to the students. Woodward
(2017) and Senack and Donoghue
(2016) recommended that students advocate
for themselves, but aside from
one mention of “workshops and seminars”
(Senack, 2014, p. 14) and “a student
advocacy session” (Woodward,
2017, p. 211), we have found nothing
in the literature about librarian-led outreach
to students that has lead to successful
student advocacy and notable
change. If students understand both the
financial/economic costs of higher education,
as well as the other dynamics
that play a role in information privilege,
they can begin the slow process of addressing
the disparities such privilege
perpetuates, both on this campus and
in the wider San Luis Valley community.
It is also our hope that using the student
outreach data we have collected,
our next grant proposals will stand out
from the crowd and perhaps provide us
with desperately needed resources.
Barriers to Faculty Adoption
Most of the literature pertaining
to OER-advocacy agrees
that it is librarians who lead
the charge for campus-wide OER adoption
and instruction. Bell’s article title,
“It’s up to the Librarians,” is quite apt,
as we are often the first and strongest
advocates for this change. Braddlee and
VanScoy (2019) called it a “professional
responsibility” (p. 429), and it is undeniable
that we are in the best position to
find new and better resources, to curate
and catalog them, to add metadata and
make them findable. A portion of the
librarians’ charge is aimed at debunking
misconceptions held by faculty regarding
the quality of open resources
and at attempting to educate the educators,
understanding and addressing the
barriers to faculty adoption. The first
seems to be ignorance of open options
(Belikov & Bodily, 2016, p. 239), with
“time and effort to find and evaluate”
OER (Allen & Seaman, 2014, p. 4) being
a close second.
FlatWorld, a low-cost textbook
publisher, performed a study in May of
2019, finding that 90% of surveyed faculty
were aware that there was a problem
with rising textbook costs, but 59%
were unaware of campus programs or
initiatives to rectify the problem (Flat-
World, 2019, p. 3). In part, it was this
apparent lack of awareness that has
shaped our plans for marketing and
outreach going forward. In a report
entitled Opening the Curriculum: Open
Educational Resources in US Higher
Education, 2014 by Allen and Seaman
(2014), their first key finding is that
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