International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 22

International Journal of Open Educational Resources
• Teaching Presence: The course
adapts Creative Commons (CC) licensed
OER development training
from the State University of New
York (SUNY). By using OER materials
as the basis for our curriculum,
faculty were provided with a
model for how they can adapt OER
and share resources. Many faculty
members are concerned that using
OER will mean added work and less
time—this example shows how reusing
materials developed and appropriately
licensed can be timesaving
and efficient.
• Social Presence: The course uses
online education best practices to
facilitate collaboration and knowledge
sharing, including member
introductions, discussions, and organizing
faculty and librarians into
team groups. This encourages faculty
to learn from and support each
other in an environment that is familiar
and lasting.
• Cognitive Presence: Faculty members
apply what they are learning
into their OER course design. Grant
projects can be loosely grouped into
two categories: selecting and adapting
existing materials and developing
and formatting material newly
created by the instructor. Within
these two categories, however,
projects vary greatly, from adding
homework exercises in Mathematical
Markup Language to a vector
calculus textbook written by math
department colleagues, to searching
for openly licensed Russian
language resources. Considerations
such as accessible design are reflected
across all projects.
Literature Review
Libraries and OER
Advocacy for OER amongst librarians is
not a new or especially innovative topic,
although it is widely discussed in current
professional literature within the context
of affordable learning in K-20 education
and, occasionally, in connection to critical
librarianship and engaged pedagogy
(Crissinger, 2015; Wilkinson, 2017). In
the recent past, “one of the greatest challenges”
in supporting faculty interest in
OER adoption was finding, evaluating,
and using materials with appropriate licenses
to use in courses (Massis, 2016, p.
770). Thankfully, the seemingly barren
landscape has bloomed with the help
of dedicated institutions of higher education
and nonprofit organizations to
create both open courseware and highly
searchable OER repositories—e.g.,
OpenStax from Rice University, Open
Textbook Library from the Open Textbook
Network and the University of
Minnesota, GeorgiA LIbrary LEarning
Online (GALILEO) from Affordable
Learning Georgia (ALG) and the University
System of Georgia, Multimedia
Educational Resource for Learning and
Online Teaching, commonly known
as MERLOT, from the California State
University System, OER Commons
powered by the independent education
nonprofit Study of Knowledge Management
in Education (ISKME), and many,
many more. In addition, the willingness
of statewide academic library con-
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