International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 23

Building a Community of Inquiry Around OER
sortia—e.g., the aforementioned ALG,
Louisiana Library Network (LOUIS),
Ohio Library and Information Network
(OhioLINK), Open Oregon, and Virtual
Library of Virginia (VIVA)—international
consortia like Community College
Consortium for Open Educational
Resources (CCCOER), and system-wide
OER initiatives, like the one at SUNY,
to support academic librarians, faculty,
and instructional designers and technologists
as they explore OER, for both
the sake of “saving students money” and
“an overall improvement in students’ academic
performance” (McBride, 2019,
p. 24), has not gone unnoticed in the
literature (Bell & Salem, 2017; Colson,
Scott, & Donaldson, 2017; Evans, 2018;
Evans, 2019; Salem, 2017).
While conversations regarding
copyright law, fair use, and intellectual
property—and the introduction of CC
licenses over a decade ago—have placed
libraries and the work of librarians “at
the crux of affordable learning,” OER
curation, promotion, and even publication
have also become “an integral part
of an academic library’s service model”
(Evans, 2019, p. 1) as college and university
tuition costs continue to rise and
more students are reported to be food
and/or housing insecure (Blagg, Whitmore-Schanzenbach,
Gundersen, & Ziliak,
2017; Goldrick-Rab, Richardson, &
Hernandez, 2017; Hallett & Crutchfield,
2018). The process of converting to OER
can be time-intensive, however, and
buy-in is not likely to materialize based
on the cause of affordable learning alone
(Cummings, 2019). Beyond “practical
reasons” (Wilkinson, 2017, p. 117) for
library involvement in OER adoption
and delivery, librarians are also pedagogically
inclined, through digital and
information literacy instruction, “to
demonstrate how authority is a means
to disseminate power, not withhold it”
(p. 118). As an alternative to traditional
models that favor “the university
bookstore’s treatment of knowledge as
capital” (Wilkinson, 2017, p. 115), OER
empowers both faculty and students
to fully engage with course content in
meaningful ways and allows faculty to
make deliberate choices when selecting
and adapting or developing and formatting
materials. It seems as though librarians
are uniquely poised to discuss the
“pedagogical superiority” of open education
(Cummings, 2019, p. 25) and develop
and deliver campus-wide professional
development on “the potential of
digital technologies and specifically the
need for new digital literacies” (Conole,
2018); their expertise and willingness
to lead is well-recognized in the literature
covering the practical application
of OER grant and incentive programs
(Bell & Johnson, 2019; Bell & Salem,
2017; Goodsett, Loomis, & Miles, 2016;
Jensen & Nackerud, 2016; Walz, Jensen,
& Salem, 2016).
Librarians and the Community
of Inquiry model
Almost 20 years ago, the CoI framework
was first introduced as a model
of teaching and learning, specifically
for delivering courses “anytime, anywhere”
and for facilitating educational
transactions through “computer-mediated
communication” (Garrison et al.,
2000, p. 87). Despite increasing enrollment
in online and distance education
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