International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 25

Building a Community of Inquiry Around OER
The Information Literacy User’s Guide:
An Open, Online Textbook (Bernnard et
al., 2014)—and/or one published by the
Ohio State University—i.e., Choosing
& Using Sources: A Guide to Academic
Research (Lowery, 2016). Additionally,
two of these faculty librarians had written
and published lesson plans for the
course under a CC license (Finch & van
Arnhem, 2018; van Arnhem & Finch,
2018). Several members of the group
had also attended consortial trainings
and conference sessions related to
campus affordable learning initiatives.
Shortly before the group began meeting,
the research and instruction librarians
created an OER LibGuide (CofC,
2018) and began putting out feelers on
campus for other partners, including
instructional designers and technologists
from CofC’s Teaching and Learning
Team. At the same time, the Provost
developed an interest in OER because of
its frequent coverage in academic and
higher education literature and tasked
a faculty member with researching and
developing a proposal for a grant program
to incentivize and reward faculty
for transitioning their courses to OER.
The appointed faculty member met with
two members of the library working
group, and librarians were subsequently
involved in all aspects of the program.
In particular, it was decided that the
library would be the primary source
of support for faculty receiving grants.
This support would include a formal
training component and ongoing assistance
and guidance, as needed, from an
assigned library liaison. The program
was announced at a meeting of the Faculty
Senate (see Figure 2), and any and
all faculty members were invited to apply
for $750 grants to transition a course
to OER, while librarians offering support
to these faculty members, ultimately,
received smaller stipends of $200
each for their efforts. A total of 10 faculty
members applied to the program,
representing eight OER projects—two
of the projects were collaborative, involving
courses taught by multiple instructors.
Once the faculty applications
were reviewed and accepted by a small
committee of two faculty members, one
librarian, and one instructional technologist,
librarians could begin preparing a
training course that would foster a CoI
surrounding OER.
Developing the OER training
course
Many faculty members at CofC have
participated in a program called Distance
Education (DE) Readiness, designed
to prepare faculty for teaching
in an online environment. DE Readiness
completion is required before
instructors can teach online at CofC
(CofC, 2017). The program is an asynchronous
online course administered
in the campus LMS (Brightspace/D2L)
and administered and taught by an instructional
technologist. Other faculty
members, past DE Readiness graduates,
serve as mentors and leaders of small
groups. All research and instruction librarians
at CofC have taken DE Readiness
in preparation for teaching online
credit-bearing information literacy
courses, and one librarian has served as
a DE mentor. Because of faculty familiarity
with this program, and because
in-person training posed scheduling
challenges, DE Readiness was chosen
as a model for an online OER train-
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