International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 27

Building a Community of Inquiry Around OER independent reviews of the SUNY content, the authors of this article used the files to create four content modules in the LMS course: Defining OER; Identifying, Finding and Adopting OER; Customizing and Integrating OER; and Creating, Licensing, and Publishing OER. These four topics best captured the essential knowledge necessary for faculty to develop a thorough understanding of OER, use it effectively in their course, and become an advocate for OER on campus. Additional topics were considered, but it was decided that faculty needed to acquire the basics and then shift their focus to their individual courses, rather than work through additional, general content about OER. Identifying, finding, and adapting OER about OER was a strategic curriculum design choice. Reusing SUNY’s open content dramatically reduced the time and effort involved in developing the training program. Developing a new course is time-intensive, and many institutions, especially those without a dedicated OER or scholarly communications librarian, may find it challenging, initially, to implement such a program from scratch. This parallels the concerns of many instructors that designing or redesigning a course using OER is impractical (Cummings, 2019). This course not only provided faculty with an example of OER in action, it also demonstrated that using OER, and open education itself, can save time, add quality, and potentially improve the “educational experience” (Garrison et al., 2000, p. 87) of both instructors and students or participants. As previously mentioned, the CoI framework identifies the overlap or “convergence” of teaching, social, and cognitive presence as ideal in creating “a collaborative constructivist education experience” (Vaughan, Garrison, & Cleveland-Innes, 2013, p. 11), and the OER training course developed and delivered by librarians was designed with this in mind. Figure 3. Educational experience in the OER training course. 19