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.
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