Designing and Developing an Open Education Course for Library Science Students
Introduction
To achieve sustainability , the open education movement needs to develop its pipeline of future leaders . That need to educate future leaders was recognized early on in the OER movement and that ( Jensen & West 2015 ) effort is already in progress . Both SPARC and the Open Education Network offer formal educational and leadership academies for aspiring open education leaders . SPARC ’ s Open Education Leadership Program began in 2017 and enrolls cohorts of approximately 20 individuals , mostly academic librarians . Each participant conducts a capstone project and several past projects provide educational and advocacy resources that benefit the global open education community . The Open Education Network focuses more on best practices for creating and sustaining open education projects than formal leadership , but its Certificate in OER Librarianship describes itself as “ creating open education program leaders .” Together , these programs and related educational workshops and institutes offered at state and regional levels by library consortia and state agencies , do contribute to the preparation of the open movement ’ s future leaders .
Many of these programs ’ participants are academic librarians who are already committed to the basic tenets of open education . They may be their institution ’ s leading proponent of open education or a recognized state advocate . Existing open education programs such as those described above work to sharpen the saw , so to speak , by giving the participants enhanced abilities to promote the advance of the open movement locally , and even globally . In doing so they fulfill the early vision for OER growth shared by Allen , Bell and Billings ( Allen , Bell & Billings 2014 ; Allen , Bell & Billings 2016 ). But how is the open movement being introduced to new , potentially interested future enthusiasts ? Practicing academic librarians have opportunities to learn about open education and develop the requisite skill set from colleagues , webinars , conference presentations and the journal literature . This article proposes that there is another audience of potential future open advocates and leaders who could be reached at a much earlier stage in their library careers – the library science student .
Students currently enrolled in one of the 62 North American , American Library Association accredited library schools have few opportunities to gain an introduction to the open movement or the specifics of open education resources or open pedagogy . While the topic might be introduced in an existing course about scholarly communications or open access , open education may be limited to a single class or the instructor may focus only on open educational resources , ignoring other critical aspects of the open movement . Where this might be the case , the presence of a course in scholarly communications in the library school curriculum is no certainty . It is more certain that few of these programs offers a dedicated course in open education as an elective or seminar . Recognizing the opportunity to create more future open education
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