Encouraging and supporting the adoption and creation of open educational resources demands significant academic labor; however, few studies provide explicit detail about the personnel and costs underlying open education initiatives. This presents a problem for institutions seeking to implement or improve their own initiatives. The lack of transparency about labor also obscures ethical concerns about the agency of the librarians, faculty, students, instructional designers, and other potential stakeholders involved, each of whom occupy varying positions of power and privilege within the academic apparatus. This presentation helps to address that gap through a case study of how Ohio University Libraries have attempted to make its open education initiatives more sustainable and impactful by transitioning from workshops and other labor-intensive activities to collaborations with faculty and students focused on OER creation in which librarians have taken on more of a project management role. We will describe those initiatives and the projects they have yielded, including a student-authored open Hispanic linguistics textbook, student-created test banks to support OER materials for a high-enrollment art history course, and several additional projects in which students have been hired to assist faculty with developing open content. We will discuss the challenges encountered along the way and how our trajectory has helped us to overcome some of those barriers. We will frame our discussion within the context of labor and the ethical implications for open educational practices and open pedagogy.
Learning Outcomes: Participants will understand possibilities for creating open education initiatives that are more sustainable and focus more on OER creation and open pedagogy via collaboration between librarians, faculty, and students. Participants will be able to critically analyze the labor implications for their own open education initiatives in order to foster more equitable and inclusive collaborations in support of open education.
