OpenEd20

In the Fall of 2018, Salt Lake Community College’s Open SLCC Team explored the opportunity to participate in the College’s Campus Internship Program to raise student visibility of OERs. This partnership resulted in the creation of the OER Student Advocacy and Outreach Internship, which led to the development of the Student OER Advocacy Training (SOAT) Guide. The SOAT Guide’s goals were to help interns develop skills related to advocacy within the context of Open SLCC and to establish sustainability and consistency within the internship in the long-term. Alongside these overarching goals, the interns would also develop information literacy skills and career-oriented transferrable skills.

The SOAT Guide was reconceptualized in 2019 to support interns from diverse backgrounds, especially to create a guide that was inclusive and rooted in the desire to provide equitable access to any student in the internship program. Open pedagogical practices were introduced and the presentation of information literacy concepts was developed through the use of the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. The result was the creation of an OER that was scalable, easy to update, modular, and explicitly integrated renewable assignments and information literacy into the internship program.

The redesigned SOAT Guide is self-paced with 15 modules. These modules cover internship onboarding and provide a basic introduction to OER, SLCC’s OER initiative, and an introduction to signature assignments. This is typically achieved at the pace of one module per week during the semester. However, this process is flexible, allowing the ability to adjust the content to the intern’s experiences, aptitude, or estimated internship eligibility. At the end of each semester, the intern is required to complete a signature assignment related to the OER Advocacy and the work readiness skills identified at the beginning of the semester. The renewable assignment offers the program an element of sustainability while providing the intern with the opportunity to share their unique experiences and perspectives.

In this demonstration, we will share extracts from the SOAT Guide set to be released at the end of 2020 and a Salt Lake Community College Student Release Form developed to support the best practices within the SOAT Guide.

Learning Outcomes: Following this demonstration, the conference participants will gain an understanding of the inclusive benefits of Open Pedagogical Practices and strategies for establishing long-term sustainability within OER Internship Programs.