OpenEd20

This YouTube playlist about the open educational resources (OER) publishing program at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) Libraries features interviews with stakeholders in the OER creation pipeline, including OER creators, librarians, and printing and distribution partners. UTA Libraries believe education should be available to everyone, which means supporting the creation of free, open, and accessible course materials. We provide access to and support for using open source tools to create and disseminate OER. We prioritize eliminating as many barriers to OER use as possible, so we offer training and technical services for transitioning existing open content into an editable format, licensing and attributing content to abide by legal and ethical reuse expectations, providing content in multiple format options (e.g., web, PDF, EPUB, optional hard copies), and indexing OER in open repositories. We are also actively committed to increasing the accessibility and usability of OER by providing accessibility evaluations, trainings, and assistance with content remediation as necessary.

This session will describe the conversion in all sections of Organic Chemistry I & II from a traditional hard-copy textbook to a free, open-source textbook. All students have access to the book through the university's learning management system. Assessment of student and faculty satisfaction, as well as representative student performance and retention, will be provided.

Learning Outcomes: Learning outcomes for the project include (1) the adoption of a no-cost OER textbook, (2) the alignment of the OER resource and supplementary materials with the course objectives, and (3) the assessment of developed materials to measure their effectiveness in student satisfaction, faculty satisfaction, student performance, and student retention.

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.

The SPARC Open Education Leadership Program is an intensive professional development program to empower academic professionals with the knowledge, skills, and connections to lead successful open education initiatives that benefit students. The two-semester program blends online, peer-to-peer, and project-based learning to build a comprehensive understanding of the open education space coupled with practical know-how to take action on campus and beyond. Structured as a fellowship, each cohort becomes a vibrant community of practice that is further enhanced by expert instructors and mentorship support.

This Showcase Gallery session offers a summary of the capstone projects implemented by the 2019-20 cohort. Hailing from diverse institutions across the U.S. and Canada, each of the 27 fellows published an openly licensed resource of value to the broader open education field as an output of their capstone project, along with a final report articulating lessons learned. Resources range from open education training modules to OER toolkits to metadata recommendations. Participants may browse and access these resources, as well as the openly licensed curriculum for the program.

Learning Outcomes:

• Browse the final reports and capstone resources developed by the 2019-20 cohort of the SPARC Open Education Leadership Program
• Access the openly licensed curriculum for the Open Education Leadership Program