Assignment 3: A Plan for OER Promotion at Duke
For this assignment, I am once again looking at Duke University, and specifically the DUL, this time to see how it could potentially work to promote OERs to faculty. I have limited experience with OER outreach myself, but the DUL fortunately has its own history of OER promotion initiatives, so I intend to discuss the ways the DUL could adapt some of their prior efforts in this realm. In particular, I will analyze a 2016 effort that notably stretched beyond Duke itself to a few other institutions and their libraries, including Davidson College, Furman University, and Johnson C. Smith University.
The Duke University Libraries OER Review Project, as this effort was known, involved librarians at Duke and the other institutions listed above, all of which are institutions funded at least in part by the Duke Endowment, a foundation established by the Duke family in 1924. It was designed to encourage faculty members to better acquaint themselves with OERs by first having them arrange a one-on-one meeting with a library staff member to discuss the subject, and then by having the faculty member select and review a number of OERs that relate to their work. Participants were provided with a review form which, upon completion by the faculty member, was turned into the library of the faculty member’s given institution. Participants were then asked to complete a survey about their experience in the initiative. As a way of encouraging participation, faculty members who completed all these steps were entered into a raffle to receive a $250 stipend—as only ten of these stipends were allotted to each of the four universities involved in the initiative, it is likely that not every faculty member who was involved in the initiative received such a stipend (“Duke Faculty: $250 to Consider Open Educational Resources,” 2016).
I think that numerous attributes of this initiative appear to have been useful and effective in increasing OER awareness among faculty members, assuming that the Project was executed as it is described in this blog post (though unfortunately, there appears to be no published follow-up about the results of the initiative).[1] One of the most noteworthy features of this project was its collaborative nature. Involving four fairly geographically-dispersed universities (across two states, anyway) likely proved quite effective in illustrating one of the major benefits of OERS, the way their accessibility generally transcends geographic barriers (provided that broadband access is available, which it would be at least on the campuses of these four universities). Though participants were instructed to work with a librarian at their particular university, the project was explicitly collaborative between these four already affiliated schools; this likely facilitated at least some sharing of OERs between the institutions, both those created by faculty at the institutions themselves and from elsewhere. Additionally, the fact that these schools are all quite different in their size and purpose—Duke University is a major R1 research university, Davidson College and Furman University are smaller liberal arts colleges, and Johnson C. Smith University is a small HBCU—was another likely benefit.[2] The sharing of OERs between these institutions would likely prevent the misuse of OERs as static, self-contained learning objects in the way that Mossley describes in last week’s assigned reading; indeed, the fact all of these institutions have markedly distinct educational aims would likely necessitate facilitation of Wiley’s “revise, remix, and redistribute” elements of OER, which Mossley describes as essential to the very definition of OERs (Mossley, 2013, p. 8). Of course, this assumes that collaboration specifically in the use and sharing of OERs between these universities proved to be a major priority of the project as it was executed, which is uncertain. Yet, the very fact that this collaborative initiative on OERs involved these four very different universities to some degree likely helped influence the attitude that OERs are adaptable and usable by all manner of institutions, even if the differences between these schools ended up precluding the widespread sharing of OERs as resources.
Were this initiative to be enacted by Duke today, however, I would encourage a few changes. One such suggested change is merely the result of the passage of time. Compared to 2016, the DUL today has much more robust OER-related infrastructure. In addition to helpful resources such as the recently updated and approachable “Discovering, Assessing, and Using Open Educational Resources in Teaching and Learning” LibGuide created by librarian Haley Walton (Walton, 2021) as well as Duke’s own significant presence on Coursera (“Duke University,” n.d.), the DUL also now has a permanent center dedicated solely to modern-day advancement in scholarly publishing, ScholarWorks, which has a notable emphasis on creating and using OERs (“Teaching and Learning with Open Educational Resources: Improve Access, Flexibility, and Affordability in Your Classroom, n.d.). I think it would be more or less a given that these kinds of resources would be more heavily employed in the execution of this initiative today, but nonetheless, I find them worth mentioning if only to note that the DUL is generally much better equipped to take on this project in conjunction with these three other institutions today. And if in fact the previous execution of this initiative did not heavily emphasize these universities’ collaboration with Duke specifically, I would change that as well—though I am sure that the three other institutions involved in this project have some degree of OER infrastructure in place, there can be no escaping the fact that Duke, with its very high endowment relative to these other schools, is in the best position financially to facilitate sharing and collaboration among these four institutions.
Relating to this, I would also choose to devote more of Duke’s OER-related funds to the initiative today, such that faculty members would not be considering the use of OERS for the mere chance of earning a $250 stipend. I would elect to guarantee faculty members some sort of funding (the exact amount, of course, would be determined based on budgetary limits) on the condition that they not only consider OERs or learn more about them with a librarian, but also employ them in their classes to some capacity or work to create an OER of their own. My rationale for doing so is the fact that the 2016 version of this project—with its emphasis on simply learning about OERs and giving faculty just the chance of receiving a $250 stipend—risks framing the OER movement as something of a gimmick, which I think would undermine the intended promotion of OERs as serious academic enterprises. In reshaping the project in this way, I think its architects could look toward NCSU’s Alt-Textbook Project—a program that provides grants to faculty wishing to use or make OERS—as something of an example to follow (“Alt-Textbook Project,” n.d.). This remodeling of the OER Review Project as a grant for OER use or creation by faculty, coupled with the original project’s collaborative nature across four universities, would likely make for a unique and effective OER promotion plan.
References:
Alt-Textbook Project (2021). NC State University Libraries. Retrieved November 8, 2021, from https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/alttextbook
Duke University (n.d.). Coursera. Retrieved November 8, 2021, from https://www.coursera.org/duke
Mossley, D. (2013, November). Open Educational Resources and Open Education. The Higher Education Academy. Retrieved November 8, 2021, from https://ils.unc.edu/courses/2021_fall/inls700_001/Readings/Mossely2013-OERandOpenEducation.pdf
Teaching and Learning with Open Educational Resources: Improve Access, Flexibility, and Affordability in Your Classroom (n.d.). Duke ScholarWorks. Retrieved November 8, 2021, from
Walton, H. (2021, November 5). Discovering, Assessing, and Using Open Educational Resources in Teaching and Learning. Duke University Libraries. Retrieved November 8, 2021, from https://guides.library.duke.edu/c.php?g=1044201&p=7575453
Welborn, A. (2016, October 17). Duke Faculty: $250 to Consider Open Educational Resources. Duke University Libraries. Retrieved November 8, 2021, from https://blogs.library.duke.edu/blog/2016/10/17/duke-faculty-250-consider-open-educational-resources/
[1] I reached out to Haley Walton, the DUL’s librarian for open scholarship and one of the points of contact for this project, but she was unable to comment on the success of the initiative in time for the due date of this assignment.
[2] At the same time, all four schools are private. It would be interesting to visualize a collaborative OER effort between public and private universities.
I have neither given nor received aid while working on this assignment. I have completed the graded portion BEFORE looking at anyone else's work on this assignment. Signed Anna Twiddy