Firstly, I would make the information regarding OERs as easy to find and understand as possible for the faculty. It would be important to have an easy-to-locate libguide or centralized location where information is stored. Said information should be kept up-to-date. Ironically, on Carolina’s own OER page, under the subpage Find, the link to the UNC OER collection in the Carolina Digital Repository (CDR) results in a page not found error. This will discourage faculty from using OERs if information is not readily available. I would make sure that the liaison librarians had a good working knowledge of OER as well in case faculty reach out to them. I would also invite faculty to a presentation on OER to highlight how they further the educational aims of the university. It would also give them an opportunity to voice their concerns. Making sure faculty understand copyright and licensing is important too. This may be difficult for faculty who have previously only really needed to understand serials copyright laws. And faculty who blatantly ignored serials copyright law in order to provide free resources to students.
The biggest concerns that faculty may have: more work and less financial incentive. This depends on the publishing habits of each specialty and what OERs already exist. Faculty who generate income by publishing books on their subject matter may be less interested in OER since no one would necessarily need to buy their book. I am still not sure how to argue for OER from that perspective. Another concern is how much additional work it would take to adopt OER into their curriculum. Obviously, faculty need to make updates to their textbooks and recommended readings over time, but I do not actually know how often that actually happens. (I took an embarrassingly out-of-date course in undergrad once.) I would recommend that faculty consider OER when they make their updates. They do not need to overhaul all of their classes to entirely OER by next semester. As stated above, having existing OER readily available for reference and reuse will also help with adoption of OERs in general.
OERs allow for a certain amount of flexibility of content. They can change existing OERs as needed to suit the specific needs of their classes. If they are especially ambitious, they can create whole new OERs to suit their needs. This is especially useful when creating or updating elective courses. This is not the case when they are tied down to a specific textbook that may contain 2/3s of what they need and another 1/3 of information that is not necessarily helpful to their students.
By now faculty should know that MOOCs will not replace traditional classroom teaching. The pandemic has shown that not all subjects can be successfully taught as massive, online courses and many students do not learn in that environment. The only major concern is university administration imposing MOOCs onto a department against the recommendation of the department itself. Ideally, the OER resources team would side with the department on this matter or come to a compromise that does not ignore faculty concerns. I can only hope that the pandemic has shown university administration that student success often hinges on the two-way street of communication between students and their professors. Those are harder to achieve with MOOCs.
Concerns with quality are valid. Having the skillset to evaluate OERs is important. Faculty should be trained, if necessary, to evaluate OERs. Or liaison librarians should be able to point faculty toward trustworthy repositories of currently existing OERs. In the beginning, helping faculty navigate quality concerns may require a very hands-on-approach. Liaison librarians may need to do a lot of hand-holding during the evaluation process. Having evaluation tools that faculty can refer back to will also help. Ideally, of time and faculty become more comfortable they will get better at determining quality and will be able to assist their newer colleagues.
Hopefully, the idea of OERs to promote student success will not have much push-back. Ideally all faulty want students to be successful during their time at college/university and are invested in making sure that whatever economic barriers they, individually, can remove, are removed. Students will perform better if they are not strategically having to decide which books to buy/rent for the semester because they cannot afford all of the books. Students will perform better if they are not picking up extra shifts at work in order to pay for books. Also, students who live off-campus or have difficulty traveling to campus are more likely to use online resources than the physical course reserves at the library. This is especially true at so-called commuter schools where many of the student commute to class rather than live on campus.
Find. Carolina Open Educational Resources. (n.d.). Retrieved November 5, 2021, from https://coer.web.unc.edu/find/.
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