OERs at North Carolina Community Colleges
Background: American community colleges were founded upon the principle of providing affordable high-quality education to students of all backgrounds and socio-economic statuses, which aligns very closely to the goal of OERs (CCOER, “About”). These principles, paired with the wider range of community college students’ ability to afford textbooks, make community colleges a logical place to begin the promotion of OERs. Because community college faculty members are undoubtedly aware of this pressing need for free educational resources, I believe that most community college faculty and staff would be receptive to an OER program.
Plan: The responsibility for promoting the use and development of OERs as course materials will necessarily fall to the campus librarians, who will create resources to educate faculty about the need for OERs, what OERs are, and how to incorporate them into courses. I would suggest creating a LibGuide (or a website/blog—you can fit more text on websites, so it will depend on how many links and video resources are shared. It it’s more media-heavy I would do a LibGuide, but if it’s more text-heavy I would do a blog/website). I would use Mitchell Community College’s OER LibGuide as an example. You can generally see how many people have viewed your LibGuide or blog, so I would use those stats to gauge whether I need to do more to make faculty aware of what OERs are and how to use them.
As a librarian, I would work closely with NC Live’s Open Education North Carolina program and the Community College Consortium for OER. Both of these programs’ sole mission is to provide support for librarians and faculty in the adoption of OERs by hosting workshops, creating advocacy materials, helping to design courses with OERs, and providing grant money. NC Live has a fantastic repository of infographics, slides, LibGuide templates (which you can easily copy/paste into your own LibGuide), and OER resources that I would rely on in the advocacy and promotion of OER to the faulty at my community college. These marketing resources will save librarians valuable time by allowing them to devote their efforts to providing individual support to faculty.
Incentives: Ways that I would incentivize faculty to utilize OERs in their course design include allowing the creation of OERs to count towards tenure (many community colleges have something akin to tenure, even if it’s not actually called that), applying for NC Live OER grant money to monetarily compensate faculty for the creation of OERs, requiring faculty to take part in at least 2 OER workshops or webinars per year, and providing librarian support for identifying OER course materials. This final incentive will lighten the burden if faculty do not have to find all of the OERs themselves. Librarians can point them in the direction of the OERs and let the faculty make the final resource selection.
Another way that librarians can make course design with OERs easier for faculty is to offer the service of embedded librarianship, which can manifest in a lot of different ways, depending on what the course instructor needs. I am most familiar with embedded librarianship that involves the instructor assigning a “textbook” reading on a topic each week and a librarian creating a folder of additional resources in a variety of formats to give the students multiple means of engagement with the material (such as videos and podcasts). In this way, librarians would bear the burden of identifying some of the course materials, which would make the instructor’s job easier. My only hesitation with this practice is that once enough faculty ask for it, the librarian’s workload will soon pile up. Ideally, the college can hire a library intern (unpaid or maybe paid with grant money) to do some of the OER selection involved in embedded librarianship.
Works Cited
“About Us.” Community College Consortium for OER, https://www.cccoer.org/about/about-cccoer/.
“Open Education North Carolina.” Open Education North Carolina | NC LIVE, https://www.nclive.org/oenc.
“Open Educational Resources: Home.” Mitchell Community College, https://mitchellcc.libguides.com/oer/home.