Supporting Librarians in Making the Business Case for OER

College textbook costs increased at three times the rate of inflation between 2002 and 2012 (United States General Accounting Office [GAO], 2013). One solution to high textbook costs is Open Educational Resources (OER) and institutional librarians, because of their reach throughout the institution and particular skillsets, are keenly positioned to make the business case for OER and become leaders of the OER movement. This article discusses the issues most relevant to OER adoption and provides an environmental scan of OER resources currently available to institutions, faculty, and students.     

Librarians and OER: Cultivating a Community of Practice To Be More Effective Advocates

ABSTRACT

As the costs of scholarly and educational publications skyrocket, open educational resources (OER) are becoming an important way to provide content and enhance the teaching and learning experience. Librarians have a key role to play in developing, advocating, and managing OER. For many librarians, however, championing OERs means adding an additional responsibility to their already heavy workloads, which may be overwhelming. This article describes how a grassroots group of academic librarians in British Columbia, Canada joined together as a community of practice to learn and to share ideas, strategies, and tools to support the use of OER. The BCOER Librarians focus on the education and professional development of librarians to help facilitate the use and development of OERs and to create authoritative and sustainable resources to support librarians in OER-related interactions with faculty.     

The power of open: benefits,barriers, and strategies for integration of open educational resources

ABSTRACT

Open Educational Resources (OER) are becoming a significant, mission-driven trend within educational literature. To help address rising costs, instructors and designers are looking to OER to effectively replace traditional instructional content, which requires more than just identify and replace. Drawing from 51 OER studies conducted in countries across the five continents, this systematic literature review explored the empirical themes evident in the current research on a global scale. This review found (1) discoverability, sustainability, and remixing are significant barriers that stand in the way of OER disrupting traditional textbook models; (2) there is no significant difference in learning outcomes when instructors incorporate OER; and (3) implementation of OER as instructional strategies is challenging but can be effective in supporting positive learning outcomes when properly designed. The paper concludes with a discussion of gaps in the literature, considerations for implementation and further directions for future research.     

Open education and critical pedagogy

This paper argues for a revaluation of the potential of open education to support more critical forms of pedagogy. Section 1 examines contemporary discourses around open education, offering a commentary on the perception of openness as both a disruptive force in education, and a potential solution to contemporary challenges. Section 2 examines the implications of the lack of consensus around what it means to be open, focusing on the example of commercial and proprietary claims to openness commonly known as ‘openwashing’. Section 3 uses Raymond's influential essay on open source software ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ as a framework for thinking through these issues, and about alternative power structures in open education. In Section 4, an explicit link is drawn between more equal and democratic power structures and the possibility for developing pedagogies which are critical and reflexive, providing examples which show how certain interpretations of openness can raise opportunities to support critical approaches to pedagogy.     

An exploration of agency in the localisation of open educational resources for teacher development

ABSTRACT

This study examines the practice of adaptation and translation (localisation) of Open Educational Resources (OER). It employs a sociocultural perspective to focus on the experiences of practitioners (localisers) who undertook the localisation of a suite of 125 OER created as part of a teacher professional development programme in India. This localisation process generated eight unique versions of the OER in five languages. Drawing on project reports, practitioner interviews and analysis of the adapted OER, the study explores how localisers created meaning for the task, the situational and linguistic factors that influenced and mediated their decisions to adapt the materials – or not – and the skills and experiences that emerged through the process. Although the findings revealed that changes to the materials were limited, suggesting that enacting localisation is more difficult than perhaps suggested by OER proponents, the analysis indicated forms of localisers’ emerging professional agency through this endeavour.     

A cross-cultural approach to the adoption of open educational resources in higher education

The factors affecting the adoption of open educational resources (OER) in higher education have become a research topic of great interest as OER continue to be widely used in universities, affecting the quality of teaching and learning. The reasons for OER adoption are diverse, across both individual educators and cultural environments. This study explored determinants of OER adoption by university educators in three cultural contexts utilizing the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2). Data on educators' behavioral intention to adopt OER were collected from 152 educators in three countries, Korea, Japan and the United States. In every culture, habit was the strongest determinant of this behavioral intention. Other highly significant factors affecting OER adoption by educators varied by culture. In Korea, the strongest determinant was performance expectancy, in Japan it was social influence and in the United States it was price value. The moderating effect of culture was significant on three paths of the model, and the cultural specificity affecting OER adoption was substantial. Theoretical and practical implications related to the UTAUT2 model and OER policy are discussed.     

Open Educational Resources (OER) and Textbooks: Opportunities for Academic Libraries

Librarians have a role in working with faculty to provide low-cost alternatives to textbooks. Open educational resources (OER) are an alternative to textbooks in college courses, but there can be barriers to using OER. Are students successful in OER courses? Do faculty see librarians as collaborators in designing courses using OER? What are some alternatives to OER that libraries and library consortia can take advantage of to make college more affordable for students? The following articles address these issues, and the work of the following authors can benefit all types of academic librarians as they contemplate their role in the OER world.     

开放教育资源运动综述及其可持续发展探析

本世纪初以来,以麻省理工学院的开放课件项目为发端的开放教育资源运动得到前所未有的蓬勃发展,从优质资源共享的单纯理念,到各国开放资源项目的不断推陈出新,开放教育资源被引向了更深入和广泛的层面。教育资源的开放是否能够实现资源的共享,如何保证资源的优质性,如何确保开放教育资源运动的可持续发展,尝试解答这一系列问题的过程本身也恰好是引导我们规划、设计、建设和应用开放教育资源的途径。     

Adoption of open educational resources (OER) textbook for an introductory information systems course

Open educational resources (OER) can make educational resources widely available to all students and educators for free; however, OER are still untried in many academic programmes in higher education. This article reports a case of adoption of an open access textbook for an introductory information systems course and discusses the process and suggestions of adoption of an OER textbook based upon the authors’ own experience. The study indicates that the process of adoption of an open access textbook demands more intellectual work on the instructors’ side in comparison with the adoption of a new commercial textbook. The study suggests that discipline-based communities of practice (CoP) can ease the workload problem in the process of adopting OER textbooks. The findings are important in encouraging the OER community to shift from project-based OER textbook development to discipline-based CoP for effective OER textbook adoption.     

共享开放教育资源的门户——ISKME组织的OER Commons项目评析

OER Commons项目是由美国教育领域的知识管理研究协会(ISKME)创建的共享开放教育资源的知识库与联接门户,旨在支持开放教育资源应用和重用。文章介绍了OER Commons项目的发展及其特色,并分析了该项目的开放机制,提出了对我国开放教育资源建设的启示。