SUNY OER Services

August 18, 2018

Laura K. Murray

CC BY

How is OER shaping your professional role as a librarian?

My first encounter with OER was in 2013 when I volunteered to serve on a task group of librarians in CUNY and SUNY charged with creating a legislative proposal addressing the high cost of college textbooks. I had been immersed in technical library automation for 20 years and did not even know that the high cost of textbooks had reached a crisis point in higher education.  Thus began my journey with open educational resources.

My first realization was that librarians were particularly well-situated  in their academic support roles to educate about, and support OER. They were already immersed  the less than perfect solution of addressing the textbook crisis by acquiring required textbooks and placing them on reserve. Academic librarians are usually the copyright educators and enforcers as well, so who better to educate faculty and students about Creative Commons licensing?

My second realization was that there was massive confusion between Open Access and Open Educational Resources! Open Access, or OA, is the practice of making academic content protected by standard copyright available without charge in some public repository or publication. OA is about an author negotiating a contract with a publisher that allows for OA, or bypassing a publisher and going straight to an OA journal or publication service. Intellectual property published as OA is not openly licensed and NOT OER. While this difference may seem insignificant to many, it is extremely important that the differences are understood at the level of policy and management so that institutional support structures, such as open repositories, are constructed and supported appropriately. Librarians are usually the individuals tasked with educating on OA and OER and maing sure the two are not conflated to the detriment of the institution, faculty, and students.

My second OER project in 2013, that carried over to 2014, was convening a task group of librarians to write a manual that supported online teaching excellence. OER was one of the chapters and I volunteered to write it. Thanks to that project, OER was introduced early into the Open SUNY OSQR rubric and in 2014, I found myself reviewing campus syllabi and locating OER to replace textbooks and other traditionally copyrighted learning materials. I connected with other librarians who were also locating OER as part of their charge serving on online teaching excellence teams with instructional designers and faculty.

When SUNY decided to become a partner with MERLOT at California State, the many new roles created by OER for professional librarian came into sharp focus for me:

• OER and open pedagogy educators
• Open textbook and learning material locators
• OER repository creators and managers
• OER course design team members
• OER project managers
• OER program managers
• OER publishers

I saw librarians playing some, or all, of these roles in SUNY and California State.

As OER evolves out of innovation  into standard practice in higher education, I can see libraries become both the financial, as well as programmatic, hub of OER at many institutions. Right now, in 2018, there are many opportunities for libraries to catch of the wave of OER and own it as part of the the mission to optimally serve teaching and learning. It is a wonderful opportunity to reinvent, renew, and be an integral part of increasing student success and institutional viability.

August 7, 2018

Amanda Wentworth

CC BY

Write the definition of OER in your own words, one strength, and one weakness as you see it.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching tools, materials, and techniques that are created to be freely accessed, shared, edited, and repurposed by others. A variety of resources fall under this term, from educational texts, to assessments, to full course content – anything that is made to help students more comprehensively understand core course concepts. I think that a key strength of OER is that they are all about access, opening the door to society’s cache of knowledge that has been too long guarded by copyright gatekeepers. Education and knowledge have always been a privilege of the wealthy and highranking, and modernity demands a solution to that issue; its answer begins with OER. With textbook costs soaring, a significant portion of the student population can’t afford to the materials they need to be successful in their classes, resulting in poor grades and even drop-outs. Professors maintain control over their students’ learning experiences, and grant them control as well, by swapping traditional textbooks for open material, either for free online or at a fractional cost in print. Unfortunately, it may be this very strength that fosters one of OERs’ weaknesses: sustainability. While OER saves students money by sidestepping restrictive copyright, OER original-content creators are likewise not typically paid for their work, which could discourage some from producing new or consistent content. I think that one of the most pressing matters that we need to address in the OER community is how to promote this kind of sustainability.