Welcome to my second course the Diploma in Open Education Program: Open Education Resources and Pedagogies, and to the first assessment in this course: creating an annotated list of OER for a project or goal.

For your annotated OER list, you are expected to include the following: 

• A description of your aspirations for a future project or what goals you might target
• The sources, including, title, author(s), cc license, and link to each within your list
• In your annotations, explain how each source might be used in your context
• Illustrate the social justice, racial equity or cultural relevance aspects of your project

My immediate future goal at work is to further Open Education at my college through engaging with students, faculty, staff, and administrators around the affordability, sustainability, flexibility, collaboration, that adopting/adapting/creating OER bring to an institution.  To that end, I am looking for OER that support engagement, training, and advocacy to help me work with my Director to develop a plan.  And there are a LOT of things out there to get started with.  So, here are some OER I have found I am hoping to integrate into my own advocacy over the next year.  Note that not all of these OER address issues of social justice, racial equity or cultural relevance directly, but I would argue that advocacy for Open Education includes these as part of its very definition.

Okanagan College’s Open Education Strategy and Open Education Plan, June 2021, CC-BY

I just found this last week, and man I was SO excited to see this.  This document was produced in 2021 with support from BCcampus funding, and it is exactly what I had been looking for to adapt for my own college.  Prepared by Roen Janyk, a librarian at Okanagan College, “the main goals of Okanagan College’s Open Education Strategy and Action Plan are to integrate Open Education Practices and Open Education Resources into curriculum and curriculum development processes, to equalize access to education and course materials, and to support learners and educators in accessing, creating, and utilizing open resources.”  The document defines Open Education, links Open Education to Okanagan’s strategic plan, places Okanagan’s action plan in the context of BC post-secondary institutions, identifies strategies and success measures, and provides concrete examples of the importance of Open Education from research, including it’s potential impact on social justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, decolonization, etc. Most importantly for me, are concrete tips for advocacy for Open Education to administrators, faculty, and students.

OER Policy Development Tool. 2016, CC-BY. Amanda Coolidge, Senior Manager Open Education, BCcampus and Institute for Open Leadership Fellow, and Daniel DeMarte, Chief Academic Officer, Tidewater Community College and Institute for Open Leadership Fellow.

I would be remiss if I did not include some OER from the folks at BCcampus.   This first one is a bit beyond what I can do at my institution, but it does contain some good information around how to advocate for Open Education and a good starting point for anyone who has the authority to begin adding Open Education to policy at an institution.  As the document begins “few colleges and universities in the United States have formal policies in place that institutionalize the promise of OER. To this day, there remains insufficient support for OER from officials who have formal responsibility for overseeing most colleges and universities in the United States. The purpose of this OER policy tool is to help close this gap. The tool has been created specifically for college and university governance officials, as well as individuals who have responsibility for developing institutional policy, to promote the utilization of OER and scale efforts to full OER programs.  The contents of the OER policy tool are intended to be adopted and adapted for use within a college or university’s culture.”  Yes, the US is identified as the main audience for this document, but given that Canadian post-secondary institutions are lagging behind the US in terms of Open Education advocacy and integration into policy, I feel this document could easily be adapted for a Canadian context.  Finally, the importance of having Open Education embedded in institutional policy cannot be over stated, since integrating Open Education in curriculum addresses issues of equity, accessibility, diversity of voices in our education system.

Second from BCcampus is the OER Student Toolkit.  2016, CC-BY.  This is “a BCcampus Open Education advocacy guide for student leaders” by Authors: Daniel Munro; Jenna Omassi; and Brady Yano.  According to the introduction, “this toolkit provides information on how interested student societies/associations as well as individual students can successfully advocate for greater OER adoption on campus. Primarily designed to serve post-secondary students in Canada working to support open education, we hope this toolkit will be useful to students from any country.”  This OER in particular situates OER advocacy with those who typically have the least power at a post-secondary institution, students.

Book Description: 

The OER Starter Kit for Program Managers, 2022, CC-BY, is a multi-author work authored and compiled by Abbey K. Elder; Stefanie Buck; Jeff Gallant; Marco Seiferle-Valencia; and Apurva Ashok. “The OER Starter Kit for Program Managers was created to bring attention to the work that is involved in building and managing an OER program, from learning about open educational practices and soliciting team members to collecting and reporting data on your program’s outcomes. Regardless of your program’s scope and your own experience with OER, we hope that the Starter Kit for Program Managers will have some tips to help you along your way.”  With chapters, and more importantly case studies, related to building an OER program, training, project management, supporting OER creation and adoption, and collecting and reporting data, this book is a wealth of information to support those like me who are doing Open Education work off the sides of their desks.  This book was written by a diverse group with the intention that the advice provided could be applicable to Open Education advocates around the world.

Report and Recommendations for Open Educational Resources (OER) Initiatives and Affordable Alternatives at uOttawa, 2021, CC-BY.  “Created in late 2019, the OALM Working Group had the mandate to 1) develop awareness and promote the use of affordable course content; 2) explore and recommend strategies to establish an environment at uOttawa in which the creation and adoption of OER is encouraged and rewarded; and 3) coordinate efforts among key campus stakeholders who lead and support open education initiatives on campus. Its report concludes twelve months of work and builds on existing open access and e-learning initiatives. It presents four categories of recommendations to guide open education and textbook affordability activities at uOttawa for the next five years.”  Similarly to the Okanagan College strategy plan, The uOttawa report advocates for raising awareness of Open Education, supporting the use and creation of OER (and in this case, specifically of French language OER) and encouraging the use of other affordable or cost-free course materials, all with concrete recommendations for reaching these goals.

One of my favourite Open Education initiatives is the WY Open:  A Grassroots Open Educational Resources Initiative, 2021, CC-BY-SA, by Shannon Smith, Chad Hutchens, and Cassandra Kvenild at Boise State University and the University of Wyoming.  The initiative is presented as a recipe in an easy to read PDF which includes nutrition information, number served, cooking time, ingredients, preparation, cooking method, etc. to fulfill the metaphor.  “This recipe describes starting a library-led open educational resources (OER) as a mechanism to recognize and promote cost-savings for students while allowing faculty to tailor their learning materials to specific pedagogy needs. The grassroots approach is best implemented alongside existing organizational infrastructures. At the University of Wyoming (UW), the OER initiative developed without a dedicated position or home department but rather a collaborative foundation across the libraries which builds momentum, spreads the message, and ultimately the workload.”  My favourite part is the allergy warning which speaks to the potentially contentious conversations around Open versus freely available, as well as issues of copyright (to which I would add ownership and intellectual property concerns faculty often have.)

There are many other OER out there which are intended to support creating OER initiatives, and advocating for Open Education at an institutional level – these are just the beginning.  I am looking forward to taking a much closer look at all of these to come up with a clearer path to recommend at my institution.