Open Education 2014

This panel will combine three presentations that discuss how libraries are successfully involved in reviewing, publishing and disseminating OER. Each presenter will speak for 15 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of joint Q&A.

Open textbook publishing at Oregon State University: A partnership among the Libraries, Press, and Extended Campus in support of OSU’s Open Access values and land grant mission
Shan Sutton & Faye A. Chadwell, Oregon State University

At Oregon State University, the Libraries, Press, and Extended Campus units have developed a partnership to publish open textbooks by OSU faculty. Phase one of the initiative provides financial and technical support for the creation of four open textbooks in 2014-2015 that will include extensive multimedia content created by Extended Campus’s Open Educational Resources department. These works will also go through the OSU Press’s standard peer-review and editorial processes. This presentation will discuss how these partnerships were developed, and how open textbook publishing connects to broader institutional commitments to Open Access and OSU’s land grant mission. It will demonstrate how academic libraries can leverage collaborations with campus partners to establish themselves as leaders in Open Educational Resources at their universities.

Library service and advocacy in the publishing and use of OERs and Open Textbooks at SUNY
Cyril Oberlander & Kate Pitcher, SUNY Geneseo; Mark McBride, Monroe Community College

Open SUNY Textbooks (http://www.opensuny.org) is a multi-college program with SUNY faculty & libraries publishing open textbooks & promoting OER use. The program started as an innovative publishing program with key strategies including collaboration across SUNY and libraries, rapid prototype processes and services. Pilot 1 has published 5 of the 15 it selected for publication in 2014, and the second pilot has selected 15 more for publication in 2015. The first pilot received 38 proposals, and the second pilot received 46. The publishing program includes peer review, copy editing, and some instructional design services. This proof of concept is building our awareness and capacity to publish open textbooks, and in the last 9 months, Open SUNY Textbooks has had over 12.3K new viewers, with almost 20% visits from outside the US. This presentation provides a brief summary of the program, lessons learned and next steps to significantly expand the program and adoption of OERs.

Working with the Tools at Hand: Harnessing Library Expertise to Support the Creation of High-Quality Open Educational Resources
William Cross & Brendan O’Connell, North Carolina State University

The creation of OERs on campus requires academics to develop expertise in fields such as copyright, coordinating peer review, licensing, technology, and a host of other areas that have traditionally been in the domain of publishers, rather than academic authors. Campus libraries can be a surprising source of untapped expertise in many of these areas. Based on this expertise, and on their role as the hub for campus collaboration, campus libraries are a natural space to centralize OER efforts. This presentation describes the experience of one academic library that leveraged our expertise to launch a successful OER project by empowering creators with support in the areas described above. Led by a scholarly communication librarian and a committee of stakeholders across the Libraries, North Carolina State University launched an OER program in the spring of 2014. This program, built on the success of our 2010 Open Physics Textbook (http://bit.ly/1nakMH1), offers faculty members grant funding to support the development of alternative textbooks and educational materials that save money for students and empower faculty to make pedagogically-tailored teaching tools.