Advocacy, Librarians, and OERs
Because librarians have these campus connections, they can use the opportunity to increase awareness of OERs among these key stakeholders in higher education and help to create an understanding of their benefits. They can:
Help to create institutional support via senate and faculty discussions, whenever they are involved.
Address policies that work against OER creation
Once agreement between stakeholders is reached, the can help to create policies and procedures that support OER creation
Advocate for institutional assistance for content creation (please see the UMass Amherst example here)
Can work with stakeholders in order to secure appropriate funding and can lobby for open textbook creation, distribution and reuse.
Additionally, in regard to creation, given their extensive skill set, librarians can give:
intellectual property advice
instructional design and pedagogical assistance
assistance in mixing or adapting OERs in a wide range of formats
providing access to technology via multimedia labs
expertise in cataloging and classification
housing and archiving OERs via content management systems, and,
dissemination of OERs to facilitate delivery.
Academic Commons - NITLE
Academic Commons is hosted by the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE), and is dedicated to the development of free web-based resources for academic professionals focusing on liberal arts education via digital tools. All content on the Academic Commons is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Authors who submit content for distribution via the Academic Commons, attest that their submissions are original, that they are the author, and that they grant permission to NITLE to distribute it under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Educates about and advocates for the use of Creative Commons licenses in educational materials.It works to minimize these barriers, supporting the CC mission through education, advocacy and outreach on using the right licenses and open policies to maximize the benefits of open educational resources (OER) and the return on investment in publicly funded education resources.
A collection of twenty-nine educational non-profit and for-profit organizations, affiliated with more than 200 colleges, is focused on driving awareness and adoptions of open textbooks to more than 2000 community and other two-year colleges. This includes providing training for instructors adopting open resources, peer reviews of open textbooks, and mentoring online professional networks that support for authors opening their resources, and other services. Provides training for instructors seeking to utilize open educational resources.
A global network of educational institutions, individuals and organizations that support an approach to education based on openness, including collaboration, innovation and collective development and use of open educational materials. The Open Education Consortium is a non-profit, social benefit organization registered in the United States and operating worldwide.
SPARC Coalition - Global Coalition to making Open the default for research and education. Offers a free subscription to a listserv for SPARC's libraries and OER forum.
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