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Learning Belongs in the Library — OER and Achieving Wide Faculty Adoption: Three Hurdles By Column Editor: David Parker (Publisher and Consultant; Phone: 201-673-8784) <david@parkerthepublisher.com>
I
am a proponent of open educational resources (OERs) and the role the library plays in increasing faculty understanding of, creation of, and use of OERs. In my role as a product manager at various educational technology businesses, I have presented strategic overviews and business plans to senior leaders to address the needs I see librarians’ facing in growing the adoption by faculty of OERs. And I often consider what we can learn from the rapid growth of open access in scholarly publishing, which has grown much faster in journal publishing than book publishing. There is much the world of OER should learn from the world of OA, including the efforts of publishers to align on metadata standards, business models, and methods for measuring usage and engagement. But the baseline fact that the textbook industry was built on individual students purchasing individual textbooks, whereas the scholarly publishing industry was built primarily on institutions purchasing institution-wide access, complicates the comparison of OER and OA to the extreme. In this column I will focus on three hurdles that I believe must be overcome if OER is to become as widely adopted by faculty as the global university library community seeks. In a future
Against the Grain / April 2022
column I will explore learnings from the world of open access scholarly publishing that can contribute to the growth of OER creation, distribution, and adoption. The three hurdles are: 1) The impediment to scale that comes with prioritizing individual faculty grants for OER creation. 2) The difficulty created by the absence of cataloging standards and disciplined curation, and 3) The challenge to faculty adoption when a candidate OER textbook lacks the full package of support materials faculty require.
The Downside of Faculty Grants: The absolute volume of funding flowing toward higher education institutions to increase the use of OER has grown dramatically in the past decade. For detail, read any number of the excellent research reports on the growth of OER by Julia E. Seaman and Jeff Seaman.1 These grants, from government (state and federal) and private, non-profits, have been used to fund research into OER efficacy, centers for teaching and learning, new staff positions focused on increasing the use of
<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>
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