Open Educational Resources Committee Meeting: March 18, 2021

Zoom / Conference Call

Members Attending: Anne Chernaik (College of Lake County), Dan Matthews (Moraine Valley Community College), Elizabeth Nelson (McHenry County College), Susan Shultz, co-chair (DePaul University), Janet Swatscheno, co-chair (University of Illinois Chicago), Chris Sweet (Illinois Wesleyan University)

Members Absent: Annette Alvarado (Loyola University Chicago), Michelle Oh (Northeastern Illinois University), Anne Shelley (Illinois State University)

Staff Attending: Elizabeth Clarage

Staff Absent: Nicole Swanson

Board Liaisons Attending: Jacob Jeremiah (Oakton Community College)

Tasks Assigned

• Sue will take minutes.
• Elizabeth will create a draft announcement for the OER Office Hours and send to the committee for feedback.
• Elizabeth will contact those that volunteered to teach the CARLI OER Course: Understanding and Promoting Open Educational Resources for days/times of the next offering.

Decisions

• February minutes were approved.
• The April 22 OER Chat will now be OER Office Hours. The theme for the chat will be challenges. Dan and Sue will moderate the chat.
• The Committee will not request members vote for the LibreTexts idea on the ExLibris Idea Exchange.
• The Committee decided that CARLI should add the option of OEN Allied Membership to its membership agreement with the OEN when the contract is renewed rather than amend the current contract.

Announcements

• Member Announcements
• Chris Sweet updated the committee on the pilot OER grant program at Illinois Wesleyan.
  • Four out of the five grants have already been assigned to faculty.
  • The Ames Library OER Exploration Grants
• CARLI Announcements
  • CARLI is a member of the Professional Development Alliance (PDA) with eight other consortia. One program that may interest committee members is on April 7 from 1-2pm titled Who Owns That, Who Can Use It, and Who Cares: Copyright and Digital Media in the Classroom.

Discussion

• OER Commons Hub (https://www.oercommons.org/hubs/openillinois)
  • Resources on the Open Illinois Hub: Curated Collections (subject groups)
    • Curated Collections are collections from other institutions.
    • Anne Chernaik, Dan, Elizabeth, and Nicole worked with OER Commons to split out provider list and asked to add additional collections. OER Commons is in the process of doing this.
    • If you have questions about different subject areas, contact Elizabeth, Dan or Anne (Chernaik).
    • There are two ways that materials are added to subject groups:
      • OER Commons staff create content and add.
      • CARLI must endorse newly created content.
  • Resources on the Hub: OER from Illinois
    • These will be things that we add.
    • Add local resources form: https://forms.gle/1rTyei5psnh1F7yt8
    • No date yet for when this form will be removed. Elizabeth, Dan and Anne Chernaik will consult with OER Commons.
  • Try it Out: New Test Group (located in Collaborate & Create)
    • This is about how to use OER and getting started—similar to a sandbox.
    • Add, create, delete in this group.
    • Anyone can join.
    • Begin at Collaborate and Create: Elizabeth is the administrator for adding people.
    • We need to create groups with our institutions’ names (that is the naming protocol) and let Elizabeth know so that she can affiliate the group with the Open Illinois Hub. Each group needs to allow one person from CARLI to be affiliated with their group.
    • The minimum number of resources for a group to be created is zero.
• LibreTexts
  • LibreTexts: Committee members reviewed content available on LibreTexts to decide if CARLI should request members to vote for this idea on the ExLibris Idea Exchange which is to create records and then add these to the Alma Community Zone.
  • Some thoughts about LibreTexts:
    • The entire site has felt like Beta since they got the grant.
    • Not ready for prime time.
    • We have to be mindful of not turning faculty members off to something.
    • On the other hand, there are UIC faculty who love the Chemistry section. Janet points science faculty to LibreTexts.
  • Committee decided to do nothing about this idea in the Idea Exchange. The Committee will not promote this idea.
• OER Chat on April 22 from 10am-11am
  • New name: OER Office Hours
    • The April meeting will be OER Office Hours, Challenges. Then we can continue with that model going forward, for example, a future one may be called OER Office Hours, Successes.
  • Challenges: The committee brainstormed challenges to include in the invitation. Elizabeth will draft an invitation and solicit our feedback.
    • Quality
    • Institutional support
    • Institutional funding
    • Allocation of librarian time dedicated to OER
    • Supplementary material
    • Bookstore not being supportive (Dan can speak to this challenge)
    • Lack of specialty texts within a discipline
    • OER for upper-level courses in some disciplines not developed yet
  • Moderators: Dan and Sue will moderate.
  • Elizabeth will send out information about registering for the Office Hours.
• OEN Allied Membership
  • Should CARLI amend its current contract with the Open Education Network so that members might pay an Allied membership via CARLI instead of contracting directly with the Open Education Network?
  • Amending the contract is not trivial and staff would want at least 5 members to be interested.
  • CARLI Consortial Membership
    • Faculty can write reviews of open textbooks.
    • CARLI staff can create workshops which then trigger automated invitations to faculty to write reviews of open textbooks. CARLI staff will then distribute the data from the data dashboard for the institutions involved.
    • Almost everything that is available through an Allied membership is available to CARLI members by asking CARLI to do it.
    • Even if we were not members through CARLI, we can use the OEN slidedeck because they all have CC BY licenses.
  • Allied Membership ($525 annually)
    • Allied membership allows direct access to the data dashboard which allows the creation of workshops to send the automated emails to write reviews of open textbooks.
    • Perhaps this membership would be beneficial for those institutions who have dedicated OER librarians.
  • The Committee decided that CARLI should add this to the contract when the contract needs to be renewed rather than amend the current contract.
• OER Faculty Workshop
  • Reflections from February Workshop:
    • It went well and there was good engagement.
    • 80+ registered and 60+ attended
    • No evaluation yet; perhaps down the line when attendees have time to reflect on it.
  • March Workshop
    • 77 registered at this point.
    • College of DuPage is offering stipends to adjuncts.
• OER Course: Understanding and Promoting Open Educational Resources
  • Elizabeth will contact committee members who agreed to teach in April and May.

Next Meeting

The OER Committee will meet on April 15, 2021 from 1-2pm.