Open Educational Resources Task Force Meeting: December 17, 2019

Conference Call

Members attending: Annette Alvarado (Loyola University Chicago), Sara Benson, co-chair (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Anne Shelley (Illinois State University), Sue Shultz (DePaul University), Janet Swatscheno, co-chair (University of Illinois at Chicago), Linda Zellmer (Western Illinois University)

Members absent: Anne Chernaik (College of Lake County), Kathy Ladell (Northern Illinois University), Elizabeth Nelson (McHenry County College)

Staff attending: Elizabeth Clarage, Anne Craig, Lorna Engels

Tasks Assigned

• Sue Shultz will take minutes.

Decisions

• November 2019 minutes for both the 11-19 conference call and 11-26 in-person meeting will be approved in January.

Announcements

• Member Announcements:
  • Sara Benson: 1) The Open Education Week event on March 3rd at UIUC featuring Jasmine Roberts from Ohio State will be streamed through the CARLI website. It will probably also be recorded; 2) Sara received funding from her library so that she can attend the UIC Open Textbook Sprint this year with plans to replicate this event at UIUC in 2021.
  • Janet Swatscheno: Janet developed a weeklong workshop called the Open Textbook Sprint, which will be offered at UIC in 2020. There have been logistical challenges with identifying a specific course willing to convert and participate so she is working with her student government organization. The plan is for student government to approach the targeted department(s) to request participation.  The departments they will be recruiting from have high enrollment/high cost courses.
• CARLI Announcements:
  • Anne Craig: 1) CARLI Counts Cohort #2 is in the process of being finalized and will begin in February 2020; 2) the Career Fair held in Champaign on November 14 was well attended; 3) CARLI is working on OpenAthens and will have information to share about this soon.
  • Lorna: Working on Alma. Primo VE is available to look at test interface. Get in touch with Alma person.

Discussion

• CARLI Board Approved OER Projects
  • OER Commons.  The Board has approved funding for the Hub level of OER Commons. This is the definition of a Hub on the OER Commons website: “A Hub is a custom resource center on OER Commons where groups can create and share collections associated with a project or organization. Projects, institutions, states and initiatives make use of Hubs to bring groups of educators together to create, organize, and share collections that meet their common goals.”
    • Several other consortia have hubs with OER Commons including Alabama, North Carolina, and Michigan.
    • Timing: It takes 8-10 weeks for the site to be created.
    • Naming of the Hub: CARLI is considering calling it Open Illinois. This name may be more welcoming to non-CARLI institutions because it implies a statewide resource instead of a more narrow CARLI resource. This may encourage participation from non-CARLI institutions such as the ICCB or IBHE.
    • Hub organization: The content of the Hub can be organized by institution or by subject.
    • Purpose of the Hub: The Hub can be used for different purposes. One idea suggested was to use this for faculty/institutions who receive grants to share their materials (a requirement of the UIC grant is for applicants to state how they will share the material created). Many sister consortia have materials on their hubs.
      • It was decided that a list be created of the different ways to use the Hub. Task force members should send their suggestions of what the Hub can be used for to CARLI through email. Keep in mind that we should leverage this site as much as possible.
• Train-the-trainers Workshops
  • A new initiative will be launched which will provide support to CARLI institutions who want help developing their OER workshops for faculty.
    The key components of this initiative will be:
    • Elizabeth and a volunteer travelling to CARLI campuses to present a workshop to faculty. CARLI funding for faculty reviews of an open textbook will be available.
    • Requirement that the home library/librarians present a second workshop to their faculty. The second workshop would include CARLI funding for reviews of an OTN textbook.
    • For those libraries already presenting workshops, funding would also be provided for their faculty who review an OTN textbook.
  • Timing: An important consideration the task force discussed was the due date of textbook selections at the campuses. However, we also discussed the idea that just providing the workshops is important.
  • Group formed to work through the logistics and present workshops: Elizabeth, Sue, and Anne S. They will meet by phone to discuss the first few days of January.
• OTN Certificate Program
  • Five Illinois librarians were accepted into the program and will be funded for the OTN Certificate Program in 2020.
• Other Items
  • Open Oregon: Sara reached out to Amy Hofer of Open Oregon (OO) to discuss their funding model. Oregon has fewer schools than Illinois and easier to manage.
    • Amy’s role is largely administrative: promoting, managing and administering the grants.
    • She does some training, but a significant part of her job is running the program that includes the grant programs to distribute funding to different institutions.
    • Not all of the materials created through funding from OO are textbooks.
    • They also have a lobbyist, which is very beneficial.
    • OO will be presenting a January webinar about how to talk to your legislator.
    • The discussion with Amy was very worthwhile: good background information and an example of a good model.
    • One idea for future CARLI funding would be to hire someone for a role like Amy’s in Illinois.
  • OpenStax: Anne Craig reached out to them to ask if they would come to Illinois. They will have a follow-up discussion in January.
    • This would be good use of faculty across Illinois to use their knowledge to create ancillary materials  that go with the textbooks.
  • Logic Model: Janet created a Logic Model for the in-person task force meeting in November. She has shared the document with the task force. The idea behind this was to provide an overview of the impact of the task force so that the task force will have solid evidence to backup its recommendation to the CARLI Board that the task force should become a committee.
    • All of this information exists in the task force minutes/survey monkey, but Janet pulled it together in one place: this is all the work the task force has done, the librarians we have reached, and the impact we have had.
    • The task force worked on this at the in-person meeting and anyone can make edits to the Logic Model.
  • New materials in the public domain: A big hooray for materials entering the public domain in 2020, which includes everything published in the U.S. in 1924.  

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be a conference call on Tuesday, January 21, 2020 from 1pm-2pm.