Beyond the LibGuide, or how to overcome barriers to OER adoption

The concept of open education and the creation of OER have been around for a while now, so why aren’t they more widely adopted by faculty and teachers?  A 2016 survey by the Instructional Technology Council found that faculty identified five key barriers to OER adoption:

• time needed to locate/evaluate resources (76 percent)
• lack of faculty awareness (70 percent)
• lack of ancillary materials (45 percent)
• credibility of sources (45 percent)
• resistance from administration (10 percent)

The top two responses, time to evaluate and lack of awareness, are areas that libraries are uniquely positioned to address. Locating and evaluating resources are librarians’ bread and butter. Outreach and education is our jam. We have the tools, skills, and methods to make this process easy and painless for faculty members. How can we leverage our experience to encourage faculty to participate in open education? One response has been to make OER LibGuides that explain OER, the benefits of adopting OER, and guide users to websites and databases for finding open resources. Our library has a guide that has been actively update for several years now. But I think if we really want to have an impact on our faculty and advocate for open education, we need to go beyond the guide. We need to actually put our own time and resources on the line. Another common method for supporting faculty is providing grant money for reviewing, adopting, adapting, and publishing OER. While grants are a great form of outreach and provide incentives for faculty to carve out a chunk of time to work with OER, as librarians we need to provide other types of support as well. So what additional support should libraries provide?

• Space. Libraries should offer a common space for faculty (and students) who want to work on open education. The space should have technology available that makes it easy to read, review, adopt, and create OER such as high quality computers, tablets, cameras, microphones, etc. The space should also be staffed by librarians and IT specialists who can help faculty in their open education endeavors. Which leads us to…
• Expertise. Libraries are filled with both functional and subject expertise that can be used to help faculty adopt and publish OER. Subject librarians can help select and evaluate OER material and do outreach to their faculty members to make them more aware of their options. Functional experts such as digital curators, instructional designers, and digital publishing specialists can help faculty adapt and publish OER that matches their vision.
• Accolades! Libraries can also serve a space to encourage and congratulate faculty who have taken the time to adapt or create OER. We have many venues for celebrating faculty both digital and in person. We can include brief paragraphs about faculty that are using OER in our newsletters and we can use our digital signage to make students aware of faculty who use OER.

When I read the ITC’s survey results, my first thought was "libraries can do that". These are just a few ways that I think libraries can truly support and promote OER. I look forward to hopefully implementing these support structures and finding new ways to encourage OER use on my campus.

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