This course was developed by the “California Consortium for Equitable Change in Hispanic Serving Institutions OER” (CC ECHO), a project of the U.S. Department of Education’s Open Textbook Pilot program. CC ECHO is developing openly licensed resources for twenty high impact general education courses utilizing a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion framework to enhance outcomes at Hispanic Serving Institutions.
Published on December 13, 2021CC ECHO OER Specialist Course – Case Study
Link to resource: OER Specialist Course (opens in a new window)
Overview
College of the Canyons’ OER Team has been assisting faculty at the college with developing open educational resources since 2016. In that time, they have helped publish over 60 open textbooks in a variety of disciplines that are used across the country. The CC ECHO grant provided the OER team of former and current students with the opportunity to create an OER Specialist online training course to document best practices for OER workflow with the aim of supporting other institutions to undertake similar work. This course provides guidance for hiring and onboarding new team members and instructions for other institutions interested in creating their own OER teams. Within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the online format is particularly useful as faculty, staff, and students have continued to work and study remotely.
Course Description
The OER Specialist course provides instruction on the workflow used at the college to create high-quality OER tailored to a faculty member’s instructional needs. It is designed for newly hired OER specialists and is also useful to organizations interested in hiring students to support OER development. It supports a smooth onboarding process while also serving as a reference guide for questions that may arise as a specialist progresses.
After successfully completing the OER Specialist course, the student or staff member should be able to locate OER resources, analyze and cite open licenses, properly format materials, and check materials for accessibility. Completion of the course also positions the learner as an advocate and subject matter expert for OER development at their institution.
Course Content
The course is divided into seven steps to help learners understand the workflow of OER creation:
- Initial meeting with instructors
- Finding existing resources
- Properly citing sources in textbooks
- Formatting text consistently
- Ensuring accessibility throughout the created material
- Soliciting instructor review of the created material
- Distributing materials as needed
The course includes additional information to learn about tracking revisions, file naming conventions, keeping track of OER projects, and an optional section explaining licensing and copyright within the context of OER. This section covers fair use, Creative Commons licensing, items in the public domain, and other topics that the OER specialist may encounter in their work.
For hiring managers, the course provides a preface with guidance on what skills to look for in candidates — particularly student workers — to ensure that they can succeed in the role, as well as an overview of how to provide a supportive interviewing process. This recognizes that while students will bring a variety of skills to the role, they may not have previous interviewing experience. It provides advice on how to make the experience positive for them, and provides example questions suitable for the work.
Team Overview
At College of the Canyons, the OER Team resides within the Online Education department. The former and current students who form the OER team include (left to right):
- Alexa Johnston is the team lead; organizes projects and facilitates communication between the team and faculty. Also formats textbooks and audits for accessibility.
- Lauren Adams proofreads textbooks, audits for accessibility and locates Open resources for instructors.
- Alex Gavilan locates Open resources for instructors; formats images and citations in textbooks.
- Kyra Karatsu (not pictured) formats and designs textbooks, creates graphics.
Learn more about the OER/ZTC Specialist position at College of the Canyons and the work that the team put into turning their learnings into the OER Specialist course in this interview with Alex Gavilan.
The Online Education staff also provide leadership and expertise:
- Joy Shoemate: Director of Online Education, College of the Canyons
- Chloe McGinley: Online Education Coordinator I, College of the Canyons
- Carol Johnston: Online Educational Coordinator I, College of the Canyons
- Helen Graves: Instructional Designer, California Community Colleges Online Education Initiative
Outcomes
Developing this course has enabled the OER team to document and share their processes, which are the result of years of fine tuning and improving. Combining their formatting expertise and OER knowledge and search skills with existing openly licensed training materials, the course has allowed them to share broadly with new hires and other institutions. They currently have ten faculty projects underway and more in the queue reflecting the high quality and positive reputation of their work on campus.
Challenges
Although the team had significant experience with formatting, editing and creating accessible content, the OER Specialist course was their first experience using Canvas as a platform to document their work. Ultimately, the team was successful in creating a well-formatted and openly licensed course on Canvas Commons that others will be able to download and import for their own use.
Lessons Learned
Due to the variability of student work schedules, communications between participating faculty and the OER Team are conducted through the team lead, Alexa Johnson. This gives faculty a direct and responsive line of communication for project updates even while much of the OER development work is distributed across team members.
“Because there are a number of hands working on these projects, make sure that communication is clear and that you document the process of what’s going on. Especially make sure that … everybody’s expectations are on the same page in terms of what the instructor wants, and what we’re capable of giving them.”
Alex Gavilan, ZTC/OER Specialist, College of the Canyons
Impact and Sustainability
Basing the OER Specialist course on their own experiences serving faculty at College of the Canyons has enabled the team to create a tool to accelerate the adoption and creation of OER at other higher education institutions across California. It also creates awareness of the importance and value of OER among the students who will fill these roles. In turn, these students can advocate for wider adoption of OER among their professors and peers while gaining valuable skills in content creation, licensing, and instructional design.
College of the Canyons’ OER team will continue to edit the Canvas Commons course and share updates to processes and resources, ensuring that the course content stays timely and relevant as technology and best practices evolve.
The contents of this case study were developed under an Open Textbooks Pilot grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), U.S. Department of Education. However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.