In line with a growing body of research, ISKME’s work over the last decade has revealed that a principal barrier to OER use by educators is difficulty in finding the resources that they need. Existing OER platforms, including the Open Textbook Network, ISKME’s own OER Commons, and a growing number of institutional OER repository projects provide access to high quality OER. However, these OER often do not include metadata on learning outcomes or alignment to local course requirements and topics—making the task of identifying relevant OER time consuming and ineffective for the library staff and faculty end user.
Over the past year, ISKME has been working in collaboration with six academic library consortia (OhioLINK, LOUIS, VIVA, DigiTex, PALNI and PALCI) to study how faculty and library staff search for and discover OER. The research is part of a larger project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to develop a solution that will enable postsecondary educators to more efficiently discover and share course-aligned OER across states, libraries, institutions, and repositories. This session will present the results of the first phase of this research, which included in-depth interviews conducted in early 2021 with 35 faculty and library staff spanning the participating consortia and seven states. The interviews sought to assess the tasks and decision making processes faculty and library staff use when selecting, evaluating and assembling OER, and the extensions to existing metadata that are needed to accommodate their decision making. The interviews resulted in the development of five OER curation “personas” that describe archetypical users representing the curation and metadata needs of core faculty and library staff OER curators: 1) the Faculty Textbook Replacer, 2) the Faculty A La Carte Curator, 3) the Collections Maintenance Librarian, 4) the Course Redesign Support Librarian, and 5) the OER Reference Librarian.
The session will discuss how each of the personas carries unique and sometimes shared needs that OER repositories and initiatives can address as they work to support enhanced OER discovery—from the importance of including accessibility metadata for resources (all personas), to the need for notifications of new or updated metadata records as they become available for OER collections (Collections Maintenance Librarian persona). The session will close with a discussion of the implications of the findings for both future OER research and for institution- and library-level OER practice.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Identify and understand a set of research-based archetypal users for OER curation in the postsecondary context, and their OER discovery pain points and needs
- Understand the implications of the research findings for enhancing OER sharing and discovery in future contexts
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