OER Working Group Mission and Vision
by Kristin Conlin 4 years agoGreetings! I was recently welcomed into this group and I look forward to working with all of you. I am part of SPARC, and yesterday's monthly call in discussion addressed OER working group mission and vision statements.
One example was suggested by MSU: https://lib.msu.edu/OER/AdvisoryCommittee/
The M&V was proposed as a way to give the group a goal or set of goals to work towards and provide some structure. Anyone have thoughts on this?
Hi Kristin,
I think it would be great for us to have a mission and vision statement. My ideas for this group were centered around creating connections across Maryland campuses for OER collaboration, building our shared knowledge of OER practices, and working to make a more cohesive understanding of OER. I'd love to hear what others think!
Hey Shaune! Ditto. I'd love to hear what other group members say.
I'm sorry it took me some time to respond, but wanted to let you all know about a conversation I had yesterday with Annika and MJ to talk about bringing more librarians into the MOST initiative which may help guide us as we think about our mission and goals.
One of the main things that Annika and MJ are interested in, is finding ways to distribute workloads across institutions so that we aren't duplicating efforts in institutions across the State. One of the things they were hoping Libraries could help with would be finding, adding, and curating OERs across different disciplines and adding them to the MOST Commons. The idea would be for different libraries or librarians to take on different subjects so that we don't have five libraries all looking for Psychology resources with no one looking for resources in Physics.
Perhaps part of our mission could be coordinating Library OER efforts across institutions to enhance the reach of OER initiatives in the State of Maryland, or something like that?
MOST is also planning on sending an email to Library Directors asking them to foward our Group information to their staff in an effort to grow our membership. I'll also be talking directly to the Maryland Community College Library Directors in December about the Group.
I like the idea about distributing labor and building subject expertise, but I do have some questions about that:
1. Having sub. experts distributed across the System depends on responsiveness and ability to commit to this effort for it to be effective. We would need some kind of "level of commitment" statement from librarians/libraries.
2. Should the subject experts be linked to school expertise and/or involvement with a subject? For instance, UB's history program is small so it wouldn't make sense for me (Kristin) to be the history expert, yet, I have a master's in history so my expertise in the subject exists.
3. How did SUNY do it?
This is exciting news, Colleen! Thank you for getting information about this group out there!
I definitely think the purpose and mission of our group should be to coordinate library OER efforts across all MD institutions. I agree with Kristin that getting librarians to commit to certain levels of involvement is necessary for this effort to work. I don't necessarily think that subject specialty is necessary for us to find resources, though it would definitely be a bonus.
As for SUNY, I think they are partnered with Lumen Learning so they had a lot of support from them to get started.