 And Lauren's going to be talking about the role of the libraries within open education communities. So I'm just going to check with my colleague, Fiona Jones, that being able to stop and start recording just so we have a break. That's perfect. Over to you, Lauren. Great. Thanks so much, Martin. Can you hear me? Okay. Yep, loud and clear. Wonderful. Great. Well, thanks everyone for coming to my webinar advocacy from within building sustainable open education communities across the library. I'm Lauren Ray open education and psychology librarian at the University of Washington libraries and I use she her pronouns. I'm joining you today from Seattle, Washington, where the sun is just starting to come up over the Olympic Mountains, though right now from my window it's too cloudy to see those mountains at the moment. And I have my webcam on, but I'm going to just to say hello, but I'm going to turn that off to hopefully help with any connection issues that might happen. So I'll do that now. And today I want to talk to you about a project I undertook at my library to help connect subject librarians to the work of OER. I was excited to travel to London for OER 20, but I'm thankful to the conference organizers for putting together this virtual program and I'm really looking forward to learning from the other presentations given over the next day and a half. That's right. The Olympic Mountains have been postponed, Jeff. So what I'd like to do today is just give you a little bit of context about the library that I work at, talk to you about some OER workshops that I developed for subject librarians, talk about how those workshops were evaluated, and give you some takeaways and share with you some librarian created OER and hopefully have some time for questions. So I'm a little bit about the University of Washington. We're a large public research institution. We have, we're a multi campus university located in Seattle, Tacoma, and Bottle. That's in Washington State on the West Coast in the U.S. We have around 57,000 students and over 4,000 faculty or instructors. And we have more than 613 degree options across 312 different academic programs. And within our system, we have 16 libraries spread across those campuses. Within our library, we have 70 subject librarians also across our three campuses. And as many of you are familiar with the role of subject librarians probably in general, they provide support for research and teaching through practices like collection development, reference instructional services. And they're a crucial player in terms of outreach to departments, to instructors, both in terms of teaching and learning and research at the campus. We also, over the years, functional specialist library and roles have emerged in academic libraries in the U.S. as well as internationally. Functional specialists don't have subject assignments to a specific academic department, but instead serve in roles meant to meet the needs of the entire campus. And at our library, here are a few of the librarian roles that we have. So we have an instructional design librarian, data services librarians, user experience librarian, copyright librarians, and so on and so forth. And in 2016, our libraries undertook an organizational review initiative that was aimed at reorganizing our research and learning services department. In addition to creating a separate learning services unit, as well as a scholarly communication and publishing unit and other organizational alignments, our subject librarians were organized into teams in order to increase collaboration, develop opportunities to address emerging areas of teaching and teaching. And research need and expand the capacity of individual subject librarians. This also came at the same time that my half of my role as the first open education librarian was created for our university libraries. And a little bit about me, I've been an academic librarian at the University of Washington for over 12 years. My first role focused on instructional design and distance learning services for students in our fee based professional degree programs where I created tutorials and streamlined instructional content created by the libraries to meet the needs of students working in online courses. Starting in 2010, I led the opening and development of our research comments, which is sort of an experimental incubator space focused on fostering interdisciplinary connections and providing graduate student services. And that's where I started a series of programs, including scholar studio and our collaborating with strangers series that were aimed at getting graduate student researchers to kind of connect across departments. In both of these roles, making successful connections with subject librarians was crucial. As a functional librarian, I have always relied on subject librarians to market the services and products my teams created to their departments. And the programs were also that I created as research comments librarian were also designed to get subject librarians engaged with interdisciplinary research. I've always had a strong interest in libraries organizational development and tackling the somewhat messy question, how can subject librarians and functional librarians use our shared values to work better together. One of my long term values as the librarian, regardless of my work area is putting people over collections and platforms back into the work that's happening. And I think the workout I describe here nicely ties in with this conference theme and spotlighting the value of care and building sustainable community within open education. So now I'm going to talk about the series of workshops I've created for subject library and teams at my institution. So prior to starting in my new role, my colleagues who worked around open OER and textbook affordability initiatives uncovered a really strong interest at our campus for OER authoring amongst instructors. And given this knowledge at the start of my position, I really wanted to develop a series of open pedagogy and OER publishing workshops for instructors. However, at the time I was member of our scholarly communication outreach and education team. And as part of that team, we did a project where we conducted interviews with subject librarian teams to get at their priorities and challenges around things dealing with openness and scholarly communication and how we might address those in their work. And while our librarians were able to speak clearly to their concerns around open access journal publishing and infrastructure needs that they had around supporting digital publishing and data, OER came up much less frequently. We heard some librarians who would say things like, I know OER is a specific thing, I just don't know how to describe it. Librarians mentioned knowing that students paid too much for textbooks but felt there were too many barriers to effectively address this challenge themselves and didn't feel like they had an understanding of open education beyond this textbook issue. At the same time, however, librarians in these conversations recognized that seeing students as producers rather than just consumers of knowledge and addressing information privilege was part of their role as instructors and reference consultants. So participating in this interview project gave me insight into the ways in which our siloed areas of open, open data, open access, digital scholarship, etc., have created barriers to addressing open education in a sustainable way and opportunities for outreach. So I saw these conversations as an opportunity to further my colleague's understanding of open education and I tabled my idea for instructor-facing workshop series and instead decided to create a program of OER training for our subject librarians. The goals of this were to increase my colleague's understanding of open education beyond textbook affordability to start a conversation with them about how faculty in their departments might be receptive to OER and whether they had information on how textbooks were selected to create openly licensed materials for OER librarians at other institutions. And to engage subject librarians in creating OER themselves and to promote press books, which we had just started as a two-year pilot. But primarily, it was really to build my own capacity for OER support at my institution, being a .5 open education librarian in such a large institution, I really had to rely on my colleague's support and outreach to their own department in order to sustain OER programs. So the components of the workshops, which were about an hour and a half that I developed focused on definitions, outlining how OER and open pedagogy were really distinct from open access. I think many of my colleagues still kind of mix up the terms open access and OER and so getting at kind of the five Rs and other ways in which these are distinct was important. I also use the workshops as an opportunity to showcase OER and open pedagogy examples in their disciplines. So really speaking to the kinds of projects that instructors in their departments might be interested in. We had hands-on time working in press books. I had an overview of H5P and hypothesis as tools for OER. And I also use the time to talk about critical issues in OER like open washing, inclusive access and student agency and OER creation. I wanted to bring back the issues I was learning about at conferences like these because I knew that they might be more engaging for my colleagues than just talking about textbooks. I also shared information about my current OER work on campus and had time for questions and discussion. So now I'm just going to show some examples of what I included in each workshop. And when showing disciplinary examples of OER, I tried to really tell the story of these resources beyond just being static free openly licensed stuff. Rather than just listing resources, which sometimes I think those librarians were really good at, I found background information on how an open pedagogy assignment was created, quotes from students who participated in the creation of a work or a story about how an OER was remixed into another OER. So for instance, with our social sciences librarian team, I talked about using Wikipedia as an assignment. I showed the NOBA project in which students created topical videos on psychology topics. And I showed examples of how open stacks textbooks, for instance, in business could be remixed and revised. For our sciences librarian workshop, I showed examples of how OER can be more than just textbooks. For instance, in this example from a pharmacology study guide done at the University of Minnesota. And I also talked about this student created environmental science textbook from Ohio State University, where students wrote about science and engineering technical environmental challenges and in the process learned about open access and publishing. In my workshop with our arts and humanities librarians, I talked about this example of a student authored work from the University of Wisconsin called Creators, Collectors, and Community. Communities making ethnic identities through objects, a student created work in an art history class, as well as the open anthology of earlier American literature. This project that many of you are familiar with from Robin DeRosa at Plymouth State University. I also expanded my workshop for other groups of library staff, including our East Asia librarians, who support Chinese, Japanese, and Korean studies at our university. So I showed them this example of OER from University of British Columbia, the Meiji at 150 digital teaching resources that included digitized documents and visual materials from their archival collection. As well as examples of language learning resources in OER such as this Korean through folktales OER designed for early Korean courses and licensee by NC. So most librarians, I did a survey after the workshops to get some feedback, and most librarians reported that the workshop greatly increased their understanding of OER, provided them with examples that were relevant to the departments that they served, and gave them a good understanding of how to use press books, whether the workshop provided a better understanding of open pedagogy was slightly less strong. And I also used the time to get some feedback on whether instructors would be interested in creating OER in their departments, and if they were aware of how textbooks were chosen, many of which said that they were not, but some pointed to curriculum committees and contacts that could be a good start for me in doing targeted outreach. So my takeaways were that at least from my campus, many subject librarians are tied to their roles in supporting research over supporting teacher teaching, which can pose a barrier to connecting with open education. And I think this is probably true at larger research focused institutions. I also found that it was challenging to sort of find examples of OER that told the story of how that OER was created. So I really had to do a lot of digging to kind of find out how something was created and get quotes and things that would help those resources resonate more. And I thought it useful to really tailor OER workshops to attendees and emphasize the use in classroom as well as student outcomes. I think in the future I would expand more time talking about critical issues like open washing and inclusive access, I know anecdotally that these are still coming up as kind of confusing points amongst my colleagues. And I also just wanted to show a few examples of librarian created OER after my workshop, our performing arts librarian Angela Weaver created this dramaturgical casebook called La France. It's a production book based on her own research on Marie Antoinette and she wanted to use it as an example to present to faculty members in performing arts at our institution. And she thought it would be a good idea to show people about how press books and this OER format would give them an opportunity to collaborate and comment outside of the place production itself. Our political science and public affairs librarian Emily Keller was inspired from the workshop and worked with a graduate student in our human rights center who created this how to FOIA guide. It's a guide to filing Freedom of Information Act requests that's openly licensed and allows for greater access. And finally this badass women in the Pacific Northwest scene as an entirely student created project started after these workshops and after we got press books, not specifically tied to my workshops but something in which our digital scholarship librarian Denise Hatwick worked with a faculty member at our UW Bothell campus to have students create this collaborative work where students learned about open access, creative comments and their rights and responsibilities as open access scholarship authors. And finally I think some takeaways that I have from this whole project. A big one is that I think self care is really important. Not everyone is going to be interested in OER and you might have colleagues that have questions that were challenging or perhaps questioning about OER. Subject librarians can express that they feel overwhelmed sometimes and I think it's just important to keep in mind that we all have our students and users best interest in mind and find good ways of working together. I would like to find, it's important for me to find sustainable ways beyond these trainings of keeping subject librarians connected with new OER and their disciplines. At a large university like mine, subject librarians are the liaison between the librarian teaching faculty so keeping them updated on OER and their disciplines is important. And also finding ways of involving subject librarians and open pedagogy projects. On the right I have this photo from a project that I'm currently working on with a faculty member, Rick Bonus in our American Ethnic Studies department where students are collaboratively creating an OER so we are using based on artifacts at the Burke Museum of Natural History at our university and I involved our copyright librarian who's pictured here and then our Harry Murphy, our American Ethnic Studies librarian on the right in this project. So finding ways of kind of involving subject librarians and functional librarian colleagues when I'm involved in kind of student authored projects like these I think would be useful for me in the future. I have a link to my workshop materials which I mentioned were openly licensed and I can share those in the chat. But I just wanted to thank everybody for staying with me through this presentation and I'm happy to take questions if there's still time. We've got time Lauren, I think it was a really interesting insight to some of the work you've been doing so if people want to raise their hand we can get a microphone to you or we can pick up questions from the chat as well. I think people are really loving some of the resources that you've shared there Lauren. Great. I'll just post to see if there's any questions. Just one question for me, what did you find were people's motivations for coming to the workshops? I forced them to. No, the workshops were, so they were provided during, I tried to schedule them during kind of already existing meeting times for our subject librarian teams. And I think people were very receptive to that. I think part of the reason we kind of structured our subject librarians into teams was to sort of help consolidate those kinds of, you know, sort of professional development training or things that might be of shared interest to everyone. So in the past, before we had the teams, I would have to kind of reach out individually or use a lot of, you know, email listservs to reach out to subject librarian colleagues. But with the new kind of regular meetings that these teams have, I just, I primarily used those as a way to get in the door, so to speak. However, I think a lot of people were really interested in press books, you know, even if they weren't at the, you know, before coming to the workshop, kind of interested in the OER topic. I think people were kind of curious about press books as an authoring tool. I think in some ways having, having like a concrete tool that they might be able to market to their departments or share with their departments seemed very appealing because I think probably many of them had faculty who had been looking for those kind of tools, either for digital scholarship or for creating some kind of teaching focused resource. So as librarians, we like to be very helpful. And so I think that, you know, saying that the workshop that I was providing was going to provide them with hands on time really learning press books was appealing. Right, right. There was a question from Jane Sacher. And just around the fact that, you know, acknowledging that open education librarians are more of a thing in the US than in the UK. And Jane's moving over this is, you know, the textbook model or I was also wondering what to what degree of impact MOOCs it had or was that just like a flashing pan and it's more textbook driven? Yeah, I would say at our institution, it's more textbook driven. My position was sort of created with addressing textbook affordability in mind, but also kind of acknowledging that at least on our Seattle campus. Most faculty who had expressed interest in OER in the past were more interested in OER authoring rather than remixing or revising existing OER. And so I think in my position, I've been trying to kind of create a balance between addressing textbook affordability issues and also speaking to the needs of instructors who want to, you know, experiment with new ways of teaching where open pedagogy might be part of that or to, you know, author something that might be iterative and changing over time. I think over time that I don't think that MOOCs are as they're not as relevant, although maybe in our current situation as people are sort of looking to, you know, course content that's not sort of more traditional that maybe that will become more relevant. But I think, yeah, I think at least at our institution and most institutions in the US, kind of the textbook is the frame of reference for OER and OER programs. I'm not sure if that answered the question. I'm still still waking up a little bit here. I'll just pause and just see if there are any other. Yeah, Jane feels that covered our questions, so thank you for that. So unless there are any further questions, if we could just show our appreciation to Lauren, Josh and Lauren as well. Thank you for taking the time out in such unusual global situation to share your work. So there's definitely a number of takeaways from me from this, particularly looking at some of the platforms available. So thank you very much for that.