 Great. Well, welcome, everyone. I'm Cynthia Giant from the Institute for the Study of Knowledge, Management, and Education, and we will be presenting OER Discovery Research, Librarian, and Faculty curation personas. This presentation is the result of our first phase research for an IMLS, or Institute of Museum and Library Services grant, where we're working with six library consortia across the United States, and two of them are represented here to really build out a network where consortia can share and ingest OER and kind of benefit from each other's work. And so I have with me Michelle Brennan from IFSCME and OER Commons, as well as Sophie Rondeau, Assessment and eResources Program Analyst at Virginia's Academic Library Consortia, and Emily Frank, the Affordable Learning Administrator with Louisiana's Academic Library Consortia, Louis. So welcome, everyone. That's my idea. So I wanted to give a little bit of the background to the research. IFSCME has been working for many years with states and library consortia to support their efforts to build out OER microcytes within OER Commons where they can evaluate and curate and map courses, evaluate and curate OER and then do some course mapping work and build out their OER collections. And what we were seeing through that work over the past years is really a need to support the more efficient discovery and search for OER through, for example, enhanced metadata. And what our library partners were seeing, and I will hear a little bit more about this in a minute, was that they were looking around and kind of noticing that they could be leveraging the curation work of other library consortia in other states so that that they are able to ingest that amazing work that others are doing and into their own collection. So investing that curated content from other states into their own OER microcytes. And so the project was really born out of this need to increase efficiency ultimately for faculty and library staff who are looking to find OER that's a fit for their courses and for their learners. So I'll move into the next slide now and I'm going to give our library partners first the floor to say a little bit about their perspective on the need for this work and the project. Sophie, would you like to start? Yeah, thanks Cynthia. So, yeah, so, as mentioned I'm Sophie I work with Viva where Virginia's Academic Library Consortium. And one of my responsibilities is to administrate our Viva Open, which is our instance Viva's instance of an OER comments. And our Viva Open microsite was originally intended to serve primarily as a repository for OER grant projects. And while this continues to be an important focus for us, the site has really grown and is now also home to a large scale course mapping effort, which involves mapping OER to courses at Virginia higher education institutions. And when we started we knew that other consortia, most notably our colleagues at Lewis, were also mapping OER to high enrollment courses and tagging them with course information through their microsite. And we wanted to find a way when it was appropriate to piggyback on all the excellent work that they had already done. We know that the topics addressed in high enrollment general education courses and higher education are often fairly consistent. So finding strategies to cross map OER from Louisiana to Virginia courses was really desirable. So if you have a desire to find efficiencies with course mapping, I have also felt that finding a way to reduce duplication of effort across higher education microsite partners would be valuable. Just doesn't make sense to me that we're all adding the same OER and adding metadata to the same OER when we share a common platform. We're a cataloger as well engaged in cooperative cataloging practices. I felt really strongly that there must be ways we could be sharing OER and the metadata to describe it more effectively in the open community, even if only among microsite partners. Emily. Thanks Sophie yes I'm Emily with Lewis, the academic library consortium in Louisiana. I'm going to go forward at Lewis with our microsite, which you can find at Lewis or comments.org in fall of 2018 before launching the site in fall in 2019, and a main goal or motivation of our microsite was to leverage what's called the Louisiana master course articulation matrix. And this maps about 300 Gen Ed courses across all public two and four year institutions in the state. So the fact that in Louisiana we have this master course articulation matrix which makes for common framework meant that we could align OER to a consistent course ID, and then that consistent course ID aligns with a course format at one of these public institutions. So to do that alignment work, we engaged in a year long project with librarians statewide to review these roughly 300 courses looking at things like course syllabi student learning outcomes, and then using that information to align OER to the courses and to tag them with an alignment tag. It's a really resource time intensive process. So it's important for us that this work can be used by others like Viva that Sophie just described, so that they can facilitate their local OER discovery. These courses are all widely applicable it's things like English comp one organic chemistry Spanish one. Because a Louisiana effort and making that work more transferable would be really great. And then one other thing I want to mention that is a priority for us with this project is thinking about the role of this collaboration and sustainability. So this project is such an important consideration in OER and in infrastructure, and I think that this project can help with that in terms of the staff time needed to sustain and grow the micro site. It's important to staff that can apply time to this work at Lewis, and at our member campuses, the librarians that we work with who support OER are often stretched thin. But, you know, as we want our micro site to be easy to use up to date efficient. The more that we can leverage the work of others like Viva. The more that we can automate the process of adding new content or deaccessioning and accessible content, then the more that we and the librarians that we work with can invest in other open education activities. Thanks Emily. I am Michelle Brennan, and I had the pleasure and honor of working with with both Emily and Sophie to design and implement and launch their projects. So Emily was was my first large scale course mapping project. And we worked with a wonderful librarian who is not here with us today Emily Rogers to sort of develop this framework for curation and evaluation, a large scale effort. And, and that sort of gave me a really deep look into what the current processes are for librarians and sort of a beginning start to understand how how the how librarians engage with faculty in sort of curation and co evaluation of where we are. And then transitioning from the Lewis project into the project with Sophie Viva. Her really strong background as a cataloger, especially with her expertise in collaborative cataloging and she really understood the nuts and bolts of the technical processes and the metadata sort of working with her to bring all of this evaluation and curation work and the framework we'd used with Emily into Viva and sort of looking at what does it really mean. When we take collections from one locality and transfer them to another one. I remember a really clear like a moment for me was a workshop that we did at GMU in person with a group of librarians. And we actually had them review some course content that had been brought over from Lewis, and just working through them through with them, sort of like the questions that they had the uncertainties that they had, you know their their their needs. And all of this together really clarified for me and I think probably both for Emily and Sophie. A vision of what wasn't working and what we could do to make things better. Especially from a librarian perspective. But what this project and the research are going to present here today. Also expanded that to really getting to understand and know our faculty needs in our faculty users instructors as well. And really ensure that if we do all of this work. Are we giving folks what they need to make decisions and to adopt and use so we are confidently. So I was definitely so excited and grateful. They were able to get this project funded and to share the research with you all today. And that's a great segue into our research questions. So in order to do this work we of course needed to understand library staff and faculty current curation processes their pain points and how do they make decisions that about we are that the fit for them. What existing metadata extension or what extensions to existing metadata are needed to really help them make their decisions around OER that they would like to use and incorporate. And then what pain points do they encounter in the OER curation process so these were the three core questions there were other sort of sub questions that these are the main questions that drove the research that we're going to present today. And the approach was to work with our six partnering consortia and I didn't mention this before but we also in addition to Viva and Lewis. Ohio's library consortium Ohio link is a partner on the project and they're represented in this work today as well as the digital higher education consortium of Texas. And then Indiana's private library network Paul me and then the partnership for academic library collaboration and innovation which covers Pennsylvania and New Jersey West Virginia and New York are also represented in the work. So, to do the research we first really wanted to recruit folks from across these the states the partnering states and consortia. And we wanted to find individuals that had of course some experience in curating OER. And we did a pre screening survey did a lot of outreach, working with our partners like Emily and Sophie and we ended up identifying 35 a mix of 35 faculty and library staff to participate in the OER curation interviews as we're calling them. And so we conducted 90 minute interviews where we asked the participants to walk us through their sort of OER journey, how they move through the process of identifying OER evaluating it and determining whether they want to use it. And then we also, as part of that process asked them to make statements on the utility of different types of metadata in that process. So we analyze the data and then we developed what we're calling user personas and user stories and Michelle get into that in a little bit for both the faculty and library staff curators. And then of course the outcome of this work is to really be able to translate those findings into a design of an OER exchange network where OER can be ingested and shared across silos and states. So, Michelle let you jump into the findings. Thanks Cynthia. So we, the next few slides will give you more details about our five personas so our five different types of users. So we have two faculty personas and three librarian personas. Kendra is our textbook replacer. Kevin are all a cart curator. Mira is our on the ground. We are reference librarian. Jacques. He is our very classy collections maintenance librarian. And then Eva course redesign support librarian. And so I would really encourage you to think about and is how I think about it. Everyone is familiar with a reference librarian. So I think of Jacques, just as an overall collections librarian and you've really more as a combination between an OER librarian and a special collections librarian because she is curating very special, specific collections to reflect courses. I think we can move on and dig into our first persona Kendra. I'll give you a few moments, just to take this in. So Kendra is is your faculty or instructor who they really understand the value of OER they understand that it reduces student costs. They understand that students are more likely to take their, their courses and to be able to be successful in their courses when they don't have to worry about textbook costs. But they're often driven by some external factors. For example, being in compliance or wanting to participate in campus initiatives or policies. And they and Kendra wants to spend as least time as possible. Curating, switching out the publisher textbook for the for the open content. Often, these folks are could be newer faculty or professors. They're not as familiar with the content that they're teaching they may also be adjunct, who are have been just thrown a course, they've never taught before. And they, they don't have a whole lot of time. So this person is looking specifically for things that look like and feel like your traditional textbooks and ancillaries. All right. We'll move on to Kevin, our a la carte curator. So again, I'll give you a few moments just to scan it. So Kevin is really a curious person, really, really focused on the design of course content, you know, as as an art. Very familiar with the content that they're teaching. Possibly a veteran educator, but certainly an educator who's experienced with the content and has taught the course many times. So really motivated internally to be focused on creating fun and exciting learning experiences is it wants to be very hands on. Sort of the word that I heard from from our UX researcher was really likes to create create bespoke courses. So this person will spend, you know, a lot of time searching for that, you know, perfect, exciting thing definitely a novelty seeker and Kendra's got a pretty, pretty low frustration threshold. Kevin's got a pretty high one. Definitely willing to get in there and wait around. All right. So we've got Mira, our reference librarian. So Mira is really on the front lines. She is interacting with faculty who come to her seeking support for content far beyond we are so she's working with all of the resources databases. The ebooks collections and we are is part of her work, but it is not. It is by far not her only focus. So she's got a lot to do, often liaising with multiple faculty members across multiple departments. But she is really dedicated to advocating for we are so she wants to make her faculty happy so that they have a good impression of we are. And that she can advocate for folks adopting it. So she's looking to build smaller sets of resources for individual faculty. All right, so we've got that's okay you can move to the next one. Yeah. All right, so we've got Jacques. Who's the collections maintenance librarian. And Jacques is focused really more on breadth of the end and depth of the entire catalog or repository. So really focused on identifying overall subject area gaps that there might be might get the information from faculty or other reference librarians. So is is looking for collections that he can import or make available and discoverable for his faculty and other reference librarians, really focus on the quality of the metadata and the technical aspect of bringing content in bulk. So would know a lot about how the technology works and how metadata is interoperable or not interoperable. Okay. And last but not least, we have our lovely course redesign support librarian a k a special collections. So, so Emily and Sophie are two very expert course redesign support librarians. So they are focusing on building out a breadth of collections for specific courses. So that means that may might have, you know, a catalog of 200 courses and are looking for ways to fill collections that are likely going to be relevant for all of those across all of those subject areas. So definitely working to support both faculty and other librarians but definitely it is a combination of both understanding the technical aspects of collections like metadata. Well, as the user needs and understanding how to and to enact a review of the content and understand the user needs. Okay, so we can move on to the next slide. So, go back one more. Yeah, there we go. I'm having trouble with my mouth. Oh, that's all right. So, we'll just spend a moment here. So after we coded the research, the interviews for these five personas. We went through. And we, we looked at quotes from the interviews, and we built out user stories. So for example, as a faculty textbook replacer. I want to find content that looks exactly like my textbook but is open so that I can provide free content for my students. So that you know that is a basic user story, and that we heard over and over again from folks who were part of the textbook faculty replacer persona. So we created multiple stickies for these user stories. Organize them by persona, and then we created a user journey. So that meant we organized them into steps in the process of, okay, I've decided that I want to use OER. So that's where that's the searching part. It's my search start points and my motivations. And once I've found something to search for and I've started searching, how do I evaluate it what user stories do we have that tell us about how each type of persona evaluates OER. Then we identified selecting. So how do I know when I've found something that I like, and what do I want to do with it. And then sharing is the final step in the journey where you've found something you like you've used it and now you want to share it back and the cycle starts all over again. So our goal here was to really understand the motivations, goals and pain points for each type of user. But we also wanted to look across the personas and identify what they had in common. So what they had in common would tell us a lot about what the most basic user needs were for the OER exchange that we were creating. So yeah, this next slide. We're going to talk, I'll talk a little bit about some of the main highlights for each persona before we talk about what they had in common. So Kendra motivations are her motivations are largely external so wanting to attract more students to the course or being in compliance with policies. Her goals are to switch out that content as quickly as possible and in little time as possible. And her pain point is that she just wants OER to look like and be packaged like your usual textbook and ancillaries. And OER right now doesn't always look like that and it's not always packaged like that and that makes it hard for her to make the make the transition and make the leap. Kevin, you know, he's motivated internally. He wants to keep the course content relevant. Really has drive and inspiration to build new and creative learning experiences. His goal really is just to find the newest and most interesting content for his course. And he does do that make that that is a little bit difficult is liking to mix and match and combine a lot of diverse types of materials. Looking at games and interactive and videos and news articles. She has a hard time understanding well if I combine all of these things is it still we are how can I what does that license look like how can I understand what I can use and when because I want to use so many different things. Mira. She's supporting specific faculty or been tasked with supporting affordable learning initiatives her goal is really she wants to find really targeted smaller sets of we are that meet the specific needs of her faculty members. She wants to be able to have sets of we are that she can refer to and return to in the future, and maybe leverage for different types of faculty members but really build up her reference sets of we are. And it's difficult for her though because she is a librarian and is being asked to find content for professors for really specific subject areas, especially challenging for the upper level courses that are very specific and niche. That causes some discomfort for Mira because she is not a subject matter expert and may not feel confident in her ability to provide appropriate reference materials for her faculty. So I just wanted to give you a time notice, we have, we have to save about seven minutes for for discussion at the end so if we might have to go a little bit faster and so sorry I'm really enjoying. I know that's okay. Yeah, so we'll just go quickly, Jacques and Eva. So, Jacques main pain point is that we are collection maintenance requires a lot of manual work. We are repositories. There are a lot of them systems aren't interoperable and the metadata is inconsistent so technically it's difficult to harvest we are collections. Eva. And she's got a lot of courses to curate to and individual evaluation of we are is time consuming and the metadata that currently exists doesn't efficiently express everything she needs to know about quality and fit so it makes it harder for her to identify collections of content that are appropriate quickly. All right, and do we have time Cynthia to to touch on the similarities. We have about a minute left. Okay, should go into. Having some technical problems. That's fun. I guess we'll be available. Yes, we were going to cover a little bit more about the summary what what was on and across. Did you want to say anything there Michelle or. Yeah, so we can. So, looking across the user needs. We ranked, you know, the metadata that is important and to all users and we really wanted to focus in on the evaluation process. So understanding what a resource is, does the content fit needs. Is it a quality resource and how easy will it be to use. And sort of one of the key takeaways from that as far as metadata extensions was that we really needed more robust user evaluations. Definitely more granular topical information about content. As well as increased accessibility information that information is really difficult for folks to parse, but it's often a deal breaker. Can you see my screen still. I can yes. Great okay. So I thought we could move into just our implications slide. As I'm waiting for my computer to catch up to my hand. And maybe Sophie you could start by sharing how you've taken these findings and how they support your work at the best. Yeah, sure. Um, well I found this process of working with these personas really, really gratifying and I think that having those personas kind of humanized. And, and help me to understand needs I will say that some of the needs and the desires that I encountered through the process where we're needs I've had heard of, because we work with faculty to review the we are that we have mapped. But the focus on metadata needs was particularly interesting and the personas helped me to think more strategically about the metadata needs and what I apply when I'm adding new content to the site. For example Kendra's desire for comprehensiveness. And I think about that carefully. And if there's a table of contents that I can add to the description I do. And that was in part because I understood that that's especially helpful for her. I think that you know some of the needs identified in the personas were things that we can address on the platform. But I think that some of the needs also require more careful deliberation outreach and maybe even training. So somebody like Kevin maybe some kind of training and licensing or so on or outreach related to those kinds of things could be helpful. And I will say it was really great to see my own needs reflected in the personas and then to kind of hash that those out with consortial members, the other partners to figure out strategies we might, you know, invite iskimi to consider creating to create efficiencies and, and to help us with our work. Emily did you want to say something. I'm just sad that I think, you know, for us, Jacques pain point on inconsistent metadata is a pain point we share and so there's a real opportunity for us to achieve more consistency and allow folks to use our site in a more complex way we with the course of internet tags. Those are extremely consistent, but in working with librarians, you know in retrospect we, we didn't plan for the inconsistencies around things like metadata I'm sorry accessibility education level material type. And so being able to work with all these other microsites and achieve more uniform and complete records will really be an enhancement to our site in terms of discovery. Um, I've spent a lot of time talking so if you want to punt to some questions, then that is fine. Yeah. Great. Yes, please. And I'm sorry about the technical problems here. Thank you for the chat and see what folks are writing there and if anybody has questions verbally you'd like to share please do. There's one of what can content creators do to better support your work. Michelle do you want to answer that. Yeah, sure. I think one thing. One thing that is really difficult is matching of ancillary content to core texts. And I know the open stacks has done some of that work with collecting together assessment items that they make available and I know Sophie has been working on ways to make those types of ancillaries. So I think there's a whole sort of behind a authentication wall for folks to access, but I definitely think thinking about we are creation as packaged together to make it as easy for the kinders of the world to transition over to we are kind of bring them into the fold would be a really great.