 started. Welcome, everyone. I'm Cliff Lynch. I'm the director of the Coalition for Network Information, and I'll be introducing the session today. The session you have reached is actually the final project briefing session of the fall 2020 CNI virtual member meeting. The meeting itself will conclude with some plenary events early next week on Monday and Tuesday, but this is going to be the last of our scheduled project briefings. The project briefing you're going to hear today is part of week four, which is themed around responses to the current emergencies we're facing and emerging issues. And this presentation is going to make a very timely focus on instructional resilience. I'll have a little bit more to say about that in a moment. I want to note that we are recording this session. The recording will be publicly available later. Closed captioning is available. Please make use of that if it's helpful to you. There is a chat. Feel free to use that. And there is a Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen. You can use that to pose questions at any point for our speakers. We will deal with all the questions at the end after the two presentations when Diane Goldenberg, heart of CNI, will moderate Q&A session. So with that, let me come back to the topic of this, which is about the role of open educational resources in instructional resilience. And this is a very important instructional resilience strategy. We have heard a lot of discussion of this, for example, in the executive roundtables that we conducted in conjunction with the Spring 2020 virtual meeting where we looked at the role of acquiring instructional material and how that played into the sudden pivot to remote education, for example. So I think this will be a very timely topic. And I'm delighted that Carrie Weaver and Mike Chi, both from the University of Waterloo Library in Waterloo, Canada, have come to share their thinking on this topic with us. So with that, let me just welcome Carrie and Mike and I'll turn it over to them. Carrie, it's all yours. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much, Cliff. So we have kind of a shared situation here where I'm going to talk a little bit about the background of our online learning object repository, which was created in response to a need to be able to make educational materials created by our library open educational materials and have a place to be able to share them. And how important that became in the context of the current COVID crisis. So I think we're going to go ahead and go on to the next slide. So our O'Lor, which is how I'll be referring to this, started as a collaborative project between the learning teaching and instructional design librarian position, the position that I and Mike are sharing during this story. The digital repositories librarian and members and the manager of our digital initiatives department who deserve significant praise and thanks for what we were able to accomplish and what we continue to accomplish. And actually, I think I noticed in the attendees list that Christa, our manager of digital initiatives is joining us today. So thank you, Christa, and huge shout out to all of the digital initiatives folks who worked on this with Mike and I to get this off the ground. So this was actually identified as a priority and a needed project at our institution long in advance, about a year and a half prior to the pandemic. But it hadn't been a project that we could give priority because there were some other needs and priorities that the digital initiative staff was handling. We were changing to a completely new back end system in our library and also the website needed to go from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 as many institutions are dealing with. And these things obviously were taking significant time and our project was sitting there. We were working on it. And the idea was really to work on creating a space for digital learning objects from across departments in the library that would allow for discoverability, findability and attribution of objects to their creators. Our institution in particular has a really strong emphasis on preserving the intellectual property rights of all materials, including instructional materials that are created and preserving those and assigning those to the individual creators. There was also a need to be able to keep analytics of access and use of the materials, both for our own internal conversations and also because the Canadian Association of Research Libraries has recently moved to ask us to keep that as part of the metrics that we track. And we also really needed something that could handle a very wide variety of format types beyond what was available in other repositories or what was available to us already in the library. And we needed not only for it to be able to handle different format types, but we needed to have direct access to load and update the materials and to be able to provide supplementary materials for formats where we couldn't necessarily provide the core file as being open because of the tool that we were using to create it, but we could make materials so that it could be open so people could create their own versions of it based off of what we had done. And there were also a number of privacy and security recommendations from the institution that we had to consider, including the fact that in general, the institution would like us to maintain as much intellectual property in Canada or on Canadian-based servers as possible. And so I think we're moving on to the next slide, Mike's helping with the slides. So we had a wide variety of stakeholders to consider in this conversation, both internal and external. We had our digital initiative staff who I've already mentioned that were involved in building the web environment and implementing the key features. We have our librarians who on a day-to-day basis are subject librarians who directly engage in instruction when we're there in person and really act as the content experts. And the content that we deal with ranges from support for engineering design courses to traditional support in St. English class to teaching graduate students in health fields, how to do systematic and scoping reviews. So it's quite a wide-ranging collection of things that we have to have covered and have content experts in. And then we had a number of campus collaborators who were interested in, wanted access to, wanted to be able to see the kinds of things that we were working on. Those included other academic support units, including our Writing and Communication Center, our Center for Extended Learning, which is part of the organization that deals most directly with distance education, our Student Success Office, our Center for Teaching Excellence, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, faculty members who were very interested in being able to see what the library had available and potentially recommend or integrate materials, educational materials from the library into their courses, as they had been doing in person, but as we were moving to the online environment very, very swiftly. So we had to consider the needs, responsibilities, and availability of all of these different stakeholders in getting the project off the ground and really being able to do this. Okay, I think we're ready to move on. Perfect. And the instructional context at our institution just to give it a little bit more. When we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of COVID-19, we went suddenly to most courses being entirely online with the exception for a few lab courses, starting a little later in the year since March. The institution identified asynchronous instruction as the preference for what they would like to see us do, recognizing that we have students all over the world in different time zones, and also that many people have other responsibilities, caregiving responsibilities, and that certainly faculty and student and librarian, mental health and well-being needs to be considered and trying to make as much instruction as possible asynchronous really helps support that. We did have a collection of existing asynchronous resources, library research guides on the LibGuides platform, and we have definitely seen an increase in use during the pandemic of about eight and a half percent in comparison to the previous couple of years. But those resources weren't specialized or focused enough for what people were really asking for or needed, and we're meant to just sort of be a way to get people into library resources as opposed to actually teaching students in this in sort of a similar manner to how we might if we went into the classroom environment regularly. So that gives you a sense. So within this project, we had to move very swiftly from our original timeline, which was we'll get it done sometime in the next year or two. We hope to we're going to get this done in the next two to three months. So we are very, very grateful that our digital initiative staff was able to work with us and move up the timeline on the project quite dramatically. To do that, we really streamlined our intentions for what we were going to launch. So we had a lot of items. We moved many things to the long-term wish list. We really considered what was the minimum that we would need to launch in beta and to be able to do that prior to the 2020-2021 academic year. And in particular, we were really trying to get it done before the end of June because I was getting ready to go on maternity and parental leave for the year with Mike taking over my position for me while I was on leave, the joys of being in Canada, where we get that kind of time. And so we were trying to have it initially launched before I went on leave. And then I was handing it off to Mike to be able to take over and really carry forward. And the one other thing before I do hand this off to Mike is just to say there were some things that I worked on by myself or in collaboration with others, including a collection development policy and initially populating the repository with materials that were helpful. But as Mike is going to talk about, have certainly changed or grown in approach over time since I've been away on leave. So in May, we worked to initially populate with the content. In June, we announced it live in beta just before I went on leave. And then in September, we started really marketing it to faculty and campus stakeholders. And in November, a new filter feature, which was one of our wish list items was added to enhance browse functionality. But we have a number of things that we hope to do with this project long term. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Mike, who's going to tell you a little bit about what happens between June and now. Great. Thank you, Carrie. So as Carrie laid out, we had a strong sense as to what the Olar was meant to do. But as we progressed, as with the even the best laid plans, our implementation strategy was shaped by several key considerations, four of which I'm going to cover today. So two of these considerations were internal facing within the library instructional setting, while the other two were external facing towards the community of students, faculty, and campus partners. So the first internal facing consideration was about content development. So the challenge we faced, of course, was the new virtual instructional environment and really the need for quality asynchronous learning resources. Our solution was to adopt a new team based rapid content development process. So this process was designed to take advantage of different skill sets within the library to collaboratively develop needed instructional content. In this process, library instructors served as subject experts in developing the content, while the instructional design team was able to focus on the effective and accessible presentation of this content. Of course, launching this new process had its own particular challenges, primarily in a mentality shift, both for library instructors and for all of our collaborators, understandably in this new virtual instructional context, and with this new team approach for developing content. And so what we really need it was library instructor buy-in. In this context, the Olar was a key piece in encouraging this buy-in because it highlighted the success of the newly adopted content development process, and it provided a tangible output for content and a centralized means of discovering and sharing peer created material. So our second internal facing consideration was about the collection policy of the Olar. So as Carrie mentioned, she'd started putting together a collection policy that was quite specific in terms of what material would end up in the Olar. Our challenge as we move forward with implementation was that students and instructors wanted continual access to material from their classes. Content produced by the library is normally uploaded to the virtual classroom space, but embedded resources on these class sites are no longer accessible once the course ends. The solution, again, came in the form of the Olar, which seemed the logical hosting platform for continuous access for our learners. So our success was reshaping the collection policy of the Olar to include material with a narrow scope focused on a particular course. We realized that access to content for our learners took precedent over our desire to have a really targeted scope, and so we've made it quite flexible in the past few months. This flexibility has been critical for supporting instruction within this virtual teaching realm, but post pandemic, we do plan to revisit the collection policy and provide some enhanced guidelines around retention of some of these more narrowly focused instructional materials. Moving on now to the external facing considerations. The first external facing consideration was about information literacy materials for students. So the challenge in this case, as always, is an ongoing one, and is that academic libraries are continuing to look for ways to teach information literacy. In terms of solution, part of the solution is to provide targeted instruction for information literacy, and building off of the definition for information literacy provided by CILIP, C-I-L-I-P, which is the UK's Library and Information Association, this instruction should be aimed at improving students ability to think critically and make balance judgment about information they find and use. With a shift to online learning, the solution in this context was to provide asynchronous learning module, modules to extend learning beyond the classroom. So the success in this case is that the OLR serves as a central virtual location for students to discover and use OER on information literacy. The creation of the sort of one-stop shop for information literacy resources is important long term as it positions the library as the provider of information literacy expertise and gathers together expert content that students know they can use and continue to revisit. And the final consideration, which was also external facing, was about campus presence. So the challenge, of course, is that in the virtual world, the library presence on campus is a bit diminished. In the sense that in the physical setting, the library has two locations, one of which towers over surrounding buildings and serves as a very clear marker of library as place. Physically, the library is highly visible and the campus community knows that a visit will yield information and the answers that they seek. Virtually, however, a lot of that is sort of lost. Naturally, the solution is to create a robust online presence that conveys areas of library expertise. So in terms of the instructional context and instructional expertise, the university-wide solution was to develop one central website with advice and support for instruction, which was called Keep Learning. This Keep Learning web presence was shaped by several academic support units that specialize in teaching. One steering committee oversees the development of the Keep Learning website and the library has a seat on this committee in terms of my position. This collaborative steering committee and the Keep Learning website pulls together resources related to teaching and learning best practices. So in this environment, when the library was asked what we could contribute, we were able to easily turn to the OLR and this proved to be another success for the OLR as it served as the library's virtual campus presence for instructional material that was meant to be shared with instructors and other campus collaborators. So the OLR has come a long way this year and we're viewing it as a victory in a year of unprecedented instructional challenges, but naturally there is more work to be done. Three major steps await us in 2021. The first is to enhance the usability of the repository, which will include the involvement of our user experience team. The second is to advertise the repository both locally on campus and beyond. An OER resource such as the OLR in our view really has limited use if people don't know about it. Presentations such as this one is one of the ways to advertise the OLR and I really do highly encourage you all to browse through the content on the OLR, whether for inspiration or even to link directly to content that you would like to use in your own instruction. It is all creative commons licensing and open access. And finally, the third step we're looking to continue building content as we have throughout this year, which means continuing to collaborate with our subject experts and others at the academic support units on campus. So that brings us to the end of our project briefing. Thank you so much for listening and I think we now have some time for questions. Thank you, Mike. And thank you, Carrie. That was a really interesting presentation. It was great to hear about that project. The floor is now open for questions. So to our attendees, please type your questions in the Q&A box and Carrie and Mike can address those now. I also just dropped into the chat a link to the OLR and I was exploring it myself while we were listening to the presentation and it really is a nice nifty tool. I want to make sure we have time for folks to ask their questions. So please, by all means, go ahead and put those questions in the Q&A box. Cliff had just chatted a question to me that he'd like me to ask and this is about whether or not there's a learning management system on campus and if so, how does the OLR relate to that? Definitely. So I can take that on a little bit. There is definitely a learning management system that the university is using. It's a D2L-based system and we are working with instructors and able to share content with them and embed content within that D2L environment. But of course, that sort of gets towards one of the pieces I mentioned, which is once those courses close, there's no way to access that information again. And so the OLR, because some of our content is through the Articulate platform and that has particular hosting requirements, which is suited for the LMS but isn't so suited for sort of general web sharing options. So the OLR ends up being a really important tool for us to extend learning even once a class has ended. Right. Interesting. Yeah, thank you. Waterloo is also very focused on letting faculty have as much control as possible. And so it's as I think at many institutions at the discretion of the individual faculty member, if they'd like to give their partner librarian access to the LMS for their courses or not. And so this helps create a situation where even if the relationship isn't such that they would give the individual librarian access, we can make instructional resources available to students and we can make it possible for faculty who aren't comfortable with that for one reason or another to actually be able to link out to resources and also for our other academic support units to link to and recommend and use resources that we've made available. So it does quite a lot more for our presence as Mike was alluding to than we would really be able to try to function just within the LMS. That makes a lot of sense. All right. Thank you for addressing that. Thanks for the question, Cliff. I was wondering what kind of feedback you're getting from your community. So the feedback on in terms of the content we're producing has been very promising. We've seen a number of comments from students using our content within their courses and then contrasting that in their comments to the content that they're seeing from their instructors or from others. And they are quite pleased with the quality and the presentation and the professionalism. It's very good. It's very promising. In terms of the Olar itself, as we've kind of alluded to it, we really went pretty quick in terms of implementation. So we haven't had a chance to really collect feedback in a more substantial way. We're currently running Google Analytics on the Olar. So we're able to see sort of the trend and it has been trending upwards in terms of usage. And I think that user experience, next step I kind of alluded to, will be really important for getting some of that feedback in terms of what folks think about it. Sure. And also you mentioned doing some publicity around it as well, getting the word out so that you're more visible. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And what about in terms of actually using the tool? Have the librarians who are using it, do they find it? I mean, I realize you've had to change your process because there's more collaboration involved. But in terms of producing the content and then making it available on the Olar, how work-intensive, how labor-intensive is that process? So putting content up on the Olar is pretty streamlined and simple. So that's great. In terms of sharing it, librarians are definitely using it. They're able to also link to the Olar on their research guides, which is now sort of tying all of our information together in a nice way. And another major piece that the Olar supports is virtual reference. So there's a number of repeated questions about access or about searching. So we're able to have objects in the Olar that directly speaks to that. And now on virtual reference, instead of having a canned message, we have a canned instructional object, if that makes sense. And so we've, in our view, elevated the quality of reference service a little bit that way as well. Interesting. Well, it's really great. Really an interesting tool. Thank you so much for bringing it to CNI to share with us. I'd love to hearing about it. I think as I see that we're approaching time here, I'm going to go ahead and turn off the recording and just invite any attendees who'd like to stay and chat with you to please just raise your hand, let us know, and I'll turn on your microphone. And again, Carrie and Mike, thank you so much for joining us here today. And thanks to our attendees for joining us too. Bye-bye.