Community building through Open Educational Practices

Librarians often think of our role as one to deliver existing content-knowledge, but we too are creators, innovators, and builders. In this session we will not only “open” our text, but discuss how to engage Open Pedagogy to create a sustainable solution for our field. Open Educational Resources (OER) and Creative Commons licensing allow us to upend the fixed concept of the “text.”

The presenters created an OER textbook that is used in a variety of ways, including in a credit-bearing information literacy course, to train student employees and tutors, and to build foundational information literacy skills for incarcerated individuals. Presenters will demonstrate how they compiled, remixed, revised, and published OER textbook materials for information literacy instruction. Using this experience as a template, presenters will build frameworks for ongoing communities of practice with workshop collaborators.

Our hope is that participants will feel empowered to tear OER textbooks apart and understand that they can create something wholly new that meets their community needs and that the participant-creators are empowered to “own”. This recreation, reconsideration, and emphasis on the relationships between collaborators across our institutional divides is what will help us, to truly ascend into an open future. That future will share information literacy instruction with campus or community partners, moving from inside the library, to the broader ecosystem of our communities.

Through facilitated conversation participants will meet and connect with other participants based on the communities they hope to connect with through information literacy instruction. Participants will be asked to question the assumed information literacy needs of a community, and will be presented with the foundation to draft an action plan for collaboration with the community. Through collaboration and conversation participants will understand how to open the content creation process to include the expertise and discourse of community partners. By sharing in open pedagogical practices, workshop participants and community partners can create resources designed for their community’s information literacy needs.

These fledgling open education communities of practice will then be invited to connect with a platform for idea sharing well after the conference concludes. By remixing and reimagining information literacy outside of the classroom or the workshop context all participants will build a foundation upon which to forge connections with new community or campus partners, gain familiarity with the fundamentals or OER publishing, and ideally develop communities of practice to grow this content and new relationships long after the conference is over.
In this session, participants will be invited to engage with OER and Open Pedagogy as both creators and facilitators.