Individual Courses
Pamela Espinosa de los Monteros
by Pamela Espinosa de los Monteros, Ohio State University (bio)
The World Geography LibGuide initiative at the Ohio State University Libraries has brought together three trends in higher education: the emergence of Open Educational Resources (OERs) and affordable content initiatives, the demand for greater internationalization of academic curriculums, and the changing instructional role of the academic librarian. Each of these areas supports 21st-century education and curriculum, and is addressed by a significant body of scholarship.[1]
The World Geography LibGuide initiative at the Ohio State University Libraries has brought together three trends in higher education: the emergence of Open Educational Resources (OERs) and affordable content initiatives, the demand for greater internationalization of academic curriculums, and the changing instructional role of the academic librarian.
The World Geography LibGuide[2] initiative demonstrates the intersection of these trends in a single project. And perhaps more importantly, it reveals the challenges and limits of affordable content initiatives affiliated with the greater global OER movement, library subscription-based resources, and faculty-librarian collaborations.
This chapter aims to explain how these trends met in one unlikely initiative, and to describe the initiative’s educational, logistical, and technological pitfalls and successes. It also briefly discusses the philosophical and conceptual dissonance between the original aims of the OER movement and projects such as the World Geography LibGuide.
The Open Education Resources Movement
From the beginning, OERs have aimed to address inclusive and equitable access to knowledge. In July, 2002, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) convened a forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries. In its final declaration, the forum expressed its desire “to develop together a universal educational resource available for the whole of humanity” (UNESCO, 2002, p.28). The concept of OERs was born, and with it a new platform to improve access to knowledge across existing “digital, societal, and cultural” divides (D’Antoni, 2009, p.19). In the same year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) initiated a global OER movement by announcing that it would place its course catalog online. UNESCO saw OpenCourseWare, OERs, and the OER movement as a mechanism to harness the power and potential of online education and to bring knowledge, online tools, education, and expertise to students in less prosperous and more geographically isolated societies (Siemens, 2015).
The international scope and accompanying global ideology of OERs are intentional, and speak to UNESCO’s broader goal of promoting a society which shares rather than partitions access to existing knowledge and information (UNESCO, 2007). OERs were therefore envisioned as the s