Training and Professional Development
Billy Meinke-Lau
The Open Educational Resources (OER) program at the University of Hawaii (UH) began in 2014 with the hiring of a full-time librarian dedicated to OER adoption at the university system’s flagship campus, UH Manoa (UHM). Early work with OER at the campus level focused on curation and archiving of openly licensed textbooks and courses, the first step in an adopt, adapt, create strategy cast by administrators and stakeholders within the university.
Based in the UHM Outreach College and working collaboratively with system IT Services and the UHM Library, the OER librarian led introductory OER workshops, facilitated open textbook reviews with the Open Education Network, and created an institutional repository dedicated to OER. Adoption and uptake of existing OER grew during this two-year period, including large-scale adoptions in the subject areas of physics and economics. After the departure of the OER librarian in 2016, I joined the UHM Outreach College as the OER Technologist, tasked with moving the OER program into the ‘adapt’ and ‘create’ phases of the strategy.
Prior to this role supporting OER across the campus, I spent several years within the UHM College of Education designing online courses and programs. Even earlier, I worked for Creative Commons on their education and science initiatives, so I was comfortable with copyright, open licenses, and open source technology tools in addition to traditional instructional design methods. To make use of this expertise, I set out to create tools for UH instructors that would be useful to them as they became OER curious, translating complex and potentially intimidating concepts around copyright and publishing into consumable ideas.
Developing our workshops
A primary goal of the UH OER program was to empower faculty with the basic skills and knowledge needed to confidently work with OER. To do this, we had to identify the skills and knowledge that faculty needed, and to build our workshops around those competencies. Many of the skills and knowledge we identified as necessary for confident OER use overlapped with existing frameworks for digital and information literacy, which served as guides for developing a set of useful, tangible competencies. Beetham and Sharpe’s pyramid model of digital literacy development helped when framing OER work as an ongoing process, one which may potentially become part of an instructor’s professional identity ( Joint Information Systems Committee 2014). The Seven Elements of Digital Literacy from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) describe knowledge and skill areas within digital literacy — what it means to meaningfully participate in a knowledge economy as a student, researcher, or academic professional. At that time, most members of the UH OER interest group served in librarian roles, so the search for OER competencies included a review of ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education as w