This year I participated in the 2018-19 SPARC Open Education Leadership Program, an intensive year-long professional development program to develop open education leaders in libraries. I was thrilled to be selected for this program and it really helped guide me in my first year as the OER Coordinator at my institution.
There’s a lot I could say about what I learned throughout my year in the program, but for now I just want to share my SPARC capstone project, titled “Enhancing OER Support by Developing a Workflow and Service Model.” My goal for this project was to be able to better support instructors in replacing traditional commercial textbooks with open or affordable alternatives, driven by the fact that UH is seeing significant levels of interest in OER but we have yet to develop full capacity to support that interest.
My capstone final report is publicly available, but I’ll give the gist of it here:
- I conducted an environmental scan to determine high-need areas for OER support at my institution
- I reviewed a handful of existing OER adoption workflows to aid in developing a UH-specific workflow
- I developed an OER adoption workflow as a resource to guide UH instructors through the process of adopting open and affordable course content
- I began to articulate an OER service model by communicating the support provided through our incentive program and incorporating that information into the workflow
https://twitter.com/aripants/status/1130930064487583744
Part of the SPARC capstone project is a community resource, an openly-licensed resource of value to the broader community. My community resource includes the adoption workflow, as well as several other outputs from the process of completing my capstone project.
I’m so grateful for the opportunity to participate in this program, as it helped me discover the type of work I wanted to focus on this year and gave me the motivation to follow through with it. I definitely wouldn’t have been as successful in this project without the consistent support and guidance of my SPARC mentor, Camille Thomas, as well as the whole #LeadOER cohort and team.
Read more at my SPARC bio and leadership portfolio
Photo by Erwan Hesry on Unsplash
This post is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 International License.
Ariana Santiago 