Open Educational Resources Task Force Meeting: March 29, 2019

Conference Call

Members Attending: Annette Alvarado (Loyola University Chicago), Sara Benson (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Anne Chernaik (College of Lake County), Connie Ghinazzi (Augustana College), Kathy Ladell, co-chair (Northern Illinois University), Anne Shelley, co-chair (Illinois State University), Janet Swatscheno (University of Illinois at Chicago), Linda Zellmer (Western Illinois University)

Members Absent: Elizabeth Nelson (McHenry County College), Susan Shultz (DePaul University)

Staff Attending: Elizabeth Clarage, Lorna Engels, Anne Craig

Decisions

  • Kathy Ladell volunteered to take minutes.
  • The February 2019 minutes were approved.
  • The Task Force will revisit the SCOER Proposal at our next meeting on April 16, 2019.

Announcements

  • Member Announcements
    • Sara Benson finalized Sarah Cohen’s talk at U of I on Wednesday, May 1, 2019 from 3:30-4:30 pm. Please the flyer that she sent to the OERTF list.
  • CARLI Updates
    • Migration and Implementation of Primo/VE and Alma. This service will have a Discovery level that wasn’t expected and will be available to 91 members in 2020.
    • CARLI Counts program first cohort will have 50 instead of 36 participants. This program teaches library how to use data to support library assessment.
    • Soon will be able to announce the database package. EBSCO agreement ends in June 2019.
    • Budget outlook for fiscal 2020. CARLI is optimistic that there may be a slightly increase and hopefully not a cut in funding.
    • Website service through CARLI built on LibGuides is available through NC LIVE. For $500, a member can get this design service.
    • In May 2019, CARLI will host a New Director’s Institute. There will be 11 participants.

Discussion

  • CARLI OER E-mail Discussion List
    • OTN originally requested the creation of a local discussion list. CARLI recently got a request to join the list from a non-CARLI member.
    • Question to group: How should the discussion list be used?
    • Response from Task Force: Include Illinois academics regardless of membership but not vendors.
    • Currently there are 89 members on CARLI OER Discussion List, and it isn’t really active.
    • Elizabeth stated that we need to let the current members of the list know about the change to the list being open.
    • For profit CARLI members institutions can participate in the list.
  • Webinars
    • Elizabeth is going to contact David Stern about a CARLI webinar,
    • Connie, Janet, Lorna and Elizabeth will talk further about their OTN topics for webinar that will happen in May 2019.
    • April 8th Webinar titled “Do Open Education Resources improve student learning? by Openstax.  Elizabeth forwarded the information to the Task Force
  • OER Spring Workshop
    • April 29th at Loyola University Chicago Watertower (downtown Chicago) campus.
    • Registration went live last week.
    • 46 people have registered so far.
    • Workshop was advertised in CARLI newsletter.
    • All Task Force Members need to register.
    • Annette sent out the list of hotels that have a Loyola discount code.
    • Presenters need to have their handouts to Elizabeth or Lorna by April 15th to have the printed before the workshop.
    • Anne Shelley will do the introduction of the presenters and will email the presenters to send her a short bio.
  • Illinois SCOER Proposal discussion with Anne Craig
    • Anne Craig sent out to OERtf Members the SCOER proposal
    • U of I Foundation want to create a proposal to get funding from other foundations. Hewlett Foundation is one of them.
    • The proposal currently has that CARLI will partner with eText Service at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to provide teaching materials at reduce cost to students.
    • EText is a platform system that provides communication between students and professors and embedded audio and video for classes among other things. It is flipped classroom based.
    • EText is competitive with big textbook vendors and works hard to make materials accessible to students with hearing and vision challenges.
    • CARLI member would be able to pull out content in a PDF as well as other print formats and put it on a server.
    • EText would allow authentication through Google or Facebook but only to CARLI members.
    • The SCOER project would have funding for the creation of OER materials, and extend EText services to CARLI Members.
    • EText told Anne that they thought that no member institutes that would interested in creating OER materials.
    • Janet said that she has a faculty member at UIC that is working on an OER.
    • Sara Benson commented that EText isn’t really OER and that other faculty can re-use materials without copyright.
    • Discussion about how it would be better to take EText out and instead use another open platform such as Pressbooks.
    • Connie stated that limiting access to materials defeats the point of open access.
    • Janet said that she is okay with EText as long as you can extract the content.
    • Discussion about how it might be a good idea to compare EText to other platforms and do a side by side comparison.  
    • Annie Craig would try to get guest log-ins to EText and have volunteers from OERTF to explore the platform.
    • Linda brought up the idea of developing high school OER materials to better prepare rural students to better prepare them for college. This might help with retention and would be totally open instead of being behind a paywall.

Next Meetings

Task Force Conference Calls:

  • April 16
  • May 21
  • June 18

Workshop:

  • April 29, 2019 at Loyola University Chicago