Open Educational Resources Task Force Meeting: April 21, 2020

Conference Call

Members attending: Annette Alvarado (Loyola University Chicago), Sara Benson (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Anne Shelley (Illinois State University), Sue Shultz (DePaul University), Janet Swatscheno (University of Illinois at Chicago), Linda Zellmer (Western Illinois University)

Members absent: Anne Chernaik (College of Lake County), Elizabeth Nelson (McHenry County College)

Staff attending: Elizabeth Clarage, Anne Craig, Lorna Engels

Tasks Assigned

• Anne Shelley will take meeting minutes.
• Janet created a CARLI OER website review Google Doc for everyone to sign up for specific sections.
  • Task force members will review and update their assigned sections on the website by May 19.
• Task force members should email Elizabeth and Lorna about continuing service on this group as it transitions to a committee on July 1.
• U.S. Department of Education call for public comments on the Open Textbook Pilot Program:
  • Sara will work on a draft message for the carli-oer email list asking CARLI members to respond to call in their individual capacity. All task force members will review and reply on the draft by Thursday. Message will be sent to membership Thursday as the comment deadline is April 30, 2020.
  • Janet and Anne Craig will draft a comment for CARLI. All task force members will review and reply. Janet will submit the comment on behalf of CARLI.

Decisions

• March minutes approved, pending minor grammatical corrections by Elizabeth C.
• The task force will ask members to submit a comment on the U.S. Department of Education Open Textbook Pilot Program.
• The task force will submit a comment on the U.S. Department of Education Open Textbook Pilot Program.

Announcements

• Member Announcements:
  • Sue (DePaul University) – She is doing a virtual workshop on OERs on May 27 with colleague in CTL. This is not a formal OTN workshop so they are not going to ask faculty to write reviews. This was originally going to be in person program but now is virtual.
  • Janet (University of Illinois at Chicago) – She is probably doing an online workshop with faculty on open textbooks with LTS, going along with other resources on digital course materials. This is related to classes going online in spring and summer. UIC will respond to the call for comments for the DOE grant program for Open Textbook Pilot. Janet is drafting comments and they will be reviewed by the Dean of Libraries.
  • Question if campuses are going to open soon. Several are having online only classes for the summer. Linda can enter office if her temperature is taken. Several institutions are waiting for state to make announcement. Annette will have staggered staffing when they open. She can come in and retrieve items needed to teach over the summer. Discussion about academic librarians being laid off and furloughed.
• CARLI Announcements:  
  • All staff are working from home. Alma migration continues amid challenges, such as currently unable to test ILL as original planned and as a whole aiming for basic functionality on the go live date of June 24.
  • The CARLI Counts July in-person session have been cancelled and replacing with online meeting.
  • On April 2, CARLI held an online event, Getting Ready for Primo VE. There were over 250 attendees. It was very successful and went smoothly. Slides and recordings of the presentations are available on the CARLI website at: https://www.carli.illinois.edu/products-services/pub-serv/Getting_Ready_for_Primo_VE.
  • All CARLI programs have moved online through July.
  • CARLI anniversary celebration has been moved to November, the evening before Annual Meeting. CARLI is inviting members to share stories from past 40 years. The link on the CARLI website to do this is https://www.carli.illinois.edu/CARLIstories.
  • Contract with Wiley is finalized for frontlist ebooks, more details should be available soon. Working on contract with Oxford University Press, still in negotiations.

Discussion

• Discuss serving on the 2020-2021 CARLI OER Committee
  • We are officially a committee. CARLI is suspending the call for members for this year. Asking anyone who is available to continue to serve for at least one more year. Everyone should e-mail Lorna and Elizabeth saying whether they want to continue serving or not.
• Review updates for CARLI OER websites
  • Google Document to record changes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zHbd5kDrfWI6y7JleCyvZXEaFEYTBYMmpmhu6CSgMRs/edit?usp=sharing
  • Janet reviewed changes made to the document. Suggested giving an extension until the May meeting. Asked for volunteers for additional sections.
  • Anne S. will add more information about email lists/listservs and Roadshows additions to Professional Development.
  • Volunteer for a section within the Google Doc.
• Draft Public Comments for the U.S. Department of Education Open Textbook Pilot Program (Due April 30th)
• Janet directed everyone to SPARC’s website for presentation slides on this topic: https://sparcopen.org/our-work/open-textbook-pilot/ .
  • Are our libraries planning submitting comments?
  • There are fewer than 10 comments to date. Elizabeth suggests that the task force reach out to membership via the consortium email list carli-oer@carli.illinois.edu and ask members to submit comments.
  • The Task Force suggested specific topics to concentration comments including:
    • Money should be distributed to multiple places and not just one
    • Technology should not be so emphasized
    • People should talk about their own challenges and/or what they would like to see in OER
  • SPARC slides cover how to make an effective argument.
  • The task force agreed that it is important to make this as easy as possible for people.
  • Question – should people comment on behalf of their institution or as individuals? It might be hard to get institutional responses organized at this point, so individuals are more likely.
  • Does this committee want to submit a comment? Consensus is “yes” as long as we inform that Board of what we’ve done. We will develop a statement by this Thursday, 4/23 and send it out to task force members to endorse.
    • Janet has set up Google doc (below), she was already working on this for UIC. Blue text was provided by SPARC.
    • People who will work on document: Janet, Anne Craig.
    • Sara will summarize comments on Technology-based strategy for the message to send to members.
    • And award size?
    • Discussion about technology aspect – any tech should be open, migratable, sharable, not proprietary.

Next Meeting

The next task force conference call will be on Tuesday, May 19, 2020, from 1:00 – 2:00 pm.