Open Educational Resources Task Force Meeting: May 19, 2020

Conference Call

Members attending: Anne Shelley (Illinois State University), Sue Shultz (DePaul University), Janet Swatscheno (University of Illinois at Chicago), Linda Zellmer (Western Illinois University)

Members absent: Annette Alvarado (Loyola University Chicago), Sara Benson (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Anne Chernaik (College of Lake County), Elizabeth Nelson (McHenry County College)

Staff attending: Elizabeth Clarage, Anne Craig, Lorna Engels

Tasks Assigned

• Sue Shultz will take meeting minutes.

Decisions

• April meeting minutes approved.

Announcements

• Member Announcements:
  • Janet (University of Illinois at Chicago) – She will be presenting a webinar with the bookstore on digital course materials on 5/20.
    • Faculty can assign a digital textbook instead of print. Janet will be discussing OER. UIC hired 80 teaching assistants to help faculty move courses online for summer and the majority of fall online courses. Over 200 faculty and teaching assistants are registered to attend.
  • UIC has officially announced a conditional plan that outlines different scenarios. However, one firm decision is that classes with over 75 students will be online.
• CARLI Announcements:
  • Alma/Primo: June 24 is the launch date.
  • Freeze – ALMA catalog and PRIMO VE catalog frozen as of this Friday. Technical areas of Voyager are frozen now. Circulation client will freeze in June. Circulation extract will take place at the latest possible moment.
  • CARLI Board election was just completed and new members will assume their official roles on July 1.
  • CARLI has worked with e-resources vendors to attempt to lower pricing or keep it flat.
  • The CARLI Board has reduced annual membership fees 10% for FY21.
  • CARLI has been working on Wiley ebook access for the entire consortium. All governing members will have access to Wiley ebooks through their Wiley Online Library platform from 2017 onward. The official project dates are July 1 through June 20, 2021, however if a computer IP address is associated with your institution, you have access now. CARLI will make purchasing decisions next year based on consortial usage. There are no ILL rights at this point, but there will be after titles are purchased.  CARLI hopes to communicate Wiley information by the end of the month.
  • A contract is pending with Oxford University Press.
  • Open Textbook Library now has a OCLC WorldShare collection i.d. which will make it easier to load OTN MARC records into the catalog.
  • Discussion about the impact of COVID-19 on CARLI member institutions.
    • UIC: Some student workers have been furloughed but may be able to return to work once the buildings reopen.
    • WIU: Student workers were doing link-checking on websites and Libguides until they graduated last weekend.

Discussion

• There was a special meeting of the CARLI Board on May 4, outside of the quarterly cycle.
  • One of the agenda items addressed programs that were funded at its December meeting. Some programs implementation were paused so that the incoming Board could make the decisions on their continuation. The Professional Development Reimbursement and the Mobile Digitization Lab Programs were paused.
  • OER training was also discussed given that most of the training was proposed to be in-person. The Board would like input from the OERTF about the possibility of delivering the training virtually and a recommendation from the group about how this might be implemented.
  • Suggestions from the group were:
    • Agreed that a full-day virtual training is not effective: break the training into smaller sections with two hours being the maximum.
    • Asynchronous + synchronous modules so that individuals can view at their own pace. Janet learned from instructional designers that a blend of both is effective.
    • Zoom break-out rooms during the synchronous sections for OTN share-out, role playing. Janet presented a virtual conference and used breakout rooms and her suggestion is that we keep these fairly small.
    • Homework/activities outside of the actual workshop are useful for creating engagement.
    • The homework could be prerequisites for attending the virtual components.
    • The group thought that the virtual training may be well-received given that some institutions are encouraging staff to attend virtual courses/professional development in lieu of regular workloads while working from home. Also, given the online course delivery necessitated by COVID-19, OER have become more important in higher education.
    • The group agreed to respond to the Board that the OER training program could move forward with virtual training.
    • Elizabeth will document what we discussed: Janet and Sue agreed to review the document. Elizabeth will review the agenda for the daylong OTN trainings to determine how we might create modules.
    • A question surfaced about the sequencing of virtual workshops: do we begin with train-the-trainer workshops and then move onto faculty workshops? Janet thought that faculty workshops might be more useful given the current online situation.
• Annual OTN Summit is virtual and online this summer.

Next Meeting

The next task force conference call is rescheduled from our regular Tuesday 1-2 meeting to Wednesday, June 17, 2020, from 3:00–4:00 pm due to a conflict with a virtual session from the OTN Summit on June 16.