By James Paradiso and Lee Miller

Collaboration is key when laying the foundation for open education initiatives. Stakeholders across any given institutional system are numerous and include faculty, administrators, students, librarians, bookstores, among others. However, in many cases, the partnership between librarians and instructional units is underutilized. This blog post focuses on building a pathway to better communicate, partner, present and publish, review, and reconnect faculty support teams to facilitate the growth of open education initiatives in higher education.

Communicate

When reaching out to units across your institution, be sure to prioritize empathy and personal value—why open educational resources matter for them and others—in your messaging. This can be challenging to do without first engaging with those whom you serve or with whom you wish to collaborate. Do your best to listen to all the stakeholders to determine their goals, and then propose how open education can support their work. 

Some units have very clear goals for the current year or even for multiple years, and while you might think cost savings for students would resonate with faculty, that is not always the case. You may instead decide to highlight points regarding increased academic freedom, student equity and experience (e.g., inclusive teaching practices), or even scholarship opportunities as a form of motivation. 

Ideally, when instructional and library support units communicate clearly and regularly about how open education impacts their units and their stakeholders, the likelihood of understanding why open educational resources should be embraced increases—leading to a better chance of buy-in and the overall success of your open education initiatives. 

Partner

Partnering with stakeholders on a project or initiative is particularly important for distributing the workload and avoiding any inadvertent duplication of work. 

In the case of library and instructional faculty support, this may take a number of forms. Let’s say your library has dedicated personnel working on open education, but the instructional support team doesn’t. Merging these two support roles creates an excellent opportunity: The library side can offer faculty support around access to open educational content thus enabling high levels of academic freedom, while the instructional side can help faculty utilize sound pedagogical practices around delivering open content. 

This two-sided support also reduces stress, minimizes cognitive and temporal workload, and ensures a well-rounded, meaningful faculty experience.

Present/Publish 

Whether scholarship is required for your job, presenting and publishing about the work with which you are engaging has many benefits for you, the educational community, and beyond.

When your paper is read and cited by your peers or your presentation is heard at a conference, you’re planting seeds with potential for growth. These efforts might attract internal and external collaborators, increase funding opportunities for your unit, and enhance your professional trajectory. 

Documenting processes and findings from projects and initiatives is time-consuming, but by doing this, you increase the value and impact of your work by contributing it to the larger education community. Work that may not have otherwise been considered can now start conversations around important issues and initiate dialogue that leads to new solutions and, ultimately, institutional success. 

The open education community is exceptionally collaborative, so finding professional development opportunities, accessing relevant research, and finding and building external partnerships is simply a matter of getting involved. Contributing to the open education field is just as much about sharing your experiences, knowledge, and expertise as it is about the opportunity to present or publish on empirical findings. 

Review

The perception of partnership and cross-unit overlap varies greatly depending on your institution. For some, collaboration is at the core of their operations, while others may have a stronger focus on their unit’s individual impact. In either scenario, interweaving aspects of the working mission and infrastructure introduces complexity, and therefore requires extensive thought and care to execute well.

For example, library and instructional support units may not have pre-established overlapping workflows. However, both units share the goal of helping faculty support student achievement. By using this as their frame of reference, they can work to evaluate the local climate and work towards a common solution. 

Additionally, reviewing institutional needs from more than one perspective offers a more holistic sense of the issues facing faculty and students. Through this approach, both library and instructional faculty perspectives can complement each other by offering slightly different perspectives on the purpose and use of certain data. Conducting needs assessments or gap analyses also establishes important documentation that contributes to an institution’s continuous improvement efforts, program accreditation, and increased opportunities for scholarship. 

Within the context of open education, evaluating the health of the projects/initiatives at multiple scales can be challenging. Since the impact of open educational practices is still very much in an exploratory stage, it is critical to start small: Limit the variables being investigated, then after conducting your analyses, look for any common threads with your counterparts, whether on the library or instructional side. 

Reconnect

Maintaining partnerships with individuals, units, and institutions requires considerable time and attention. However, setting a long-term goal to stay connected and finding the time to follow up with each other not only acknowledges the importance of your individual and collective work, but also brings you one step closer to gaining additional support through funding and other working agreements.

The temptation to stay in your own lane is constant. However, when your library and instructional support units work closely on open education initiatives, new perspectives, new ideas, and the willingness to embrace new opportunities can help this relationship evolve and catalyze the future of work in open education.

Conclusion

In higher education, libraries and instructional units often run in parallel, not necessarily in tandem. This observation is what fueled this blog post and the graphic on which it was based. At their cores, both units move in the same general direction, serve the same audiences, faculty and students, and aspire to similar goals although they might surface in slightly different ways. Exploring this shared journey can be the spark you and your colleagues need to start the bridge building process at your institution. Through intentional communication, strategic partnership, scholarly endeavors, iterative review, and continued collaboration, library and instructional units can simultaneously embrace their diversity while jointly exploring how open educational resources and practices impact student learning outcomes and benefit the institutional mission and communities they serve. 

Resources

Building Bridges to Open Education (editable / shareable files)

Authors

James R. Paradiso is an associate instructional designer and the Affordable Instructional Materials (AIM) Program Coordinator for Open Education at the University of Central Florida. His main areas of research and professional specialization are open education and adaptive learning—with a particular focus on devising and implementing strategies to scale open educational practices and engineering data-driven learning solutions across multiple internal and external stakeholder communities. Connect with him on Twitter @paradisojr. 

Lee Miller is the Director of Innovation and Compliance at Barton Community College. She works with open education and facilitates Barton’s OER initiative, assists with ADA compliance for instruction, investigates academic integrity, and engages with innovation opportunities. She also served as a member of the OpenEd Steering Committee for 2020 and 2021, is a member of the Midwest Higher Education Compact (MHEC) CTE Committee and a member of the Kansas Board of Regents (KBOR) OER Steering Committee where she represents the KBOR committee for DOERS3.