Contributed by Blog Managers Kristina Clement & Sammy Peters

Sammy and Kristina want to thank everyone who contributed to or visited OER & Beyond in 2021. It was a challenging year with many of us still working from home or working an adapted schedule during this prolonged pandemic, but we cannot help but reflect on how amazing this year was for us! We had new and former authors write for us on a selection of topics including Open Data and Open Pedagogy, and we had several authors share their own OER stories from the field. This year we have over 2,500 visitors to the blog! Our most popular post of the year was Interrogating and Supplementing OER Through a Decolonized Lens by Camile Close, Jessica Egan, and Emily Thompson with 685 OER enthusiasts who read that blog. Our second most popular post was Accessibility in Open Educational Resources is Resilience by Ksenia Cheinman with over 400 views! We also had readers from 22 different countries. We could not be more excited about the growth in the blog and are looking forward to continued growth in 2022. 

We also wanted to thank our 2021 Contributing Editor, Dr. Yang Wu of the Clemson University Libraries. Dr. Wu wrote six excellent blogs for us throughout the 2021 year including the ones listed below:

1. Open Pedagogy As a Tool for Facilitating the Design of Learner-Centered Open Educational Resources
2. Critical Thinking Education: Expanding Connections for Open Pedagogy
3. Collaborative Open Textbook Writing in Robotics: Tackling a Gap Area in Open Textbooks Through User-Centered Research

In 2022, we are excited to welcome our second Contributing Editor, Dr. Jonathan Poritz. Dr. Poritz brings us a wealth of experience in OER including his own experiences working with OER in his classroom. We look forward to the six blogs Dr. Poritz will be contributing this year!

Our Contributing Editor for 2022 is not the only exciting change we have coming in 2022. We would like to welcome two new editors for OER & Beyond: Denis Shannon and Sabrina Davis. Denis is one of two Resource Acquisition and Management Librarians at the University of Wyoming. His current research interests are related to library services for incarcerated people. Sabrina is the Open Educational Resources Librarian at Texas Tech University. Her current research interests include marketing OER to academic administration, connecting K-12 education to higher education with OER, and the inclusion of open resources for promotion and tenure. She is excited to extend her passion for all-things open as co-editor of OER & Beyond! We are excited for this new leadership and the new ideas Denis and Sabrina will bring! Kristina and Sammy will still be around, but we know you are going to love the new voices, ideas, and innovations that Denis and Sabrina will bring to the blog. 

We have another major announcement that will be forthcoming in early 2022 that we cannot wait to share with everyone. We are excited for all the changes that this upcoming year will bring, and we know you all will be too! Thank you for your continued support of OER & Beyond and let’s continue to grow the conversations and knowledge around all-things open! 

As always remember you can submit a blog proposal whenever via this form here.

This post is by Kristina Clement & Sammy Peter and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, except where otherwise indicated. Please reference OER and Beyond and use this URL when attributing this work; for more information on licensing, see our Open Access Policy.