IJOER and Beyond editors Samantha Peter and Kristina Clement are pleased to welcome Yang Wu as our 2021 Contributing Editor. As our readers may know, IJOER and Beyond is growing faster than we had expected and the time felt right to bring in another voice for regular contributions and a chance to help us review current literature and notable OER projects. We received many excellent applications for the 2021 Contributing Editor and it was a tough choice. We believe that Yang will be a wonderful addition to IJOER and Beyond as our first Contributing Editor and we welcome him with open arms. 

Yang Wu is a specialized OER Librarian at Clemson University, a land grant research institution in South Carolina. He is the Chair Elect of the Partnership Among South Carolina’s Academic Libraries (PASCAL), the State’s academic library consortium’s Affordable Learning Committee, which engages in a variety of activities that promote the use of open textbooks and other OER resources to librarians and academic faculty statewide. Dr. Wu is also Clemson’s representative to the Open Education Network (OEN) and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). He holds a certificate on OER librarianship from the OEN and has served on planning committees of major OER related conferences, such as the Open Education Conference organized by SPARC and the Open Education Southern Symposium. 

Dr. Wu’s responsibility is to develop and promote the use of OER materials, both within Clemson University and statewide through partner organizations. He organizes multiple workshops, webinars, invited-speaker presentations and other events on OER, Open Education and Open Access related topics each year at Clemson and across the state of South Carolina, and also manages and raises funding for a faculty OER teaching stipend at Clemson. His efforts have resulted in $400,000 of textbook savings for Clemson students since he assumed his role in 2018, and greatly expanded awareness of OER and Open Education at Clemson and South Carolina.  Dr. Wu is also an undergraduate instructor at Clemson who has actively used open pedagogy approaches, such as having students collectively write an OER textbook on their class subject in his instruction. He also assists faculty regularly with designing class assignments that involve students writing OER textbooks and publishing them online. His current areas of research include strategies instructors can employ to increase student use of OER in their learning, open pedagogy as an approach to increase student research and information literacy skills, as well as developing OER materials on robotics, mechatronics and advanced manufacturing. 

Please join us in welcoming Dr. Yang Wu who will be publishing six different blogs throughout 2021. 

This post is by Samantha Peter and Kristina Clement 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.