Curriculum Focus Shift
1. The results from the librarians surveyed without OER initiatives suggest that professional development education and curriculum for librarians should shift from a focus on discovery of OER to creation and adaptation.
The highest averages of confidence, Discovery (3.36) and Evaluation (3.05), seem to suggest that OER have entered the "mainstream" librarian professional conversation and thus the discovery of quality OER is less a concern for librarians. Indeed, this could be related to the proliferation of large scale OER repositories; repositories like Merlot and OpenStax make discovery of OER resources very simple.
2. The lowest averages of confidence, Creation (2.55) and Adaptation (2.64), seem to suggest that the current state of OER education/professional development for librarians has “outgrown” its curriculum; perhaps curriculums can be re-designed to focus more on the creation of OER rather than discovery. As teaching faculty are becoming more comfortable with the concept of open education resources (as is evidenced in the Hewlett Foundation report), librarians seem to be called on more to help with creation rather than simply discovery of these resources.
3. The data suggests that librarians feel very confident advocating for the use of OER/Open Pedagogy with student and faculty groups; however, it appears that librarians are significantly less confident when advocating to senior university administration and policy makers at the regional and state levels (3.00 and 2.63). This is not surprising considering librarians generally work with students and faculty most often. Open Education professional development for librarians could attempt to ameliorate this issue by focusing more on developing strategies for advocating to these groups. Suggested areas include grant development and proposal writing.
Overcoming Barriers
4. Unsurprisingly, a lack of Time (4.26) and Funding (3.83) were the largest potential barriers for adoption of OER/Open Education according to the librarians surveyed. However, the next two largest potential barriers, Faculty Awareness (3.83) and Institutional Policies (3.78), may have a direct impact on the previous two potential barriers. Many of the additional open comments suggested that library administration did not give value to Open Education and OER, noting a lack of "library administration awareness," "senior library administration engagement," and sentiments such as "it is not the library's responsibility to push such an initiative" from library administration. If library administration is unwilling to support open education initiatives with staff and funding and make adoption a strategic initiative, then, of course, librarians doing the work will note a lack of those essential resources. Perhaps going forward, a focus of the community should be to educate library administration and university administration on the value of open education and how to "tie" Open Education and OER to larger campus-wide initiatives, thus demonstrating the need for additional funding and staffing.
Librarian Attitudes & Perceptions
5. Interestingly, the librarians surveyed desire an increased awareness of OER and Open Education on their campuses; however, they do not want this awareness to be generated through workshops or professional development. This information could have implications for the kinds of OER materials librarians in the community produce for other librarians. Historically, there has been a proliferation of workshops generated in the Commons; perhaps the creation of open, library-focused materials should shift to more a marketing approach. Suggestions include social media awareness strategies, images, infographics, awareness marketing materials, OER programming and activities focused on the user community.
What Librarians Want
6. The data represented in this question response supports the suggestion in Number 5 above; librarians surveyed rated "marketing materials directed at generating faculty awareness" as the third most desired form of support (4.14). Conversely, librarians ranked "marketing materials directed at generating student awareness" as the lowest desired form of support in the category (3.55). This information seems to suggest that there is a need for librarians who have a graphic design and communications background to generate marketing materials in the Commons for librarians who do not have this skill set.
7. The results of this question also support the assertions made in Numbers 1 and 2 above by suggesting that more focus could be placed on Open Education pedagogy and best practices in librarian professional development and education (4.3); indeed, this desire tied for the second most desired form of support. Perhaps the curriculum focus should shift from discovery of OER to more time spent on creation, adaptation, advocacy, and open pedagogy.
8. As librarianship is a profession rooted in collaboration and best practices, it is not surprising that the most desired form of support for librarians is examples of successful OER initiatives from other libraries (4.36). Although this information does exist, perhaps the creation of a searchable (by type of initiative) repository for successful OER initiatives is worth exploring. Within this repository, librarians could share all associated documentation of their successful initiatives. Suggestions include grant proposals, associated forms and documents, marketing materials, work flows, and project management strategies. This kind of searchable repository would allow librarians to quickly identify the kind of initiative that would best work at their institution and locate reusable resources as opposed to creating them from scratch. Indeed as librarians are "strapped" for time and money perhaps a repository like this will help alleviate some of that stress.
General
9. It is time to open up Open Education participation within the library profession. Historically, Open Education and OER have been the domain of the Public Services Librarian. Indeed as the responses to the questionnaire indicate, the majority of respondents were in Public Service (62). But ask any librarian and they will tell you that a library is a system--a system that does not work without all of its parts. It is important that we open up the conversation around Open Education to our Systems and Collection Development/Management/Acquisition colleagues. As the need for OER grows and the amount of resources available grow, the ability to discover these resources through library EDS and OPACs is more important than ever.
10. This project is only the beginning; it really only begins the conversation about assessing librarian needs in regard to Open Education. While the data included in my survey should be used as a start, it is only a small sample of librarians. The limitations of the study, largely the scale of participants and method of participant solicitation, already have the potential to skew results and only give a very limited picture of the landscape. Due to an existing lack of librarian needs assessment in the Open Education space, there is so much room for data gathering to provide us a better picture of librarian needs, particularly in education and professional development. This project took a "shotgun" approach to needs assessment; my hope is that people will take my survey instrument, distribute it to smaller more select and potentially homogenous populations (eg. school Carnegie classifications, service populations, regions, etc.) and "fill in the blanks."
