Melissa Jakubec from Thompson Rivers University in Canada presented about building an OER repository of learning activities during a twenty-minute session at OERxDomains21. Jakubec started with another thoughtful land acknowledgement that included discussion of their personal experience living on these lands. Jakubec wanted to design a repository of educational resources that was searchable, accessible, and communal. They decided to think carefully about the design and how the learners would interact with the content. Multiple categories were created for the learner and content, learner and context, and learner and support that allows users to search easily and filter resources. Activities were also assigned one (or more!) new Bloom’s taxonomy levels. Jakubec also mentioned that users can include tags. importantly, for all the activities Creative Commons licensing was clearly mentioned on the platform for the website. Since the launch of the website, Jakubec’s team has promoted the website repository at several virtual conferences and with other course redesign and OER projects. Jakubec then mentioned that most contributions were from their team and others have not started using it as much as wanted. Returning to the catchy title of the session “If You Build It, Will They Come?: The Challenges of Building a a Communal OER,” Jakubec asked the audience for suggestions. Interestingly, others mentioned similar struggles and the need for “champions” to support and contribute. This situation made me think about some of the challenges maintaining and promoting WordPress course OERs we develop (for the Metagenomics, High-throughput Discovery, and now Yeast Metabolic Engineering courses) to have a broader audience use the student-created resources. I have mentioned my struggles “closing the cycle” to have students use resources created by former course participants within the course and time constraints. The discussion after the presentation included several suggestions for having students and others contribute, promote resources with short videos, and provide connections to discipline-specific potential contributors.
Along the same lines, another presentation focused on the actual tool to host and publish OERs. I was excited to watch this session after reading the abstract. I have enjoyed playing with PressBooks, and have also honestly struggled with the design and helping students contribute to our “Meta Book” and “Delftia Book” projects. I did not know about Manifold, and Zach Davis and Matthew Gold did a 28-minute session on “Manifold – Building and Open Source Publishing Platform.” The system is really nice and includes several accessibility options and annotation. Davis and Gold showed several examples of embedding media and creating high-quality publications. They mentioned that faculty have written professional-looking publications with students, and Cathi Davidson created a cookbook with students! The presenters and moderator discussed different ways of using Manifold. What caught my attention was how Manifold “ingests” documents, including GoogleDocs, to create amazing publications. Manifold apparently can take multiple different formats and documents and create a resource with a table of content and beautiful format. They also talked about how Manifold invested time and resources in the user and visual design! They discussed working with accessibility experts to design with access in mind. It looks beautiful and seems very functional, and they mentioned an upcoming release with new features! I did not finish watching the recording before emailing my friends and enablers at the NC State Libraries! I do know that PubPub.org has been mentioned several times, and I wonder how they compare. I would love to create resources with students, publish them, translate to Spanish, and share and annotate!
