Tonight we watched an Open Ed 2021 session with Emily Frank and Teri Gallaway from LOUIS. The title of the session was “Interactive OER for Dual Enrollment.” LOUIS is a consortium of public and private college and university libraries in the state of Louisiana with 47 academic libraries! The LOUIS community works toward student success and librarian professional development. One graph indicated almost 250,000 students impacted and savings of $26.8 million across the state. Building on the success of this program, they submitted a grant to the Department of Education to focus on dual enrollment courses to allow high school students to earn high school and college credit. The task force formed focused on participation gaps and reviewing state-wide enrollment data for dual enrollment courses. They selected twenty-five courses with high D/F/W rates and gaps in participation. Over three years, they aim to focus on those courses through a model with cohorts. They created twenty-five teams with one librarian leader and five faculty participants. The goal was to bring multiple institutions together with Quality Matters Review. Course shells will be shared through Moodle too! The grant has three goals including the creation of a replicable model of interactive OER that can be adopted across institutions. Pressbooks was mentioned as a tool used. Frank spoke about the summer professional development activities that were virtual, asynchronous, and synchronous. The asynchronous component included five modules. The course development component is ongoing thru August 2022 with Pressbooks OER and H5P interactive elements. How cool! Frank then introduced the panelists from several different institutions in Louisiana. The panelists included:
- Dr. James H. Ammons, Jr. Executive Vice President-Chancellor of Southern University at New Orleans
- Amelia Brister, Director of Library and Learning Resources, Louisiana Delta Community College
- Dr. Christy Garrison Harrison, Assistant Professor of History Southern University and A&M College
- Dr. Dawn Kight, Dean of Libraries at Southern University and A&M College; Secretary, LOUIS Executive Board
- Sarah Simms, Undergraduate & Student Success Librarian, Louisiana State University
Ammons has been a strong supporter of this initiative and serves a dual role as Chancellor of an HBCU and proter of open and student success. Ammons spoke about the cost of textbooks and tuition and the availability of resources. Brister and Simms talked about the role of librarians. They explained the collaborative opportunity with multi-institutional training. The cohorts formed a support network, and training sessions were recorded for reference. Garrison Harrison talked about the value of OER to the courses they teach. Further, the content was more inclusive and accessible. Physical, cultural, and financial accessibility are critical components of these resources, mentioned Garrison Harrison. Brister explained that scheduling was a major challenge, and they tested out different approaches to work with cohort members. Garrison Harrison talked about the importance of examining content to make sure global perspectives are included as multi-cultural may be still centering only particular voices. Garrison Harrison explained that language can be “a trigger” for some and promote undesired messages that are culturally insensitive. Kight talked about the outcomes of this project and the quality materials that are being created. Beyond a website, these OER include lessons, slides, interactive elements, and accessibility resources. This last answer by the panelist was a ‘big picture’ way of describing the impact of the work of these teams on the way current and future courses on these topics will be taught.
