Ellie Svoboda, an education informationist from Strauss Health Sciences Library at the University of Colorado, and Teresa Connolly, an assistant professor from the University of Colorado Denver, presented at Open Ed 2021 about “Collecting Nursing OER on a Health Sciences Campus.” They shared their process of sharing OER on a health sciences campuses and creating a centralized site. OER on the Anschutz Medical Campus has been supported by the UC system through a state grant to promote OER. However, most OER on their campus were for undergraduate audiences. The user experience of searching for OER with different filters in sites like MERLOT is complicated. The presenters described the Teaching Future Nurses” MERLOT site they created to share activities. The objective was to help faculty submit activities and provide feedback as well as search organized materials by discipline. The site has a mechanism to provide feedback too. MERLOT has templates to create sites that are simple and can include Google analytics. Svoboda noted that after created the site, they realized that traffic was low. Connolly talked about how they shared the site with faculty in the College of Nursing. Unfortunately, there was little to no follow through by faculty and fears of misconceptions about copyright according to Connolly. There were also fears from faculty about the quality of the resources and misunderstandings of what OER are. The presenters concluded that there needs to be more education and awareness of OER for health sciences. They also spoke about utilizing OER as a resource to promote diversity. Fortunately, the presenters noted an increase in the awareness and use of OER in nursing and mentioned OpenRN as an example. Just today a focus group I was part of spoke about some of the issues noted by the presenters: there is still a lack of understanding of what OER can do beyond being “a free textbook.” In a way, it is reassuring to learn about the struggles of others trying to promote OER on their campuses. While awareness is an important challenge to address, there also still is a need to explain how OER can be utilized to include students, I think. There still is a lot of “unlearning” and getting used to OER by faculty.
