Shayna Pekala, the Scholarly Communication Librarian at Gonzaga University, presented the lightning talk “OER In-Reach: Introducing Your Library Colleagues to OER” at Open Ed 2021. They shared slides here. Pekala defined “in-reach” as “the process of bringing information to and building relationships with internal stakeholders.” I did now know about this! Their goal was to think about in-reach to benefit OER work both externally and internally. Gonzaga is a private Jesuit university located in Spokane, WA with about 7,000 students. They do not have a formal OER program, though faculty are using and creating OER, according to Pekala. The Open Scholarship Committee has hosted OER outreach activities for students and faculty including webinars. They piloted a mini professional development series. They learned about the NC State Open Cafe Event and were inspired by the thirty-minute format. David Tully and others here have created this awesome series! Pekala mentioned that the series they created was once a month with each cafe on a different topic. They created a fun Zoom background for participants. The planning process was to discuss topic ideas and experiment with activities. Next, they created an outline for the session and assigned roles. Finally, they shared links to Zoom! They held three sessions: the first one was “Understanding what OER is (and is not)” and included Zoom polls, Mentimeter polls, quiz competition, and Q&A. The second session had faculty scenarios with breakout rooms and focused on “Finding and identifying OER.” The third session was on “Finding subject-specific OER and incorporating into LibGuides.” This last session included individual work to find OER in specific subject areas. Pekala explained that in terms of assessment, they sent surveys with 10 responses. Most said the sessions were very useful and wanted more sessions on how OER is being used on campus, for example. Respondents seem to like the length. Pekala mentioned they did a literature review during the summer of 2021 and will continue focusing on topics in the fall that appeared during the literature review. I wonder if we can build on the Open Cafe series for something like Open Sequencing sessions?
