Today I watched the Open Ed 2021 session “All for One & One for All: Building a Multi-Campus Course Material Fellowship Program” presented by Sara Hare, the Scholarly Communication Librarian at Bloomington campus of Indiana University, and Amy Minix. They launched in fall 2020 supported by a one-year grant supporting 13 students from two campuses. They wanted every fellow to be compensated the same ($2,000) to adopt/adapt/create a new resource, and fellows could utilize a mix of OER, library-licensed eBooks, and/or instructor-created materials. The first cohort had triple the applications than spots: 38 instructors applied for 13 spots. The final cohort was split seven from each campus. STEM-focused faculty were represented in the fellows. During the summer fellows had preparations for launching their implementations in the fall. Hare described the support for fellows as a series of remote Zoom consultations about Canvas, workshops, and working sessions. Similar to what our reading retreats used to include (in-person), they had breakout rooms about copyright and Creative Commons, for example. They also have a Canvas space for sharing resources. I also appreciate how Hare described that the program was not only focused on OER and included library-licensed materials. They mentioned a molecular biology resource I am interested in now! Hare shared their impact from one cohort of fourteen Course Material Fellows impacting 5,000 students and saving $185,000! Minix described the implementation group that included campus partners and librarians. I didn’t know the difference between functional and subject librarians. The campus partners included the Center for Innovative Teaching and IU Pressbooks. The areas that the fellows were supported in were workshops on: OER and copyright, getting started with video planning and production, Pressbooks, Inclusive Educational Resources, HathiTrust Workshop, General Fellows Workshops, and a working session on organizing content. Minix recommended seeking support from partners, funding, evaluation experts… They shared an email template librarians had to recruit applicants: go.iu.edu/44mA For the second cohort, they reframed questions to include budget, timeline, and sharing an OER that connects with their course. They also added more time for fellows to work on. This included building in thirty extra minutes for discussion at the end of each workshop session. Interestingly, they scaled funding based on work from adopting, to adapting, to creating.
