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OER Discovery Research: Librarian and Faculty Curation Personas

Unless otherwise noted, this presentation is licensed under CC BY 4.0 International by ISKME.

Cynthia Jimes, ISKME

Michelle Brennan, ISKME

Sophie Rondeau, VIVA

Emily Frank, LOUIS

OPEN EDUCATION CONFERENCE 2021

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Project background:

A collaborative desire to enable efficient discovery of relevant OER across states and consortia

In identifying and adapting relevant OER to meet student learning needs

Reduced time for �faculty

in curating OER, which frees up their time to support faculty

Reduced time for �library staff

�in translating descriptive data about resources from one state to another

Increased efficiency

as consortia (VIVA, LOUIS, OhioLINK, DigiTEX, PALNI, PALCI) ingest curated content from other states into their OER “microsites”

Growth in course-relevant collections

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Library & Repository Perspective on the �Need for the Project

Sophie Rondeau

Assessment & E-Resources Program Analyst, VIVA

Emily Frank

Affordable Learning Administrator, LOUIS: The Louisiana Library Network

Michelle Brennan

Product Manager, ISKME/OER Commons

Add photo

3 mins

[SR] Our VIVA Open microsite was originally intended to serve primarily as a repository for our OER grant projects. While this continues to be an important focus, the site is now also home to a large scale course mapping effort, which involves mapping OER to courses at Virginia higher education institutions. We knew that other consortia, most notably our colleagues at LOUIS, were also mapping OER to high enrollment courses and tagging them with course information through their microsite and we wanted to find a way, when it was appropriate, to piggyback on all the excellent work they had already done. We know that the topics addressed in high enrollment, general education courses in higher education are often fairly consistent so finding strategies to crossmap OER from Louisiana to Virginia courses was highly desirable.

Even beyond the desire to find efficiencies with course mapping, I have also felt that finding a way to reduce duplication of effort across higher education microsite partners would be valuable. As a former library cataloger engaged in cooperative cataloging practices, I felt strongly that there must be ways we could be sharing OER and the metadata to describe it more effectively in the open community, even if only among microsite partners.

[EF] The LOUIS microsite was developed to make use of our state common course marking, which maps ~300 gen ed, high enrollment courses across all 2- and 4- year public institutions in the state. As we developed the microsite, we engaged in a year-long project with librarians statewide to align existing OER to this common course catalog. This was a resource intensive process so it is important to us that this work can be used by other states that might be able to locally facilitate OER discovery. Another important piece of this collaboration is sustainability. Sustainability is such an important consideration in OER and technology infrastructure I think this project can help with that in terms of the staff time needed to sustain and grow the microsite. We have limited staffing to apply to this at LOUIS and, at, our member campuses, librarians, faculty champions, and instructional designers that support OER are often stretched thin. We want tools like to this be easy and efficient. The more we can leverage the work of others, automate the process of adding new content/deaccessioning inaccessible content, the more we can ensure the content we are aligning to is current and the more time we we can invest in other OER activities.

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Core

Research

Questions

What are the tasks and decision making processes faculty and library staff use when selecting, evaluating and assembling both individual OER and collections of OER?

What extensions to existing metadata are needed to accommodate their decision making?

What painpoints do they encounter in the OER curation process?

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35 faculty and library staff with OER curation experience across the six partnering consortia (VIVA, LOUIS, OhioLINK, DigiTex, PALNI, PALCI)

Recruit

90-minute interviews to assess their OER curation process, and the utility of different metadata in that process

Conduct

the interview data to develop user personas and user stories for both faculty and library staff curators

Analyze

the findings into implications for the design of an OER exchange network across PS libraries and states

Translate

OER Discovery and Curation

Research Approach

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Kendra,

Textbook Replacer (Faculty)

5 Personas

Findings

Kevin,

A La Carte Curator (Faculty)

Jacques,

Collections

Maintenance Librarian

Eva,

Course Redesign Support Librarian

Mira,

OER Reference

Librarian

Faculty Textbook Replacer, from U.S. National Archives, Public Domain Archive, Faculty À La Carte Curator, free for reuse from Unsplash, Collections Maintenance Librarian, Public Domain, Course Redesign Support Librarian, CC BY-NC 2.0,� OER Reference Librarian, free for reuse from Unsplash

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I get that education access is important, and I support my community college’s mandate that we shift toward using OER. But finding quality open materials isn’t always easy.

What’s ‘quality’? For me, it’s the resemblance to a commercial textbook. The presentation has to be professional. There has to be a natural progression of the content—an internal consistency. It has to have test banks and ancillaries like a commercial textbook. And it has to come packaged as one thing.

I don’t have time to cobble together bits and pieces and adjust them so that they integrate. That’s not workable—especially when we’re parachuting-in an adjunct at the last minute. I need a single resource I can use to replace a commercial text, and sometimes it's not easy to find.

Once I select my OER, I want to import everything into a course manual/ companion so that I can post it into my LMS to prevent students from getting derailed by external links and clicks.

If you’re going to take away my commercial text, I need a replacement with the same features.

Faculty Textbook Replacer, Kendra

Table of Contents

Ancillaries Included?

Material Type and Format

User Evaluations

Provider

Accessibility

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I take pride in customizing my courses each year with new and topical resources that bring out the best in me as a teacher, and in my students as learners.

I’ve never liked commercial textbooks much. Teaching from the same dense book year after year is not a recipe for student engagement—or my own. I’m always looking for new OER; not just when I’m planning my courses, but all year long.

It’s fun for me to go down the rabbit hole—finding things I haven’t seen before and getting ideas. Librarians have helped me become a better searcher, but probably there’s more for me to learn. I want the OER movement to transform teaching—not just by making more stuff available, but by creating a kind of interactivity that didn’t exist before.

Once I select my OER, I want to save and organize items so that I can integrate them later. I then want to sequence items from a breadth of sources and resource types so that I can create a custom course in my LMS for my specific needs.

Faculty A La Carte Curator, Kevin

Table of Contents

Remixable?

License Type

User Evaluations

Accessibility

Material Type and Format

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I enjoy searching for OER to meet individual faculty needs, but it could be less complicated.

I’m managing and troubleshooting electronic resources like databases and eBooks on our myriad platforms. A good part of my work relates to OER, and faculty reach out to me for support with searches, which sometimes means guiding them through a search and other times means doing the search for them.

I am an evangelist for OER, and a competent curator, but even for me the process can be complicated. As the OER movement evolves, I’d like to see a process that is more efficient and simple—both for me and for the faculty—whose buy-in we need for the movement to really grow.

OER Reference Librarian, Mira

Subject and TOC

Vetted by and Provider

License Type

Accessibility

Date Updated/Version

Material Type and Format

User Evaluations

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I focus on curating for breadth and on supporting faculty discovery of OER in my OER collections.

I work to build out our existing collections of OER so that I cover the greatest breadth of subject matter possible, and organize materials so it's easy for faculty to identify what they need. I typically curate from collections that I know and that have indicators of quality, like faculty reviews.

I often find that there is a lack of adequate controlled language for subjects in the higher education space, and that there’s an overall inconsistency in metadata across repositories, which slows me down. Because I think about discoverability, I’m concerned about the lack of metadata to handle the varied types of resources that faculty search for, and that OER aren’t embedded into the discovery systems they use.

Big picture, I’d like to be able to efficiently leverage the curation work of others (e.g., through collections-level metadata), and to also to share the curation work I’ve done to benefit the wider OER community.

Collections Maintenance Librarian, Jacques

Subject

Vetted by

License Type

Provider

Date Updated/Version

Material Type and Format

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If other states and consortia are also aligning OER to their courses, why can’t I leverage that?

I support the curation of OER for textbook replacement and course redesign—either as part of individual faculty projects or as part of broader initiatives for mapping OER to state-level course requirements.

Sometimes I cherry pick materials in gap areas, and other times I curate with a lens toward mapping OER I find to as many courses as possible within a discipline. I really need a way to increase my success in finding hard-to curate-for, upper level courses, including enhanced metadata to help in aligning materials outside of my area of expertise. I also want more detailed metadata that can help faculty discover the materials they need (e.g., accessibility metadata, more nuanced material type metadata, etc.).

I really wish I could more easily leverage and contribute to the curation work of other consortia, for example through a master record where participating libraries can access shared metadata, and add to it, as well as download and integrate it into their local records.

Course Redesign Support Librarian, Eva

Subject and TOC

Vetted by and Provider

Accessibility

Date Updated/Version

Material Type and Format

User Evaluations

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Creating a Cross Persona Map

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Persona Profile Highlights

Kendra,

Textbook Replacer (Faculty)

Kevin,

A La Carte Curator (Faculty)

Jacques,

Collections

Maintenance Librarian

Eva,

Course Redesign Support Librarian

Mira,

OER Reference

Librarian

Motivations

Goals

Painpoints

Be in compliance with institutional Affordable Learning policies
Attract more students to their course or section

Keeping course content relevant and up to date
Inspiration to build new and creative learning experiences

Support institutional Affordable Learning initiatives
Assist faculty who have come to them for help and support

Building and maintaining a repository that is attractive and useful to faculty and reference librarians

Design and Implement institutional OER programs
Support faculty and other librarians

Switch out publisher content for open content in as little time as possible

OER doesn’t look like and doesn’t come packaged like a textbook and the usual ancillaries

Find the newest and most interesting content for the next iteration of my course

It’s hard to understand licensing, and what I can use how. Especially because I like to combine a lot of diverse materials

Find targeted sets of OER that meet specific needs of a faculty member
Build sets of OER that can be returned to and referenced in the future

Are often tasked with finding and evaluating content far outside their subject area expertise

Find new collections to build out breadth and address gaps
Keep existing collections up to date

OER Collection maintenance requires a lot of manual work. Systems aren’t interoperable and metadata is inconsistent

Build collections containing high quality,relevant OER across a multitude of specific courses

It takes too much time to evaluate individual OER. Metadata doesn’t efficiently express quality and fit for me or for faculty.

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Commonalities Across Personas

Motivations

Goals

Painpoints

I want to find comprehensive content that covers all the topics in a course
I want to find content that has been positively reviewed and used by people with credentials I trust
I want to find the most up to date content available
I want to find content that meets accessibility standards
I want to find content that is made in easily used media formats

There are too many places to search and many of them contain the same materials
It’s difficult to tell the difference between versions. Is this an updated version of the same textbook? Has it been remixed or customized in some way, or is it just a duplicate?
It’s difficult to match ancillaries to core texts
It’s difficult to tell how accessible content is

Decrease student costs
Increase student engagement and success
Increase engagement and visibility in professional communities of practice

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Curation Decision Points & Metadata Needs Across Personas

Ancillaries Included?

Material Type

Title

Subject Area

Learning Level

Description

Table of Contents

Date Updated / Version

Alignment

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Ancillaries Included?

Material Type

Title

Subject Area

Learning Level

Description

Table of Contents

Date Updated / Version

Alignment

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Implications of the Findings for Library Practice, �and for OER Search & Discovery

Sophie Rondeau

Assessment & E-Resources Program Analyst, VIVA

Emily Frank

Affordable Learning Administrator, LOUIS: The Louisiana Library Network

Michelle Brennan

Product Manager, ISKME/OER Commons

[SR] Giving names and assigning images to these users through personas humanized them and their respective needs.The faculty personas shared many of the same needs and desires I have learned about through working collaboratively with faculty through our course mapping OER review process. Since the focus was on their metadata needs, these personas have helped me to think more strategically about the metadata needs of those engaging with VIVA Open and to consider those needs as I add new OER to the microsite. Balancing more traditional, full textbook user needs alongside the a la carte user requires careful evaluation of the OER so that metadata attribution accurately reflects the content and types of materials. For example, Kendra, the faculty persona looking for more traditional textbooks, wants metadata that helps her understand how comprehensive the materials are. Adding a table of contents to the metadata in the description field allows her to assess fairly quickly whether the OER will serve her course and to decide whether she wants to review it more carefully. As a result, I have started to add more table of contents to the descriptions in the item records. Although many of the faculty needs identified in the personas are things that are already addressed or can be addresses on the platform, some of those needs require more careful deliberation, outreach, and/or training.

It was also interesting to see some of my own needs reflected in the librarian personas, especially Jacques and Eva, so it was valuable to get more fully engaged with other consortia members to discuss ways those needs could be addressed. Mira, the OER Reference Librarian persona, also represents the needs of our OER campus leaders and advocates at our member library communities, and these users are critical stakeholders since they work closely with instructors.

[EF] First, it was exciting to participate in this type of process applying user-centered design in this way. Faculty from Louisiana participated in the in-depth interviews that resulted in these persona and the personas feel very relevant and familiar. One implication for me was a deeper understanding of the limitations in the metadata on our microsite and opportunities for enhanced metadata that will be possible with this project. I think about what Jacques said, how “there’s an overall inconsistency in metadata across repositories, which slows me down.” Within the LOUIS OER Commons microsite have really good consistency in terms of these standardized course catalog markings, which are easily searchable on our site. But, in our initial curation and course mapping project, we engaged librarians from across the state to help populate the site. Their work was essential to what we have achieve. But one thing I reflect on now is many participants bringing in content does mean some inconsistencies in how and how completely resources were tagged for areas like accessibility, education level, material type. This becomes an issue when users apply these filters in the advanced search. The opportunity to build out records with the metadata of other microsites and achieve more uniform and complete records (both in terms of tags and in terms of beneficial record content, like ToC) will be a significant enhancement to our site in terms of discovery.

[MB] The work redefined what we mean by course aligned.

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