VALE OER Certificate Course – Spring 2022
Cohort In May-June, 2022, 13 participants from VALE member libraries completed the VALE OER Certificate course. Participants were grouped into four cohorts, each led by an OER Ambassador, to develop a multi-institutional collaborative project as they worked through the course material. Four openly-licensed projects were developed and added to OpenNJ, making them available for any institution to use and adapt based on their own local contexts.
Congratulations to our first cohort who earned certificates:
| Amanda Cowell | The College of New Jersey | Emerging Technologies and Digital Projects Librarian |
| Ana Fontoura | Fairleigh Dickinson University | University Librarian |
| Anastacia McCloskey | Ocean County College | Digital Services Librarian |
| Annie Chatterjee | Essex County College | Scholarly Communication Librarian |
| Isabel Gray | Camden County College | Director, Library Services |
| James Cox | Hudson County Community College | Director of Patron Services |
| Justin Savage | Montclair State University | Research and Reference Librarian |
| Maria Deptula | Berkeley College | Director, Library Digital Services |
| Michael D’Agostino | Rowan College at Burlington County | Librarian |
| Richard Kearney | William Paterson University | Electronic Resources Librarian |
| Sharon Whitfield | Rider University | Electronic Resources & User Access Librarian |
| Victoria Swanson | Caldwell University | Interim Library Director |
| William Vincenti | Montclair State University | Librarian |
VALE OER Ambassadors, 2021 – 2023
- Megan Dempsey, Instructional Services Librarian, Raritan Valley Community College
- Muhammad Hassan, Executive Director, Nancy Thompson Learning Commons, Kean University
- Lily Todorinova, Undergraduate Experience Librarian/Open Educational Research, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
Spring 2022 Collaborative Projects
Metrics for Promoting Open Educational Resources and Assessing Their Impact
Annie Chatterjee and Richard Kearney
The purpose of this toolkit is to provide practical support to academic libraries seeking to play a campus-wide leadership role in Open Educational Resources (OER) advocacy and implementation through engagement with key stakeholder groups at their institutions. The toolkit identifies key metrics associated with OER for engagement with any strategic campus constituency – e.g., faculty, students, administrators, academic support units, the campus bookstore, etc. – to help make the case for OER implementation. These metrics, which can be tailored to any specific group, can support both advocacy for the adoption of OER and ongoing assessment of the impact of implementation at the course, departmental, college, or institution-wide level. Suggestions for data collection methods are provided for each metric.
Access the Metrics toolkit in OpenNJ
Faculty OER Workshop Slide Deck
James Cox, Amanda Cowell and Michael D’Agostino
This template slide deck was created using information and strategies learned during the course and is intended to be adapted and customized by institutions using their own local context. It can be modified by librarians/library staff or other OER advocates at a campus and delivered to faculty to educate them about OER, the 5Rs, and the resources available to discover, modify and create OER.
Access the slide deck in OpenNJ
Administrator Outreach
Maria Deptula, Victoria Swanson, Bill Vincenti, and Sharon Whitfield
Finding financial support for OER initiatives is difficult at many higher education institutions. Faculty who would like to create or adopt OER require support from their institution. The purpose of this project is to find financial support for OER initiatives in higher education institutions. The project consists of a survey (which will be used to collect evidence of faculty needs), a workflow to find financial support at your campus, and a template to contact potential financial partners.
OER Toolkit
Ana Fontoura, Isabel Gray, Justin Savage
The OER Toolkit Group (Group #1) will be developing a centralized link repository for OER guides, toolkits, FAQs, slide decks, videos, etc. We hope to house this repository on a webpage within the greater VALE website. Links to developed OER materials from institutions throughout the state will be included, and categorized on the webpage based on the overall theme of the material (Finding OER, Creating OER, Copyright/Licensing, Open Pedagogy, Discipline-Specific OER). The goal of this project is to centralize online materials that libraries and librarians from throughout New Jersey have created, such that a librarian developing OER-related materials at their own institution has one place they can look to find relevant examples to draw from. Project success could possibly be assessed by: a survey of those who use the site to get feedback, asking users to contribute with links to successful projects as a result of using the toolkit, keeping statistics on number of times the site was accessed/info downloaded, track the number of times the toolkit is shared/referenced. Furthermore, the idea is to eventually embed this object as a standing assignment within the VALE OER certificate program, with each new cohort being responsible for reviewing, adding, subtracting, and soliciting new links and materials for the repository.”