Director of Outreach and Strategic Engagement BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
The emergence of openly licensed educational resources in ecology has the potential to increase engagement among traditionally underrepresented learner populations and to better align contemporary scientific research and teaching practices. However, realizing these benefits will depend on increasing the awareness, use, and sharing of open education resources among STEM faculty. Lowering faculty barriers to participation in the open education movement requires attention to both the technical infrastructure for accessing, and the social support around using OER. Technical barriers include things like understanding search strategies for finding and organizing resources and making OER publishing as seamless as possible. Social barriers include gaining confidence working with openly licensed teaching materials, and having a supportive setting for exploring new teaching and learning strategies. The BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium hosts the QUBES OER Library as part of a comprehensive effort to address these challenges by integrating support for education reform projects and faculty professional development with emerging open education practices. This presentation will describe the strategies used to improve accessibility of the OER Library and support its use with professional development opportunities called Faculty Mentoring Networks (FMNs). FMNs are collaborative, semester-long opportunities for teachers to discover, customize, implement, and publish open resources. This professional learning model explicitly integrates social and technical support for faculty to engage in the full OER lifecycle which includes the expectation that they will publish their adaptation of the OER and describe how it was modified to fit a particular course context, or student audience. Using the QUBES platform, BioQUEST hosts over 100 education projects and partners, and has a registered user base of over 8,000 members. We have coordinated over 70 FMNs serving over 350 faculty during the last nine years. Integrating social and technical aspects of engaging with OER make it possible to collect, curate, and disseminate a diverse array of education reform resources in a scalable and sustainable manner.