December 2021

A Note from the Dean

Dear Colleagues,

Welcome back! Now that we are past the late autumn break, we begin the sprint to the end of the semester. Thank you for all your hard work to continue our educational mission for the past many months--still amid a pandemic. Through my own teaching and scholarship in 2020-21, I know firsthand the extraordinary energy that it takes to keep pressing forward in the current atmosphere in the world, the nation, on campus, and at home. You have done great things. Truly, thank you.

Warm wishes for a restorative December break,

Chawne

A note on open educational resources

State Level Support for Open Education Resources

The ecosystem of open educational resources (OER) is rich and vibrant in the state of Virginia. OER are a great way for faculty to give themselves more freedom and flexibility to adapt textbooks to their own pedagogical needs while also helping student's keep textbook cost down. Faculty often write open textbooks to replace costly textbooks and to allow others to reuse and remix the content without any copyright or license fees. Adapting resources can be as simple as rewriting questions to be more relevant to students and as complex as creating an entirely new textbook by combining chapters from various OER.

Virginia's Academic Consortium (VIVA) is growing support for OER in the state through grants and other incentives. VIVA Open! is a catalog of curated OER that includes faculty reviews and collections specifically mapped to high enrollment courses, along with a growing collection of OER created by Virginia faculty.

With VIVA's support, W&L offers workshops about OER and the Open Education Network (OEN), after which faculty are invited to write a review of any OER cataloged in the Open Textbook Library for a $200 stipend. Paula S. Kiser, the Digital Scholarship Librarian and OEN Campus Leader, typically offers these workshops during Fall Academy.

Faculty who are interested in replacing a textbook with a pre-exiting OER may be interested in the VIVA Open Adopt Grant. This grant gives the faculty member $2,000 to help pay them for their time spent updating their class to the OER. Prof. Julia Hernández, Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish, is a recipient of the most recent round of Open Adopt grants. VIVA also offers grants to people interested in writing new or heavily augmenting existing OER with Open Course Grants ranging from $2,000 to $30,000. The next round of Open Course grants will be announced in late fall 2021.

If anyone is interested in learning about how they can find, adopt, or adapt OER to meet their pedagogical needs or wants to explore submitting a grant application for either the Open Course or Open Adopt grants in the future, contact Paula S. Kiser, Digital Scholarship Librarian and Assistant Professor, at kiserp@wlu.edu.