This blog post was written by Abbey Elder, Open Access & Scholarly Communication Librarian at Iowa State University.
In November 2020, our very first Resource Highlight blog post was shared on the Iowa OER blog. Now reaching the 12th month of our Resource Highlights, we wanted to reflect on the past year and the work that Iowa OER has accomplished with the support of the wider community of educators and support staff across the state of Iowa.
Blog posts
The Iowa OER blog serves three main purposes:
- to share updates about Iowa OER’s work, as relevant to the community,
- to highlight resources, tools, and practices of interest to the Open Ed community in our monthly Resource Highlights, and
- to link and summarize the webinars hosted by the Iowa OER team on a semi-monthly basis.
Over the past year, we’ve covered a lot of topics on the blog, but I’ve pulled together a few of potential interest below, for those of you who might have missed them:
Webinar: Course Marking for OER
In our first webinar with guest speakers from outside of Iowa, we were joined by a group of experts in the field as they discussed their work implementing course marking initiatives at the institutional and state level. Course markings are described as an icon, filter, or other tag within a Student Information System (SIS) or textbook listing that denotes whether a resource is free, low-cost, or open.
The speakers for this webinar were Jessica Kirschner (Virginia Commonwealth University), Rebel Cummings-Sauls (The Florida Academic Library Services Cooperative), and Nathan Smith (Houston Community College). Read more about their talk or watch the recording on our April 2021 blog post.
Resource: The Rebus Community
Similar to our first webinar, our first Resource Highlight focused on how you can leverage the expertise or external OER experts to support your work. Specifically, our November 2020 blog post featured the Rebus Community, an online community with resources to help OER authors and program managers handle every step of the content creation process, from putting out a call for co-authors or peer reviewers to sharing information about recently published works.
Update: A New Communications Plan for Iowa OER
In an effort to better share our work across the state, the Iowa OER team posted a short update in January 2021 detailing our new Communications Plan, which explains where and how we communicate updates and news to you!
Interested in reading up on this resource or adding yourself to our list of Key Contacts by College? Read through the blog post and its attached resources for more information.
Webinar: Securing Special Funding for OER
One of the more recent webinars from Iowa OER featured members of our team who had received state funding to support local OER efforts, as we explained how we applied for, received, and managed our grants. Including representatives from Iowa’s private colleges, state universities, and community colleges, our August 2021 webinar featured some great tips for those pondering how to get funding to support their ongoing work.
The speakers for this webinar included Jenni Breems, Director of Library Services at Dordt University, Abbey Elder, Open Access & Scholarly Communication Librarian at Iowa State University, and Teri Koch, Coordinator of Serials, Acquisitions & Electronic Resources at Drake University.
Resource: Finding CTE Resources
Many of our resource highlights relate to tools for finding OER, or featuring specific open resources that may be of interest to our community. In our February 2021 Resource Highlight, Kyle Collins, Associate Dean of Online and Blended Learning at Northeast Iowa Community College, featured some tools for locating OER for Career and Technical Education (CTE) courses.
Update: 2022 Iowa OER Summit
Finally, one of the more exciting updates we’ve shared on our blog was the recent announcement of the 2022 Iowa OER Summit, a free, virtual conference for educators and practitioners across Iowa to come together and share their work in the Open Education space. As the conference describes itself, this is a place where you will have “opportunities to forge connections, collaborations, and partnerships that promote openness.”
You can register for free now and learn more on the 2022 Iowa OER Virtual Summit website.
Conclusion
There are a lot of things that Iowa OER is not. We are not an official consortium. We do not have a program manager, a budget, or a charge given to us by some overseeing body. What we are is a group of faculty, staff, and librarians from across all sectors of education who have come together to advance the awareness, use, and quality of Open Educational Resources and practices across the state of Iowa.
If you want to contribute a topic for a future resource highlight, share your thoughts on our work, or just keep in touch with other educators and support staff working with Open Education in Iowa, join our mailing list or get in touch with us via our contact form: https://iowaoer.com/contact/