In May 2023, Iowa OER hosted a webinar featuring Anne Marie Gruber, Associate Professor of Library Services and Liaison & Textbook Equity Librarian at the University of Northern Iowa and Stephen Cummings, Clinical Associate Professor, Distance Education Administrator, and MSW Program Director at the School of Social Work at the University of Iowa. These speakers discussed their experience participating in the pilot disciplinary Communities of Practice through Iowa OER, and the importance of communities like this for advancing open education work within academic disciplines.
Background: OER Communities of Practice
The Iowa OER action team developed the pilot program for disciplinary Communities of Practice (CoP) last year. The goals of the program was to help instructors across institutions in Iowa connect with their peers within the same or related disciplines, to build expertise in open education, and perhaps even create OER to support their field or program.
The pilot began in the fall of 2022 with a call for applications asking instructors across institutional lines to share their interest in participating in a disciplinary group to learn and work towards OER projects for their teaching. From this survey, two disciplines were identified with a broad base of interest: English and Social Work. These two disciplinary teams began meeting in 2022 through the entire 2022/2023 academic year.
In addition to bringing these groups together to discuss their shared interest in OER, the Iowa OER action team had volunteers from among our members facilitate the groups and help direct the instructors’ professional development. Anne Marie Gruber, a liaison librarian with extensive experience supporting Social Work faculty at UNI, led the Social Work CoP, and Shannon Brenner, an Instructional Designer at Northeast Iowa Community College, facilitated the group in English.
Community of Practice Facilitation
The CoPs met monthly throughout the academic year, building their awareness and understanding of open education topics and discussing issues relevant to their field. As Anne Marie shares, for one of their monthly meetings, the Social Work CoP “discussed a scholarly article about an undergraduate Social Work program that has transitioned to a fully zero-textbook-cost model for their students,” helping instructors understand how programmatic change can be handled to support openness and affordability across our programs.
As the CoP continued meeting and having deeper discussions, they transitioned their work into a more project-based approach. They are currently building a manuscript for an article which 5 of the participants are co-authoring with Anne Marie on the connections between open educational practices and the disciplinary accreditation standards in Social Work, mapping standards to open education concepts such as equity and access.
Reflecting on the Community of Practice Approach
As she looked back on her experience supporting the Social Work CoP this academic year, Anne Marie shared how this work was particularly impactful in her eyes:
“I think it was really advantageous to connect folks within the same discipline in Iowa who are at different stages of their experience with OER. We had some folks who were really brand new to OER and just starting to learn about it and other folks, like Stephen, who had quite a bit of experience and took kind of a leadership role in discussions, talking about using and even creating OER for their courses.”
Stephen’s Experience
Following Anne Marie’s discussion about facilitating the Social Work CoP, Dr. Stephen Cummings took the stage to share his experience as an active participant in the pilot. Stephen began his portion of the webinar by sharing his experiences with the high cost of textbooks, both as an instructor and as a student. As Stephen recounted, when he was an undergraduate at the University of Iowa in 1989, there were rumors that some books in the Medical College cost upwards of $100. Now, many courses across the university would consider that a standard cost. It was this persistent barrier to accessing course materials that first drew Stephen to OER as a way to not only bring down costs for students but to take cost out of the equation altogether.
Thankfully, Stephen works at the University of Iowa, so he has access to support for the through the OpenHawks grant program. With an OpenHawks grant, Stephen was able to get support for the adaptation of existing open content for his courses. He makes it clear, however, that he did not need to develop new materials in bulk for this project. Instead, he adapted existing materials and supplemented them where necessary. Since not all instructors have access to grant support, it’s important to note that using OER does not have to require an all-or-nothing, “create from scratch or adopt as-is” approach.
The work of using OER doesn’t have to happen all at once, either. One of the nice things about OER, Stephen shared, is that things can be changed over time. “I can move things around, adapt them accordingly, and that’s what we did. [Later], with a colleague, we actually started writing new material to go with the existing web objects that we’re using (articles, all of that) and we published that last summer.”
Reflecting on the Community of Practice as a Participant
Looking back on his experience with the CoP specifically, Stephen shared that is was interesting to connect with peers with different levels of experience and comfort with OER, and to discuss the potential for OER in Social Work courses with his peers.
As Stephen shared, “I recommend that faculty participate in future groups, absolutely, I think if you’re thinking at all about how OER works in your world… This is nothing necessarily new. It’s just exciting how you can continue to, with the different design choices that you make or the pedagogical focuses that you have, really do some creative things that I think are impactful to students. So I would definitely encourage people to participate in them.”
Next Steps for the Communities of Practice
To round out the webinar, Anne Marie gave a preview of Iowa OER’s plans for next year’s CoP program, and the future of the Social Work CoP.
The future of the Social Work CoP
While not all members may stay on board, many of the instructors on the Social Work CoP will continue to collaborate regularly as they develop their article’s manuscript and build on the relationships that they’ve developed over the past year.
The future of Disciplinary CoPs from Iowa OER
For the Communities of Practice program, that, too, will be continuing, with a new call for interested faculty planned for early in the fall of 2023. This year, Iowa OER is hoping to find additional disciplinary areas to support, with the potential for other types of collaborations, like groups for overarching disciplines (STEM, Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities) or for groups with similar experience levels (OER novices or OER experts).
More details about the exact shape and makeup of those groups will be determined by those who apply, so stay tuned for updates and please let us know if you’re interested in participating! You can stay up to date on Iowa OER’s work by signing up for the Iowa OER email listserv in Google Groups.