The OER Mix Tape: School Librarians Using OER in Instructional Practice

Most of us know that open educational resources (OER) are free, digital, easily shared learning materials (DeRosa and Robison 2017). However, are you aware of open educational pedagogy (OEP)? Open pedagogy means creating assignments students can help to create, adapt, and reuse. What if I told you open pedagogy could help you to become a better school librarian and teacher? What if I told you that your students will be more happily engaged in classes that incorporate open pedagogy? The "OER Evidence Report" shows that using OER and OEP positively impacts teaching skills and learner satisfaction (de los Arcos, Farrow, Perryman, Pitt, and Weller 2014).

School librarians can implement open pedagogy in a variety of ways. For instance:

• Student Designed Lessons: Give students a learning objective and ask them to design the lesson about how this could be taught.
• Lesson Refresh: After one of your tried and true lessons, share the slide presentation and activity worksheets/assessments with the class and ask them to revise them. Ask them: What changes would help them to learn the content or skill better?
• Team Teaching: Invite students to collaborate as teams on developing and teaching a unit of instruction on a specific upcoming topic.
• Feedback: Ask your students what their expectations are for the class at the beginning of the school year. Specifically, ask them what they want to learn. Check in with them throughout the academic year to see if they think they are learning what they expected and wanted to learn. Make adjustments to meet their learning goals.
• Integrate and Update Technology: Browse through the list of AASL's Best Websites for Teaching and Learning (http://www.ala.org/aasl/standards/best/websites) and examine these free and accessible tools as a way for your students to explore a new topic or unit of study. Keep the learning focused on what students are expecting to learn.

The inclusion of OEP allows student work to be personalized, relevant, and contextual for your students and their communities. Asking students for their opinion also provides them with the power and ability to contribute their own intellectual property to their learning process.

Three Examples of Open Educational Pedagogy:

1. I created a Fractals in Geometry lesson using OER maps to teach high school geometry students about the symmetry of fractals in a collaboration between a math teacher and a school librarian (Harland and Hannah 2016). This adaptable lesson with embedded OER is located on the OER Commons, a digital hub developed by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education.
2. Bartlett and Miller developed an exploration of data and bias in middle school science class (2016). This collaborative lesson between a school librarian and a middle school science teacher is another customizable project available on the OER Commons hub.
3. Elementary students' using blogs to publish their work to an open audience helps to empower student voice and shares the writing your students are doing with the greater educational community (Lightle 2014). Encouraging your students to select their own topics and to share their work with an audience of other educators or students using a tool like Edublogs (https://edublogs.org) will be motivating to them and will help them to write for an authentic audience.

Challenge yourself to take some of these ideas, build on them, refine them, and customize them to meet the needs of your students and the objectives of your lessons and then share what you come up with far and wide.

Challenges for Creating OEP

While OEP can positively impact your instructional practice and your students' learning, there are some challenges that need to be acknowledged.

• Time: It takes time to adapt your current practice. Revising lessons and refreshing units of study are all time-consuming practices.
• Control: Some librarians and teachers will find it frightening to put learning into the hands of their students.
• Focus: Changing your attention from being an instructor of students, to being a facilitator of their learning is another challenge. Closely related to control, changing your focus from informing your class to helping them find it easier to learn is a definite challenge.

In order to address some of these challenges, start off small by adapting one lesson and evaluating what you and your students got out of it. If your students were more engaged and learned the lesson's content or skill, consider adjusting additional lessons. You may also want to respond to some of these challenges and improve your OER and OEP practice by taking Mountain Heights Academy's OER Passport online professional development program (http://mountainheightsoer.org). We often ask our students to take risks: developing open pedagogy is definitely a risk worth taking for school librarians.

Curate Quality Open Educational Resources for Your School:

It seems that once a month a new organization is opening their collections to the world. New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art has released 375,000 works of art into the public domain without restriction (https://www.metmuseum.org/). Earlier this year NASA made their entire media library accessible and copyright free (https://images.nasa.gov/). Take the time to review, evaluate, organize, and share these resources with teachers at your school who offer instruction on related topics. Browse additional resources using an OER search tool like Amazon's Inspire (https://www.amazoninspire.com).

Organize OER you find using a curation tool like Wakelet (https://wakelet.com), Symbaloo (https://www.symbaloo.com), or Padlet (https://padlet.com). Share your curated resources with students, teachers, and other librarians. Connect learners and educators at your school with valuable and open information resources and help to build meaningful inquiry units around them.

Final Step: Share Your Work

According to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and repurposing by others (2019). Once you develop an OEP lesson or curate a collection of OER, be sure to pay it forward by sharing it with other educators. Allow your school librarian colleagues around the world to learn from your practice by sharing what you have done under a Creative Commons license that authorizes others to attribute your work and intellectual property to you, while still taking what you have done and reusing it for the greater good of improving education for all. Let the product of the teaching you do instruct those individuals beyond your school library, classroom, and school. Share it on a resource like Curriki (https://www.curriki.org), a site designed for K-12 teachers to create, share, and explore high quality OER and OEP content.

Create your own OER mix tape of open pedagogical practice and encourage other school librarians to use and revise your original work.

Works Cited

Bartlett, Rachel and Angie Miller. "An Exploration of Data & Bias." OER Commons. Accessed July 31, 2019 https://www.oercommons.org/authoring/17880-an-exploration-of-data-bias.

de los Arcos, Bea, Robert Farrow, Leigh-Ann Perryman, Rebecca Pitt, and Martin Weller. "OER Evidence Report 2013-2014." OER Research Hub. https://oerresearchhub.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/oerrh-evidence-report-2014.pdf Accessed July 31, 2019.

DeRosa, Robin and Scott Robison. "From OER to Open Pedagogy: Harnessing the Power of Open." In: Jhangiani, R S and Biswas-Diener, R. (eds.) Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science, pp. 115–124. London: Ubiquity Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/bbc.i.

Harland, Pam and Rebecca Hanna. "Fractals in Geometry." OER Commons. https://www.oercommons.org/authoring/14267-fractals-in-geometry-fractal-cities-final. Accessed July 31, 2019.

Lightle, Kimberly. "Teacher Tools that Integrate Technology: Educational Blogging." OER Commons. https://www.oercommons.org/courses/teacher-tools-that-integrate-technology-educational-blogging. Accessed July 31, 2019.

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. "Open Educational Resources." https://hewlett.org/strategy/open-educational-resources. Accessed July 31, 2019