“Never tire to learn and teach others.”—Confucius

In times of shifting learning landscapes and calls for schools and libraries to be future ready, librarians can and must expand our traditional role as resource curators. It’s time to step up and become OER ninjas!

What’s OER?

The Hewlett Foundation defines the OER as “high-quality teaching, learning, and research materials that are free for people everywhere to use and repurpose” (http://www.hewlett.org/strategy/open-educational-resources/). This definition covers many types of educational goods: videos, books, eBooks, assessments, and even complete courses that are Creative Commons Zero (no rights reserved) or otherwise licensed to permit reuse, modification, and re-sharing.

What’s Happening?

Where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going reveals the necessity for librarians to lead the charge into the realm of open educational resources.

First, where we’ve been: Libraries traditionally have been the first place in schools that have provided digital subscriptions and research portals. This fact underscores libraries as the natural pathway for schools’ shift to digital resources (Center for Digital Education 2016).

Where we are: In the 2016 School Library Journal annual School Library Spending Survey, 30% of respondents reported having used OER materials, while an additional 45% said that OER materials were “on their radar” but they had not yet used them (Barack 2016, p.46). This result highlights that the time for action is now!

Finally, where we’re going: Librarians must rise to the call to fulfill some key missions, including selecting, integrating, and organizing digital materials; developing digital curation skills in others; and building instructional partnerships. Each of these missions boosts our ability to “support transformational teaching and learning” (Future Ready Schools 2017).

But Why Us?

There’s so much noise in the digital landscape! Librarians can and must lead the charge to slice through the noise to get to the good stuff. Curation is how we make sense of it all. In her October 4, 2011 blog post on content curation, expert Beth Kantor noted, “In today’s world of content abundance, the skill of how to find, make sense, and share content that we need to be effective in our work is critical. Simply put, being a content curator is a method to help you stay informed about your field and be more effective at your job” (http://www.bethkanter.org/content-curation-101/). Educators must keep up with trends and issues shaping the evolution of our field. Future Ready Schools and the Department of Education’s Go Open movement each demand that librarians and teachers grow their digital curation skills.

Teachers have to be ready to meet their students where they are, whether onsite, online or a combination of the two. As teachers of teachers, librarians, too, must be ready. Finding, evaluating, and using OER is how we can start meeting our goals. Helping teachers keep up with changes and trends means helping them stay engaged with their instructional practice. Engaged educators create better classroom environments for learners.

So, where to begin? How can we inspire and guide our teacher colleagues through the OER jungles? Grab your favorite hachimaki (headband) and do some stretching because this is the job custom-tailored for your ninja skills! Step up and take ownership. This is a big opportunity to lead your learning community as an OER curation coach.

Just as a ninja doesn’t need a lot of gear to get the job done, the shift to OER doesn’t require your school to have big bucks to spend.

First, master the moves and plan your attack

• Explore the ever-growing variety of OER collections/platforms to get a good bead on what’s out there.
• Learn the search quirks of your favorite portals. What possible search paths do they have? What special features exist? What’s the most efficient path to point teachers toward?
• Curation of OER is active, professional research. Don’t overlook the workflow aspect. This type of search takes time, patience, and super organization. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. Plan to give teacher friends the tools and skills they’ll need to manage the giant horde of resources!
• Decide how to share your expertise and ideas for how to keep it all organized. Arm teachers with curation tools they can use to keep track of the new resources they are finding. Suggest platforms like Google Docs or HyperDocs to encourage collaboration.
• Develop supports. Make basic how-to guides to help teachers get started. Consider how these supports will need to grow as teachers delve deeper into OER. (See our OER Coaching Bo-ryaku below!)
• Plan how to help teachers understand Creative Commons (CC) licenses. Working with OER provides the opportune time to clarify CC, copyright, and transformative fair use.
• Evaluate what’s needed by your learning community. Know stakeholders, build strong lines of communication, and be able to look for spots to ply your ninja skills!

Next, Convince Your Colleagues

What’s in it for them? Teachers must be made aware of the why and the what for themselves before they can be expected to earnestly and enthusiastically buy into what you are selling. If needed, give background on the U.S. Department of Education’s Go Open movement, the trends away from commercial textbooks, and the growing need for high-quality, low cost educational materials. Go Open empowers teachers to take greater charge of the quality of the learning experiences they offer.

Exploring new resources helps teachers because it:

• Exposes teachers to differing and broadened perspectives and approaches to the same content, blowing away the notion of “this is the way it has to be taught”
• Inspires professional sharing and collaboration
• Reveals emerging themes, instructional techniques, and styles of presentation
• Builds reflective practice
• Broadens and deepens teachers’ understanding of the standards they must achieve with learners
• Reinforces, enhances, and polishes teachers’ information fluency

Learning to use OER activates five key information fluency skills: access, evaluation, analysis, synthesis, and ethical reuse. Exploring OER is an opportunity to help teachers refine and polish their own search skills, building capacity for them to be stronger search guides to their students (access). Assessing overall quality of a lesson or resource in terms of the subject matter and pedagogical best practices (evaluation) helps teachers become more reflective about their own work output. Reviewing resources (analysis) in light of local context (i.e. classroom, learners, content) prompts teachers to consider whether these items have sufficient modularity (i.e. can be separated into components) to be remixed or reused with their existing content. They can also consider whether formats and features work with usability tools like transcriptions, text-to-speech, etc., that students may need. Teachers have to determine where and how new learning objects will fit into or change their existing content (synthesis). Finally, as they integrate new items, teachers must ensure that all rules of engagement (i.e. Creative Commons licensing) have been followed (ethical reuse).

Learning to curate and use open education resources can help teachers:

• Increase productivity
• Build upon their professional interests and knowledge
• Get creative and take inspiration from the work of others
• Reclaim classroom ownership in a self-directed way
• Grow in authorship of their content
• Take students on new paths of discovery
• Expand their planning and teaching toolbox
• Connect and expand their collaborations and take their professional learning network well beyond their local onsite crew

As teachers share their remixes, they are also expanding their online social presence and are being empowered as creators. Collaboration is highly encouraged and increasingly supported by OER sites like OER Commons, where teachers can come together in new communities of practice.

When you’ve found your OER teacher partner, you are ready for the OER Coaching Bo-ryaku—our strategy for coaching teachers through the jungles of OER! (see below)

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”—Confucius

What Else?

Now that you know why and how, there’s still one more thing! Your digital dojo! To reach your full potential as an OER coach, make sure your library portal is fierce! Whether you use LibGuides, or a wiki, or work from your school’s website, do everything you can to make this a dynamic, media-rich portal that smoothly integrates with the teachers’ new instructional environment. Make OER platforms easily discoverable for teachers while ensuring that the resources the library already has are in the mix, keeping local instructional value at the forefront of your planning. Integrate your online library with playlists of content resources ready to be tapped for differentiation, remediation, and enrichment.

Share our ninja librarian’s best kept secret: the LibGuides Community! This astounding wealth of searchable, professionally-curated resources can be culled through and selected to be used in conjunction with OER lessons and other instructional resources. Teach colleagues to reflect on how media and resources found in the community might accompany their newly reused/remixed OERs.

Contributing and leading professional development in our schools continues the librarian’s role as capacity builder. We can help our learning communities grow with widened opportunities for just-in-time, personalized, multimodal, and highly relevant learning. So, why wait? Jump right into the mix, library ninjas, leap to your leadership role and help to transform learning in your school.

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists; when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: We did it ourselves.”—Lao Tzu