Track Session Type

Sustainability: Grant Acquisition & Management, Sustainability, Engaging Student Leaders, OER for Resilience, OER Community Building, OER and Technology

Presentation Type

Presentation

OER Level of Expertise

Intermediate

Audience

Faculty, Librarian, instructional designer, Administrator, Staff, Other

Session Abstract

In this session, we will share five research-derived personas that highlight goals and pain points of higher education stakeholders in discovering and adopting OER, and how we are using these personas to improve design of tools and services. Participants will be invited to give feedback and share their own experiences.

Objectives of the Session

Attendees will be familiar with five distinct higher education librarian and faculty user personas, and will learn how these personas can be leveraged to support OER discovery and adoption.

Full Description of the Session

To achieve widespread adoption of OER in higher education, faculty must be able to easily find OER that aligns with their needs. The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) created and maintains the OER Commons, a digital library of open educational resources, as well as custom hubs and microsites for sharing and discovering OER. In an effort to better understand the challenges encountered by higher education faculty and librarians when searching for and selecting OER to use in the classroom, ISKME conducted a series of in depth think-aloud interviews with users across the U.S. From these interviews, five distinct types of librarian and faculty users emerged. In this session, we will go over these 5 user personas, and share how those personas and the research that informed them is guiding current work to create search experiences and metadata application practices that are more useful to faculty members. Session participants will be polled to see which (if any) of the personas they identify with and where additional research may be helpful, give feedback on some of the tools that were created in response to this research, and give input on other ways these personas might be leveraged to improve OER initiatives more broadly.

Presenter Bios

Michelle Brennan leads overall product development for ISKME's Open Access Digital Library Platforms. Collaborating across research, UX, engineering, and customer service teams, she works to define and deliver features and services that bring value to our partners and further the vision of equitable and open access to high quality educational materials. Michelle received her Masters in Information Science from the University of Michigan School of Information where she worked as an Instructional Technology Support Librarian. She is passionate about the role of open knowledge tools in education because improving opportunities for participation in collaborative spaces is an important part of empowering individuals and communities.

Selena Burns is a Senior Research Associate for the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) where she develops, manages, and implements research grants and applied research projects related to OER. Prior to her time at ISKME, she worked on NSF and IES funded science education research and evaluation projects in partnership with Bay Area higher education institutions and non-profits. She has a PhD in Educational Theatre from New York University and a Masters in Communication from Stanford. Selena has a particular interest in research that supports equitable and inclusive education and the elevation of diverse voices in the curriculum.

Publishing Permission

1

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Start Date

27-5-2022 11:30 AM

End Date

27-5-2022 12:00 PM

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May 27th, 11:30 AM May 27th, 12:00 PM

Using Librarian and Faculty Personas to Design OER Discovery Solutions

To achieve widespread adoption of OER in higher education, faculty must be able to easily find OER that aligns with their needs. The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) created and maintains the OER Commons, a digital library of open educational resources, as well as custom hubs and microsites for sharing and discovering OER. In an effort to better understand the challenges encountered by higher education faculty and librarians when searching for and selecting OER to use in the classroom, ISKME conducted a series of in depth think-aloud interviews with users across the U.S. From these interviews, five distinct types of librarian and faculty users emerged. In this session, we will go over these 5 user personas, and share how those personas and the research that informed them is guiding current work to create search experiences and metadata application practices that are more useful to faculty members. Session participants will be polled to see which (if any) of the personas they identify with and where additional research may be helpful, give feedback on some of the tools that were created in response to this research, and give input on other ways these personas might be leveraged to improve OER initiatives more broadly.