By providing faculty with publishing services for Open Educational Resources (OER) the library at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has positioned itself to support UWM’s strategic goals around faculty scholarship and student learning outcomes. Kristin Woodward, Online Programs and Instructional Design Coordinator, reports that faculty want to showcase their teaching excellence through multimedia digital publishing where they can control, update, and track the content. At the same time, they can help UWM achieve affordable education initiatives. A recent UWM Libraries news post, “Digital Commons Provides Opportunities for UWM Faculty,” reported that these needs were met when “UWM faculty found an open access solution utilizing the UWM Digital Commons.”
UWM’s broad open educational initiative is supporting faculty in diverse ways:
- Comparative Literature Professor Carolyn Seymour-Jorn digitally enhanced a novel to illuminate Egyptian cultural references with photos and videos of songs. It is important to her to track global readership through the Author Dashboard as the results may inform future work.
- Philosophy Senior Lecturer Matthew Knachel is writing an OA textbook with Creative Commons license to save his students money, and publishing it chapter by chapter, incorporating feedback as he goes. Maintaining this control over its publication means that he can exactly align his textbook with the way he teaches the course.
- Professor Mohammed Aman recently reached out to Kristin to publish in the IR’s School of Information Studies Faculty Books, making his books free for students. He had self-published his works many years ago but finds they are more discoverable in the IR.
- Art History Professor Derek Counts looked to the library to publish an Open Access Casebook on digital methods in archeology that emerged from a workshop funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
- Professor Gerald Bergtrom’s annotated iTextbook Cell and Molecular Biology is one of the most downloaded OER in the repository.
To see further OER examples, register here for our upcoming webinar.
