Library Champions OER Project 2024

This guide is intended for students and staff working on the Library Champions OER Project, Feb-April 2024. 

The Workshop: here you will find the slides from our workshop held on 28th February. 

The Project: here you will find information about the project tasks.

Please feel free to get in touch via email or Teams, if you have any questions. 

The majority of the world's research is published behind a paywall and, therefore, unavailable to the public. The cost of accessing journal articles and ebooks can be prohibitively expensive for students. Integrating Open Education Resources (OERs) into our courses by using or creating Open Access content, can help to reduce the financial burden on not only King's students, but for students globally. Currently, we don't know how much Open Access material is already being used in our courses. Therefore, we propose to review a portion of King's reading lists to gain a better understanding of what materials we use. This will inform the next phase of the project to create and use Open Education Resources.

What to expect:

You will meet as a group of 10 for a 3-hour on-site workshop at Bush House on 28^th February, 1-4pm, together Charlie Worthington and Katie Hughes. In this workshop we will provide an overview of Open Access: what it is, what it isn't, and the benefits of using Open Access in higher education. We will also talk about Open Education Resources (OERs) in terms of what they are, and how to use, create, and share them under copyright. This workshop will be interactive and include a fun activity. Once we have the knowledge fundamentals down, we will go through the project brief and the audit tool we'll be using to complete our reading list audit. We will use the latter part of the session to start work on the audit together, identifying subject areas to focus on and solving any problems that arise.

In March, this will be followed by a 3-hour Reading List audit session, and a further 2 hour research session on Open Education Resources in March /April.

In summary, we’ll need 8 hours of your time.

Why we are doing it: 

Making research openly available to the public is part of King’s Vision 2029. The research undertaken by students as part of this project will lay the foundations for further exploratory work within King’s Libraries & Collections on the creation and publication of OERs at King's.