Today’s post is written by Megan Bauerle (she/her), OER for Social Justice project assistant.
This spring, I joined the William H. Hannon Library at Loyola Marymount University as an assistant for the OER for Social Justice project. My role is to help with open educational resources (OER) technology (i.e., Pressbooks and H5P) and to contribute to a project handbook on OER through a social justice lens. It has been super fun to learn more about OER implementation at LMU, including finding new open access image repositories, learning new H5P interactive assessment tools, and understanding more about OER copyright and licensing.
I am impressed by LMU’s commitment to high-quality, low-cost textbooks through the OERFSJ grant. As a recent undergraduate student, LMU’s OER textbooks have opened my eyes to the ways textbooks and other learning materials can be made more accessible. Part of the project I am working on is designed to address the need to make textbooks more inclusive. My favorite resource that I have explored thus far has been the University of Calgary’s Anatomy Video and Image Diversity Project, which will be used in a human anatomy Pressbook. It is great to be a part of creating more inclusive representation in course materials.
Additionally, I am using H5P interactive assessment tools, which offer customizable textbook elements like multiple choice questions, interactive videos, clickable images, and course presentation slide decks. The OERFSJ grant faculty teams span a range of disciplines, so I have been able to see how H5P can be used for anything from in-textbook reflection questions to adapting interactive economic graphs. This semester, many OERFSJ teams have student workers helping with H5P, copy editing, and content review. It is exciting to have student perspectives included in the textbook design process. Part of my role has been connecting with student workers to ensure everyone working on the grant has support and community.
I am currently a MLIS student at Simmons University in Boston, MA. In addition to working at LMU, I am a research intern at an economics consulting firm. Before starting at LMU, I worked at my undergraduate university (Wesleyan (CT)) in the Visual Resources Center, Technical Services, and Circulation. I also held a role as a junior fellow at the Library of Congress in the Connecting Communities Digital Initiative. Working with digital humanities tools has been a highlight of my academic career, and I love to learn new tools and new ways to use them. I am excited to continue my library journey at William H. Hannon library!