The Case for OER in LIS Education

The increasingly high cost of textbooks coupled with the pedagogical opportunities presented by Creative Commons licenses has provided fertile ground for the development of open educational resources (OER) initiatives as an impactful practice for improving student success. Librarians are leading advocates for OER, yet little has been published on how librarians learn about OER or how faculty use OER in library and information science (LIS) programs. For this study, the author surveyed LIS faculty about their awareness and usage of OER as well as the role they imagine for future librarians in open education. LIS faculty, current and future librarians, and those interested in open education can glean insights on the usage of OER from the almost fifty respondents. Approximately half of the respondents regularly use some OER, and the other half have heard of it. Of those who have heard of OER, half of the respondents mention them in their teaching. Respondents believe that future librarians’ roles in OER range from traditional librarian roles of finding and providing metadata and curating resources to developing and leading OER initiatives. Given that several organizations offer training and certifications for librarians in OER, LIS programs can help meet this need in a variety of ways.