By Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed
“When you look at the challenges the OER movement is facing — how to find content, how to get it to students, how to get it to faculty … — it’s something libraries are uniquely suited to be able to help with,” said Nicole Allen, director of open education for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (or SPARC), an organization that promotes open forms of scholarly communication. Anchoring an OER initiative in the library could counteract the issues some faculty members report experiencing when they try to discover open resources; doing so could also help make them aware of the resources in the first place. In the Babson survey, for example, 65.9 percent of respondents said they knew little or nothing about open resources. Libraries have already helped support the growth of open access research, speakers said, and they can do the same for the discoverability of educational resources.
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