UC San Diego Library

A flourishing partnership between undergraduate CALPIRG representatives and the campus scholarly communications librarian was able to withstand obstacles the pandemic piled on and increase faculty and student engagement with OER advocacy. This presentation will give background to our individual efforts, alignment during the pandemic, amendments made, and where we hope to go from here. We’ll discuss how we took advantage of an all virtual environment, adjusted outreach methods, collaborated on statewide education efforts, and aligned individual initiatives. Despite the hardships, we saw opportunities to engage faculty, not only on our campus but as far as the internet would take us as we moved our advocacy efforts online along with classrooms and instruction. We saw opportunity as the UC installed a new president who is vocal about affordable education and diversity.

We have held multiple virtual sessions inviting other student advocacy groups, faculty from local community colleges and several UC campuses to discuss experiences, publishing, and initiatives focused on open educational resources. The campus CALPIRG student representative will discuss their initiatives, a UC Open Textbook Grant Program through the UC Regents that would incentivize faculty to use open textbooks. She will disclose the results of the CALPIRG faculty survey and screen the student testimonial video. The librarian will discuss; guiding, collaborating, and learning from the students; faculty publishing challenges; and the campus-wide team accepted to the AAC&U Institute on Open Educational Resources that will design a pilot OER Incentive Program.