LIS practicum students in the project

Student Involvement and Experiences

We have been able to use this project to the experiential benefit of UNO students thanks to a partnership with the UNO Bachelor’s in Library Science program and program director Dr. Erica Rose. We have hosted three cohorts of senior students who have used the project for the mandatory practicum experience.  The project has benefitted from their involvement as each student, having chosen a subject area of interest to them, encountered new questions, new types of materials, and offered insight from their experiences of implementing the tagging list.

The development of the tags was an iterative process.  In the Fall of 2022, a part-time graduate student employee began working on the project, which also served as the student’s master’s project for the UNO Master of Public Administration program. After developing a small, initial list of attribute tags, we began to refine them by applying them to draft lists of UNO programs of study.  This process continued through the participation of LS student cohorts and with the subsequent employment of a part-time undergraduate student employee. As we move through implementation, we anticipate small further refinements.

The materials that we are describing are not limited to the strict definition of OER as materials that feature open content licenses allowing for the “5Rs” of copyright (reuse, retain, revise, remix, and/or redistribute). If a resource is all-rights-reserved but free to access, then functionally for students the outcome is the same as if an openly-licensed resource were utilized unchanged, as-is. The ONE course attribute tagging system notes that a course is no-cost or low-cost.  For the purposes of this project, we’re focusing on no-cost materials, meaning students can access them without going through a paywall.

This Pressbook will be used to showcase student contributions to this project.  While we have scheduled a round of editing and double-checking for these entries, this will likely take place by mid-summer 2024.

We would like to extend our thanks to Dr. Rose, the Bachelor’s in Multidisciplinary Studies program, and of course the practicum students who have helped us create this experiment in Open Pedagogy.