It's Academic

The Louisiana Library Association’s Academic Section and Louisiana chapter of the ACRL are thrilled to share the details for their upcoming 2nd annual Louisiana Virtual Academic Conference 2019. Join us on November 7, 2019 from your computer via Zoom. 

The Louisiana Virtual Academic Conference was established to provide additional presentation and professional learning opportunities for academic and other librarians in Louisiana and beyond for little to no cost. This year there are four concurrent sessions: public services, instruction, technical services, and scholarly activity. 

As members of PaLA, your registration fee is just $25 and will grant you access to the conference on November 7, as well as the recordings made available afterwards. 

Learn more about the LA Virtual Academic Conference here: https://sites.google.com/view/lavirtual/lavirtual2019 

Register here: https://sites.google.com/view/lavirtual/registration

Librarians trying to encourage the adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) on their campuses face several challenges, but none more so than faculty reliance on the various supplemental resources that publishers create and attach to their textbooks.  These resources could be pre-made tests, PowerPoint slides, or video content, for example.  Combined these materials create a sort of “lock in” that can make faculty reluctant to leave those textbooks.  Of course, these resources also create increased costs to students, who end up paying for them in the end.  When approaching faculty about adopting OER librarians may find themselves facing faculty reluctant to adopt resources without these supplemental resources.  Which is problematic because most OER do not offer those kinds of supplemental material.

However, this is changing somewhat.  Openstax, an OER collection from Rice University, does offer supplemental resources for their textbooks when faculty adopt them.  PowerPoint slides, test questions, and course cartridges that integrate into the Canvas LMS are available for their textbooks.  These are the kinds of items that faculty have come to rely on.   Demonstrating that they are available for some OER may hep get faculty on board for OER adoption.

If you’ve run into this problem I highly recommend you look at the instructor resources area attached to each textbook on Openstax.  You can’t see the instructor resources until you’ve been verified to be an instructor interested in using the text.  This is to prevent students from accessing the questions provided.  But you can see the types of material available.  It might be just the thing to get faculty on board to try an OER textbook in their class.

Here is a link to all the texts available from Openstax – https://openstax.org/subjects

ACRL will present Project Outcome at the ACLP Fall Conference on October 25th at the Red Lion in Harrisburg.

Registration is free for ACLCP (Associated College Libraries of Central Pennsylvania) members and $20 for non-members.

Learn more about Project Outcome here: https://acrl.projectoutcome.org/

Register for the ACLCP Fall Workshop here: Register

We hope to see everyone next month in Erie for the Pennsylvania Library Association Annual Conference. Our CRD luncheon speaker, Dr. Michele Villagran, will present on Cultural Intelligence in Libraries, and she hopes to include some data from our membership to inform her work.

I hope that you will take a few moments to respond to her survey by September 20, available here: https://sjsu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_czLDKKwSAwK8tMx

You do not need to be a PaLA member, CRD member, or conference attendee to complete the survey. Anyone who works in a Pennsylvania Library is eligible.