There’s No Place Like Home: Hosting Dynamic OER in the Library CMS By Jeffrey M. Mortimore (Discovery Services Librarian, Georgia Southern University) <jmortimore@georgiasouthern.edu> and Dawn (Nikki) Cannon-Rech (Georgia Southern University) <dcannonrech@georgiasouthern.edu>
Abstract This paper addresses how librarians at a mid-sized R2 university in the southeastern United States collaborated with instructional faculty to employ the Springshare LibGuides CMS platform to host an OER textbook. This paper highlights LibGuides CMS’ suitability to host sophisticated OER projects. Given that hosting is integral to any project, this paper explores issues relevant to all OER developers and managers. Keywords: Open Educational Resources, Content Management Systems, LibGuides CMS
Introduction As colleges and universities increasingly engage in the creation and repurposing of Open Educational Resources (OER), libraries are stepping up to provide faculty the support they need to manage these resources, including finding, vetting, transforming, and licensing OER content. But what about hosting? OER content comes in many forms, and faculty need the flexibility to update and revise content over time. While institutional repositories have been widely adopted for this purpose (Ferguson 2017, 35-36), many OER projects are not well suited to document-based hosting platforms (Thompson and Muir 2020, 690; Rolfe 2016).
The thought of creating OER from scratch was intimidating. Therefore the faculty decided to adapt the Chemistry 1e textbook from OpenStax. OpenStax is based at Rice University and provides a large catalog of high-quality, peer reviewed, OER textbooks and course materials that are free online or for very low cost to print. OpenStax’s use of fully-open Creative Commons CC-BY licenses made this text ideal for adaptation, and strong endorsement from other chemistry faculty allayed any quality concerns. Once the faculty had chosen this text, the task turned to exploring options for hosting and delivery. To do this, the platform would need to accommodate multiple faculty editing the material over time. The course averages five sections per academic year with at least three faculty teaching during any term, so they knew that they would need to integrate new images, videos, charts, graphs, problem sets, surveys, and other forms of student assessment. Also, the platform would need to handle importing large quantities of material, be compatible with the university’s learning management system (D2L), meet accessibility requirements, and be aesthetically pleasing. Finally, the platform would need a minimal learning curve for everyone involved. With guidance from their subject librarian and the discovery services librarian, the faculty agreed to use LibGuides CMS to develop this project.
Background, Development, and Hosting
Development of the OER fell into three stages: 1) proof of concept testing and migrating content, 2) revising content, and 3) cleanup and go-live. When development began, OpenStax allowed visitors to download their XML source files for the Chemistry 1e textbook. While the XML would need to be cleaned up and CSS recreated, migrating OpenStax’s core HTML and MathML-formatted equations appeared manageable. Before committing, the librarians migrated a test page with equations and verified that LibGuides could display them correctly by linking the MathJax JavaScript library in the Guide Custom CSS/JS dialog. Next, they audited a sample of the XML to ensure that extraneous HTML elements and attributes could be removed and CSS reapplied after the content was revised by the faculty.
This project began in Spring 2019 as part of a Faculty Learning Community program centered on developing OER course materials. One learning outcome for participating faculty was to develop a proposal for Affordable Learning Georgia’s (ALG) Textbook Transformation Grants. These grants are sponsored by the University System of Georgia and provide funding to faculty willing to replace costly course materials by adopting, adapting, or creating OER. The faculty leading this project teach an introductory chemistry course required of all engineering majors. The course is intense as it condenses two semesters of content into one. In a typical academic year, the course enrolls approximately 620 students. The faculty teaching this course knew that many students did not purchase the required course materials due to their cost. Also, they felt that students were disengaged from the materials as “a majority of the general chemistry textbooks are not written from the perspective of teaching Engineering Majors,” and therefore “Many students lack motivation to excel when the course objectives do not appear applicable to their academic major.” (Narendrapurapu et al. 2019, 4)
Once the initial migration was complete, the faculty revised the imported content for several weeks. During this time, the faculty revised or replaced text and images; revised page names, section headers, and example problems; updated or prepared
To address this hosting challenge, librarians at Georgia Southern University collaborated with instructional faculty to employ the Springshare LibGuides CMS platform to host an OER textbook. Unlike document-based OER, this textbook includes an array of dynamic content that can be edited by the faculty in real time over multiple semesters. By leveraging LibGuides CMS’ permission controls and ability to host custom XML, CSS, and JS libraries, librarians and faculty adapted a technology already available to them to support this sophisticated OER hosting project.
20 Against the Grain / April 2021
Once these proofs of concept were complete, the librarians downloaded and archived OpenStax’s XML source files, created a LibGuides CMS group and “shell” guide to contain the textbook, and developed a migration workflow, including steps to process the OpenStax XML before importing the resulting HTML into LibGuides’ Rich Text/HTML fields. To do this, the librarians used Notepad++ for batch revisions to remove elements and attributes, and revise select ids and classes. At the same time, the faculty identified the specific content to import from the Chemistry 1e textbook. Not surprisingly, as the librarians and faculty gained experience processing the OpenStax XML, the workflow required troubleshooting and revision to accommodate variances not identified in the initial audit of the sample XML. Fortunately, the faculty knew enough HTML and MathML to catch issues early as they reviewed the imported content.
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