OER and the Future of Education

03/07/23 • 65 min

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Relinda Ruth is the Director of Educational Resources and OER Specialist at the University of Arkansas-Cossatot Community College. She is responsible for the Educational Resource Center (ERC) at three campuses, which includes Kimball Library, all tutoring services, the college’s award-winning textbook rental & OER program, along with textbook procurement. She was instrumental in building the state’s first two-year-college internal textbook rental program and growing the college’s OER initiative in 2015. In 2020, UA Cossatot was awarded a Title III SIP 2.2 million-dollar grant, and Relinda serves as the Title III Director. As the college’s OER Specialist, she is responsible for the development and implementation of policies relating to open licensing, OER initiatives and practices, and provides guidance on Creative Commons licensing and OER content. She compiles open resources and provides OER usage training for faculty. Relinda leads the college’s OER Team, raises awareness of open education activities and practices, and as a leading contact for OER in Arkansas, she encourages broad participation across the state through conferences, also chairing the ARKLink OER Task Force. From 2019-21, Relinda served a two-year term on the six-member steering committee for the Open Education Network, and she is certified for specialization in open licensing and the Commons through Creative Commons.

Stephanie Pierce is Director of User Services and Director of the Physics Library at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, AR. In addition to managing one of three branch libraries, she serves on the Open Educational Resources Team and Open Access Interest Group to promote and advocate participation in the various open initiatives on campus. Her research interests include utilizing text-mining to assess open textbooks for inclusivity and diversity; library space design; digital scholarship; Women in STEM; open scholarship; and OER advocacy/professional development.

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Florida, Community, and Historians at the Movies

Dr. Jason Herbert is an ethnographer for the Seminole Tribe of Florida, where he is the primary author of an ethnographic study of the Everglades, and he is the creator of the Historians at the Movies, the international phenomenon bringing together a community of historians and film lovers around the world to watch different movies each week and analyze the historical implications and cultural relevance. Dr. Herbert received his PhD from the University of Minnesota, where his research focused on the intersection of environmental and Indigenous history from the precolonial era to the present. His dissertation, Beast of Many Names: Cattle, Conflict, and the Transformation of Indigenous Florida, 1519-1858,examined the social, political, economic, and environmental consequences stemming from the introduction of livestock onto the Florida peninsula over three centuries. Finally, Dr. Herbert is also the co-founder of the Allen Morris Forum on the Native South, a monthly online meeting of scholars who specialize in the history and cultures of Indigenous Southerners.

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In Which a Biologist Turns to Military History

Dr. Bethany Wasik is an Acquisitions Editor with Cornell University Press. She currently acquires projects in the fields of Classics, Archaeology, Modern Western European History, and Military History. Prior to joining the acquisitions team at Cornell Bethany completed a PhD and two postdoctoral fellowships in molecular genetics and evolutionary biology. Her transition from academia to publishing was fueled not only by a passion for editing and reviewing scholarly content, but also a desire to promote that content to a larger audience, which I hope we can talk about today. In addition to her science background, Bethany also minored in archaeology and enjoyed a robust liberal arts undergraduate experience, and so looks forward to building a publication list at Cornell in all the areas she acquires. Outside of the publishing world Bethany enjoys hiking, genealogy, bourbon, and creating complex and ridiculous Twitter hashtags!