Participating in informed discussions about Open Educational Resources requires a basic understanding of several copyright-related concepts, among them open licensing and the public domain. Over the past five years, Germanna Community College (GCC) has been involved in several high-profile, grant-funded OER initiatives, and various college units have regularly held OER-related professional development workshops and presentations. Still, at the end of 2017, the Germanna Libraries observed that many faculty members and administrators continued to hold misconceptions about the most fundamental aspects of OER. Moreover, the College’s OER dialogue had not significantly progressed beyond a discussion of using OER to reduce student expenses. Other
OER-related topics—including topics that indicate faculty are in the process of redesigning courses with OER—had not been addressed by the professional development workshops offered by the College’s most vocal OER advocates. For example, librarians noticed that the College’s OER professional development activities had not yet addressed the production of ancillary materials, or the use of OER quality rubrics when evaluating existing OER. Moreover, the College’s OER Committee appeared to be unfocused and disengaged...