Open Education Leadership Program 2017-2018

Cody Taylor

Open Education Leadership Fellow, Class of 2018

    @OKCody_

Biography

Cody Taylor is the Open Education Coordinator at the University of Oklahoma Libraries. In that role he advocates for and facilitates the implementation of pedagogies that utilize Open Educational Resources in an effort to make education more affordable, accessible, and effective. As frequently as possible, he also leverages his interest in microcontrollers, web development, data analytics, and all things open-source to further that goal.

Leadership Portfolio

Cody’s capstone project focused on laying the groundwork to shift large enrollment courses from expensive traditional materials to free, open resources. His work during the semester focused on starting the necessary conversations and building the necessary relationships toward achieving a major adoption at the University of Oklahoma. His Final Report is intended to serve as a guide for others pursuing similar goals.

Cody also developed a Table of Contents Comparison Tool proof of concept as an output of his capstone. A common hurdle to adopting an open educational resource is comparing available open resources to those used in the past. The Table of Contents Comparison Tool proof of concept compares the OpenStax Calculus textbook table of contents to those of four popular traditional Calculus textbooks.  The living version is available online here and its source files have been made available here.

Portfolio Contents:

Current Work

In addition to managing OU’s Alternative Textbook Grant and its relationships with campus stakeholders, Cody continues to focus on OER publishing and the use of Markdown. Recently he developed an interest in how to sustainably maintain data related to OU’s Alternative Textbook Grant; how to analyze it, report it, and use it to strategically guide the efforts of OU Libraries’ Office of Open Initiatives. The goal of this work is to develop a system, workflow, or method for maintaining the numbers related to OER grant programs as reporting them is important to support that work.

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