Biography
Jill Hallam-Miller is the Director of Research Services and Information Literacy and a liaison librarian to the College of Management and the Education Department at Bucknell University. She supports the open education initiative on the Bucknell campus by designing and delivering faculty workshops on finding, using, and creating open educational resources and by promoting awareness about open education by speaking to various campus stakeholders about open resources and open pedagogy. Jill is supporting the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, Inc.’s (PALCI) “Affordable Learning PA” program by serving as a member of the program’s first cohort of Open Educational Resources Specialists.
Leadership Portfolio
In her first semester as a SPARC Open Education Leadership fellow, Jill produced a LibGuide, “Open Education @ Bucknell,” that serves as an introductory source of information about open educational resources for the campus. The guide is openly licensed and is available for use through the LibGuides Community or by anyone who wishes to use the content. Bucknell University-specific information can be customized to fit other institutions. The guide includes a presentation Jill created, “Creative Commons: The Licenses Explained,” which describes how each of the CC licenses is best used, and its pros and cons. This presentation is also openly licensed to encourage others to modify and use it for their own purposes.
For her capstone project for the program, Jill delivered various presentations to Bucknell faculty. In the first presentation, faculty were encouraged to engage with open textbooks. During the presentation, faculty asked a number of unexpected questions, prompting Jill to develop a community resource—Open Textbook Workshop: Questions You Weren’t Expecting—to assist other open education advocates who might find themselves in a similar situation. She hopes that others will add to and improve the document to help new advocates prepare to confidently respond to difficult questions in their open textbook workshops. The first presentation, along with subsequent presentations on open pedagogy and a series of pop-up meetings to share information about open education with faculty, resulted in the development of a full slate of community resources that might be helpful to open education advocates who are just beginning initiatives on their campuses. These include a set of slides and suggested presentation notes on open pedagogy and an informational bookmark template. As one of her leadership goals for the program, Jill developed a vision statement for open education on her campus. Initially, she intended to make this private, but her mentor in the program encouraged her to share it for the benefit of others, and she is grateful for that advice!
To learn more about Jill’s experiences and the development of her resources, please visit her Final Report for the program.
