Biography
Amanda C. Larson is the Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant at The Ohio State University. In this role, she works to create and offer professional development opportunities for staff, librarians, and instructors around open pedagogy and open educational practices. She also liaises with the Affordable Learning Exchange to provide library support for Ohio State’s affordability grant initiative. This includes curating affordable curricular resources and communicating across silos in the university. Amanda currently serves on the SPARC Open Education Advisory Board.
Previously, she was the Open Education Librarian for University Libraries at The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State). She coordinated affordable content initiatives across the all Penn State campuses and provided guidance on copyright, creative commons licensing, and project management. She also served as a liaison for faculty to other University units creating OER. In this role, she served as a Steering Committee member for the Open Textbook Network, and was a 2018-2019 OER Research Fellow with the Open Ed Group and published “Open Education Librarianship: A Position Description Analysis of the Newly Emerging Role in Academic Libraries.” Prior to her role as a librarian, she worked as an OER Teaching Assistant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she worked with faculty creating open textbooks using Pressbooks, built a community of practice around OER, and advocated at institutional events for open education.
Leadership Portfolio
Amanda participated in the first class of fellows to complete the Open Education Leadership Program in the 2017-2018 pilot. As an early career librarian in her first position, Amanda’s interests in the program were to build a deep subject knowledge of the history and current state of open, to make connections with peers in similar positions to build community, and to walk away with tools that would help the strategic implementation of an affordable content initiative at her institution.
During the program, Amanda identified a need for outreach videos to help faculty at Penn State to understand and empathize with student needs around textbook affordability. Her capstone project provides guidance on how to create videos for OER outreach. As well as a list of interview questions that other institutions may use or adapt for their own video projects.
Her guide, OER Outreach Through Videos, is an openly licensed resource that assist users in creating outreach videos featuring student or faculty interviews. It provides a list of resources to help users get started with their project, as well as an eight-step guide to creating the videos from the start to finish.
Current Work
Currently, Amanda is working on creating a Community of Interest on Open Pedagogy for staff and librarians in University Libraries with the intention of scaling it up into a university-wide offering for all instructors. She is also supporting grant projects for the Affordable Learning Exchange by co-leading the Syllabus Review Grant process, curating curricular resources for the Racial Justice Grants, and providing strategic feedback as needed. Forthcoming are two book chapters on OER, the first is a chapter in the Intersections of OER and Information Literacy from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), and the second is a chapter in the OER+SC textbook project in the Open Education section.