Biography
Ariana Santiago is the Open Educational Resources Coordinator at the University of Houston Libraries. In this role, she leads the planning, implementation, and assessment of an open educational resources program, including the UH Alternative Textbook Incentive Program. In addition to open education, her interests include undergraduate student success, critical librarianship, and diversity, equity, and inclusion in libraries. Ariana earned an M.A. in Applied Learning and Instruction from the University of Central Florida and an M.A. in Library and Information Science from the University of South Florida. She was a 2017 American Library Association Emerging Leader.
Leadership Portfolio
Ariana participated in the 2018-19 cohort of the SPARC Open Education Leadership Program. Her goals through the program were to gain a strong network of peers and mentors in the open community, develop expertise in open education, and understand how to support OER use at a practical level.
Ariana’s capstone project, Enhancing OER Support by Developing a Workflow and Service Model, focused on developing internal infrastructure in order to support a new and quickly growing OER program at the University of Houston. As part of the capstone project, she developed a detailed OER adoption workflow to support instructors in replacing commercial textbooks, and began articulating a service model with the goal of building an effective and sustainable OER program. Several outputs from the process of completing this capstone project are available as a community resource. The community resource includes a template for conducting an environmental scan of OER needs, an evaluation of existing OER workflows, an OER adoption workflow, and initial service model documentation.
During her time in the SPARC Open Education Leadership Program, Ariana engaged in campus outreach and relationship-building, led the UH Alternative Textbook Incentive Program, began serving on the Texas OER Coordinating Committee, and gave several presentations at statewide events. She looks forward to continued growth and leadership opportunities in open education.