Elena Kuzmina is the Open Educational Resources, E-Resources and Collections Coordinator and a Librarian at the Vancouver Community College (VCC). In her role as the Open Education Coordinator, she advances a VCC OER strategy that supports adoption and creation of open educational content. Her MLIS is from the University of British Columbia, and her MA in Linguistics is from the Kharkov University.
As a SPARC Open Leadership Fellow, Elena has focused on increasing stakeholder engagement with OER initiatives on campus. Her capstone project is the creation of a VCC OER Virtual Hub. Creating a VCC OER website is the first step of this project. The website’s goal is to introduce students, instructors, and administrators to OER, and more specifically, to the benefits of using OERs. The second goal of this project is to attract potential students and to increase student retention at VCC. This will be attained by marking Zero Cost Textbook programs and courses on the VCC main website, and linking to the OER landing page for students interested in learning more about OER. These two goals are aimed at increasing OER discoverability and use for instructors and administrators, and accessibility of resources for students.
The community resource that Elena created is “Creating an Open Education Map for Exploring OER Territory”. This map will help users identify what has been accomplished and where they need to gather information and involve other stakeholders. Ultimately, it will show users the best possible ways to engage their community with OER because the map will be targeted to their particular work at the institution.
