Helen McManus is the Head, Collections Strategy at George Mason University, but their SPARC fellowship began during their tenure as NOVA Online Librarian at Northern Virginia Community College. At NOVA, Helen built on the college’s already strong foundation of open education advocacy and OER adoption. Since moving to Mason, their focus has broadened from OER to include Open Access and changing approaches to scholarly communication. Helen holds a PhD in Political Science and an MLIS, both from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Helen’s capstone project involved gathering, analyzing, and visualizing data on zero-textbook-cost course offerings and enrollment at NOVA from 2013 to 2020. They built on this experience to develop a data toolkit for open education advocates. The toolkit walks readers through the process of accessing campus data, recording open education advocacy data, building OER data spreadsheets, and designing and (importantly) presenting effective visualizations. Helen hopes this toolkit will empower people to begin capturing the scope and reach of OER adoptions on campus. Future iterations of the toolkit would address analyzing the impact of OER on student success.
