Kimberly Davies Hoffman serves as the University of Rochester’s Head of Outreach, Learning, and Research Services at the River Campus Libraries. With interests in engaging pedagogy, instructional design, assessment, and creating professional development opportunities, she has been a founding member for programs like LILAC, the 3Ts, and RYSAG. Current projects include her participation in the ARL Digital Scholarship Institute, a grant-based digital collection of case studies highlighting faculty’s teaching with technology (DigITaL, Digital Ideas in Teaching and Learning), and an openly published book titled Open Pedagogy Approaches: Faculty, Library, and Student Collaborations. This book aims to highlight faculty-library collaborations in adopting open educational practices. Kimberly earned her MLS at the University at Buffalo and a BA in French and International Relations at the University of New Hampshire.
My capstone project aimed to leverage the openly published book with two professional development events to create faculty awareness on campus about issues within open pedagogy. Main goals were to educate members of my university community to philosophies and practices with OER and Open Pedagogy (OP) and to encourage participation with these ideas.
The former goal was accomplished through two workshops I offered during Open Education Week 2020. I delivered a local presentation via the university’s Learning in the Digital Age (LiDA) symposia series where two collaborators joined me in introducing ideas of OER, open pedagogy, and open access publishing. For my segment of the presentation, I highlighted chapter examples from the book within the context of a Renewable Assignment Design Framework (Katz and Van Allen). The following day, I co-presented at an Open Oregon webinar, taking a deeper dive into the motivations and process of developing the book, as well as showcasing chapter examples.
I achieved the latter goal by inviting participation into the process of the book (i.e., learning by doing). Over the course of the book’s development, what grew from my initial pondering over how to engage my university community with ideas of OER and OP now includes the following circle of learners. Between editorial board, author, reviewer, and copy editor roles with a University of Rochester affiliation: 14 librarians, 2 library staff, 6 professors, 2 graduate students/instructors, and 9 undergraduate students have made an impact on Open Pedagogy Approaches: Faculty, Library, and Student Collaborations.
All of this work now serves as my launch pad to have continued conversations with stakeholders across campus (and hopefully beyond), particularly at a time where print resources are limited in their access (due to COVID-19) and OER offers an exciting alternative. Through my participation within the SPARC Open Education Leadership Program, I have gained extensive knowledge surrounding OER and open pedagogy and have become more confident in approaching campus stakeholders to share ideas and benefits of working in the open.