Liz Thompson, Open Education Librarian, is an Associate Professor at James Madison University and holds a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science. When Liz learned about OER in 2016, she was working with instructional designers and academic departments as a liaison librarian. Beginning as an Open Education Network campus leader, she has taken an iterative approach to build awareness and advocate for open resources and practices on campus. Liz is also the main coordinator for PressbooksEDU at JMU and in 2019 was co-Principle Investigator on an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant (Supporting OA Collections in the Open: community requirements and principles). Liz serves on VIVA’s Open and Affordable Course Content Committee and SCHEV’s Open Virginia Advisory Council. Her other research interests include open pedagogy, instructional design, and information literacy.
For her capstone project, Liz developed a database to manage the evolving conversations about open education happening at JMU using Airtable. Her community resource consists of a public template, Open Education Engagement Template, that can be copied and customized by anyone wanting to build an active OER community and a complementary step-by-step guide outlining how to build a database using the template. Liz uses the database to get a clear picture of trends on campus, to assess the impact of open education events, and to plan for strategic changes within JMU’s open education program.