Michele Behr currently serves as the Scholarly Communications and Open Educational Resources Librarian at Western Michigan University (WMU) in Kalamazoo, MI. She joined WMU Libraries as Off-Campus Librarian in 2001, and later moved to the position of Instruction and Outreach Librarian for Education. She has held the rank of Professor since 2015. She became interested in issues of open access and open education through her public services work with WMU students, and became a member of the OER Task Force when it was formed in 2018. Before her time at WMU, she worked at the University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon University, and cooperative library organizations in Atlanta, GA, and Denver, CO. Michele received both her undergraduate degree and Masters in Information and Library Science from the University of Michigan.
Michele’s capstone project, OER Academic Department Outreach Toolkit, was developed to help prepare for OER outreach activities aimed at academic departments.
Numerous other efforts have focused on outreach to individual faculty members; this toolkit complements those activities and is focused on work with academic teaching departments. The toolkit can be used both to help identify departments which are good targets for OER adoption and creation, as well as to plan specific activities for awareness and education about OER to those departments. Included are numerous examples of campaign materials, as well as recommended links for more information on a variety of topics.The toolkit is intended to be highly customizable depending on the department and the environment.