Shannon M. Smith is the Open Educational Resources Librarian at Boise State University Albertsons Library. She previously served as Scholarly Communication Librarian at Utah State University Libraries. Shannon earned her Master in Library and Information Science in 2019 from The University of Washington’s Information School. She began working in the realm of open education professionally in 2017 when she completed a Directed Fieldwork experience at the University of Wyoming Libraries in collaboration with their OER Committee.
Her work engages the role of students and how they are key to a future where open education is more fully embraced by scholarly communication systems. She wants to build and hold space for student voices both as the primary audience for open education and also as co-creators of OER beyond their classroom experiences. Shannon believes in the impact of building inclusive communities and considers this integral to successful work in open education. Her research interests include best practices and ethics for emerging library services, collaborative learning, and multimodal information behavior.
Shannon’s capstone project Exploring Open Education’s Impact on Learners focuses on looking at the impact of OER on learners, and how that impact is quantified by members of the open education community. Her project resulted in two primary resources: a discussion paper and a Zotero Library. The discussion paper, Learners & Impacts: A Conversation About Open Education, focuses on defining types of impact for learners within open education. The Zotero Library is intended as a community reading list and welcomes contributions as outlined in Appendix A of the paper.