Yang Wu is a specialized OER Librarian at Clemson University, a land grant research institution in South Carolina. He has served as Chair of the Partnership Among South Carolina’s Academic Libraries (PASCAL), the state’s academic library consortium’s Affordable Learning Committee, which engages in a variety of activities that promote the use of open textbooks and other OER resources to librarians and academic faculty statewide. Yang is also a recipient of the Department of Education’s 2021 Open Textbook Pilot Program and serves as the principal investigator of a project by three academic institutions in South Carolina and Alabama to develop open textbooks on robotics funded by the program. He is also a member of the Open Education Network Steering Committee. Yang holds a certificate on OER librarianship from the Open Education Network and has served on planning committees of major OER related conferences, such as the Open Education Conference and the Open Education Southern Symposium. His is also currently undertaking the American Association of Colleges & Universities’ Open Educational Resources Institute. Beyond his OER work Yang also has a PhD in history.
For his capstone project Yang has created a grant application seeking funding to develop a statewide OER publishing service that will provide benefits to students, faculty, and other stakeholder groups in his state of South Carolina. The application is part of Yang‘s larger plan to generate interest and support for OER activities in the state, where OER is a relatively new concept. The capstone project highlights a possible strategy for different OER advocates in a state to work together to demonstrate the value of OER, adapt existing library organizations to bring benefits to many groups, and to use grant writing to reach their aims.