Ursula Pike

Question #3: Please tell me about an Open Education project, textbook, or group that you have been a part of.

I’m on the Community College Consortium for OER (CCCOER) Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion committee. They put out a call in fall 2020 asking for volunteers to work on OER and Equity. The Committee members presented “Rebuilding Open Courses for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion: A Community College Perspective” at the 2020 Open Ed Conference. Now we’re trying to figure out what we’re going to do next.

The thing that drew me to the committee was the opportunity to work with other people who are interested in figuring out how OER can address equity issues or how to address equity issues within OER. It’s hard work, though. What do you do? Do you create a checklist? Well, there are already checklists. What else can we try? It’s tough but we have great discussions about all the work that we’re doing. There are different perspectives on the right approach to take. Sometimes the work is very frustrating because I don’t know what even a little bit of success would look like.