Project Incubator follow-up: AMICAL’s EcoJustice OER Initiative

Image: Teaching resources posted on AMICAL’s EcoJustice OER demo site

This is the second in a series of posts about outcomes of the Project Incubator at AMICAL 2023

Environmental justice, and environmental sustainability more generally, have become urgent priorities for this generation of students and global citizens. But these are also topics whose interdisciplinarity and specific relevance for different global populations make them perfect challenges for the international liberal arts learning environments of AMICAL member institutions.

AMICAL’s EcoJustice OER Initiative has been working on ways to help educators at our institutions to share, as Open Educational Resources, materials that can support teaching and learning in these areas. Inspired by Antonio Lopez’s ecomedialiteracy.org (“Ecomedia Literacy Resources for Teaching and Research”), EcoJustice OER aims to gather a broader range of educational and extra-curricular resources, from assignments to syllabi to ideas for campus-level initiatives, that relate in any way to environmental justice, or to environmental sustainability more broadly. EcoJustice OER’s cross-consortium faculty-staff team has been working together since our participation in the 2022 Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute, where we laid the groundwork for a project to curate pedagogical resources related to ecojustice and sustainability. Since then, we’ve been working on the editorial and technical frameworks and on outreach to potential project contributors.

EcoJustice OER at the AMICAL 2023 Project Incubator

Most recently, our participation in the Project Incubator at the AMICAL 2023 Conference helped us prepare to launch the project formally. During the first stage of the Project Incubator, a day-long “Collaboration Sprint”, we were able to

• clarify our initial models for organizing and hosting content:
  • website for project presentation and hosting a collection of resource description pages
  • granular resources (syllabi, assignment models, etc.) hosted elsewhere (Google Docs, slide sharing platforms, contributor’s repository, etc.) but linked from our resource description pages
• make decisions about adapting our resource collection’s metadata schema for our intended contributors and users – in particular, using relatively broad disciplinary categories like those used in OER Commons
• develop resource submission forms, according to the above decisions and adapted for different categories of resource (teaching/learning resource, syllabus, extra-curricular initiative, useful link)
• develop initial resource description pages for the small collection of resources we’d already gathered
• build out a demo website on WordPress.org for presenting the project and an initial curated collection of resources (see screenshot above)

During the second stage of the Project Incubator, a “Feedback Session” integrated into the conference’s Community Idea Exchange (poster) session, we had a chance to demo the website and submission form for interested colleagues. The exchange with colleagues produced valuable observations that we’ll be implementing – notably:

• We need to better communicate the opportunity represented by the website: colleagues can contribute towards environmental justice by enabling others’ teaching and work in this area
• We found several AMICAL colleagues with ecojustice-related teaching materials already developed, or in the works, whom we’ll be reaching out to as potential contributors!

What’s next?

Summer is never an easy time for moving collaborative projects forward, but we’re hoping to do the following between now and Fall 2023:

• Rebuild the project’s website on AMICAL’s own web hosting platform
• Review long-term considerations for format and metadata decisions (e.g. anticipated linkages or portability of content to major repositories like OER Commons)
• Finalize our resource submission forms
• Reach out to targeted individuals for initial submissions during a pilot phase
• Revise and launch website, promoting consortium-wide submissions and use of the collection
• Seek funding to support development of the curated collection (editorial processes, content development, site development and maintenance, etc.) as well as professional development (training in using, creating and adapting OER)

Help us reach potential contributors at AMICAL institutions

In the meantime, we would appreciate hearing about any faculty or staff at AMICAL member institutions who might be interested in using or contributing to this collection of resources. Get in touch, or send us suggested contacts from your institution, by writing to contact@amicalnet.org.

The EcoJustice OER team

Colleagues currently working on the EcoJustice OER Initiative include:

• Alex Armstrong, Program & Technology Officer (AMICAL Consortium)
• Antonio Lopez, Chair & Associate Professor of Communications and Media Studies (John Cabot University)
• Elena Berg, Associate Professor of Environmental Science (American University of Paris)
• Jeff Gima, AMICAL Consortium Director (American University of Paris)
• Nadine Aboulmagd, Senior Instructional Designer at The Center for Learning and Teaching (American University in Cairo)