Fest 2011 in Half Moon Bay. This conference was help in December 2011 and hosted by the Institute of Knowledge Management in Education. There were participants form K-12, Higher Ed, educational non-profits, foundations and start-up companies. The keynote speaker was Dr. Sugata Mitra.

This is an 8 week experience for the college student that begins by setting a learning context through using library resources, especially online databases, for locating images and art that reflect a chosen research topic and creating a mural that demonstrates the students’ comprehension of the chosen topic. The experience includes conducting research on 3 significant events or people in women’s US history. The written research will be accompanied by images or art that the student has chosen (described) as reflective of, or related to the researched event or person. In order to determine the students’ level of information literacy, the research will include a detailed description of how the students located the images. The students will also draw or describe a personalized sketch of one of the researched events or people. The culmination of the research is the design and painting of a collaborative mural depicting the students' research topics.

This Reusable Learning Object (RLO) was created out of the desire to infuse university courses with information literacy or research activities. A traditional research project on significant events or people in history is enhanced with the discovery and analyzing of art and images within the context of history. Analysis not only includes written text but the painting of a mural. The RLO is structured in a way that allows for easy replication and alteration to a variety of subjects and learning levels.

With over 305,000 open educational resources cataloged on OER Commons since 2007, ISKME works to make learning and knowledge sharing more participatory, equitable, and open, in pursuit of a more just society.

Those resources don’t describe themselves, though. The metadata of every resource in OER Commons was put together by someone before it got added to our collection, and then a librarian at ISKME reviewed it for quality – and that’s a lot of work, both in and out of house!

How much work? Well, if a librarian were to spend just five minutes on each record that ever found its way into our collection, that would take 25,433 hours. That’s enough time to…

- do 123 round trips to the moon (time to finally take that leave you’ve been saving)

- get 3,178 full nights of sleep (unless you’re a cat, then it’s only 1,413)

- walk 8 times from Cape Town to Copenhagen (we’re gonna need a bigger passport)

- work full-time for over 13 years (don’t worry, that excludes 4 weeks vacation)

All of that to say, metadata takes time.

It can be a challenge to balance metadata creation with other tasks like maintaining existing records, curation work, and supporting educational partners with curation. As such, we’re always on the lookout for tools and techniques that boost our capacity without compromising quality.

In 2023 and 2024, we’re testing out how generative AI tools like large language models can support our work in the OER landscape. This poster highlights some of the places where we’ve had successes, along with possible future applications that we think are both useful and doable.

Middle and High School educators across Lebanon County, Pennsylvania developed lesson plans to integrate the Pennsylvania Career Education and Work Standards with the content they teach. This work was made possible through a partnership between the South Central PA Workforce Investment Board (SCPa Works) and Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13 (IU13) and was funded by a Teacher in the Workplace Grant Award from the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry. This lesson plan was developed by one of the talented educators who participated in this project during the 2019-2020 school year.