Creating and Running POSE, the Program for Open Scholarship and Education, at UBC

Alongside this year’s Scholarly Communications SkillShare event, we invited contributions to our blog to hear more about what is happening at libraries in Western Canada. The second of these entries is below.

Guest post by Stephanie Savage
Scholarly Communications and Copyright Services Librarian 
University of British Columbia Library

Creating and Delivering POSE

UBC is fortunate to have a dedicated group of instructors, researchers, technologists, librarians and students who support and advocate for open scholarship on campus. While acknowledging the progress that has already been made, we are always looking for new ways to reach a broader audience, expand awareness of open scholarship and break down silos between different areas of open practice. It is with this in mind that a group of Librarians from both the UBC-Vancouver and Okanagan campuses along with colleagues from the Center for Teaching Learning and Technology came together to develop and deliver The Program for Open Scholarship and Education (POSE). 

POSE reflects our desire to provide an introduction to the three primary areas of Open – Open Access, Open Research, Open Education – in an interactive and approachable way for a broad audience of participants from across UBC and beyond. Originally conceived of as a self-paced training resource, POSE developed into a robust online course that was piloted over the Winter 2021 semester (January – May). The program combined synchronous and asynchronous learning opportunities and encouraged participants to share their questions and emerging insights through discussions, reflections, activities and a capstone project. In total we had over 140 participants register, posting over 360 discussion posts and completing 460 activities. Over 40 participants completed the capstone project and were issued certificates of completion. 

While the creation of POSE was a significant commitment for the members of the development team, the response has been positive. The depth and quality of participant engagement has validated the time and energy that went into the creation of the Program and we are looking forward to continuing to grow awareness of open scholarship on campus and beyond, both by continuing to offer POSE in the future and introducing POSE participants to other opportunities to become involved in open initiatives on campus.  

Sharing POSE

In keeping with the ethos of the subject matter, all POSE materials are freely available online at pose.open.ubc.ca and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. In addition to the site being publicly available, all POSE materials are also available for download as an XML file. Members of the POSE development team are also working to turn the course materials into a Pressbook for easier dissemination and accessibility. We encourage any interested groups to reuse and/or remix the content and I would be happy to provide further information on how we chose to deliver the course. 

Asking for Feedback

With the first iteration of POSE having wrapped up in May, and having decided that we will formally run POSE again in early 2022, now is a time for reflection and reassessment of the course content. In order to facilitate an open review of the content, we have created a hypothes.is group and would welcome feedback from members of the academic library community who have an interest and/or expertise in Open Scholarship. For those who are interested in providing feedback, please accept this invitation to join the POSE Review group in hypothes.is. For those who are unfamiliar with hypothes.is, you can learn how to sign up for a free account and install the web app at https://web.hypothes.is/start/. Once you have created an account, you can accept the above invitation and post your comments to the POSE Review group.While feedback on the modules can be posted to the hypothes.is group at any time, I will be reviewing the content this upcoming Fall, and encourage interested reviewers to summit their comments by the end of August. 

If anyone has additional questions about how to access and reuse the POSE materials or about how to provide feedback on POSE, please feel free to contact me at stephanie.savage@ubc.ca