Member Spotlight: Chelsee Dickson
A Georgia librarian discovered open education when her professor offered students a radical choice: accept the old textbook, or build something better.
While getting her masters in an IT program at Kennesaw State University, Chelsee Dickson and her classmates in a 2018 advanced web development course were handed a decade-old textbook that described early-2000s image hosting site Flickr as a "new technology." For a field like IT, the textbook was ancient history. When their professor asked for feedback, enough students complained that he made them an offer: stick with the original book, or help him create a new, open textbook for future classes.
Half the class, including Chelsee, jumped at the chance. "At the time, I didn't realize we were creating an OER and my professor was engaging in open pedagogy," she says. They built the textbook on GitHub, presented a poster at the ACM Southeast Conference, and authored conference proceedings. “I’ve been an advocate ever since,” she says.
Now KSU’s Assistant Director of Academic Engagement & Instruction, Chelsee oversees a team supporting open access, research data management, copyright education, and OER adoption across campus. “There have been many moments during which I've thought, ‘Wow, open education really makes a difference!’" she says. One was a student panel she hosted for Open Education Week, where students talked about benefits beyond affordability: no heavy textbooks to lug around, the ability to highlight and search easily, content that's actually current. "They really enjoyed using OER as opposed to their traditional textbooks," she says.
In hindsight, that outdated web development textbook turned out to be the best teaching tool her professor could have chosen: it showed Chelsee exactly what education could be if we see beyond what we've always been handed. Now, she wants to see OER to become the norm rather than the exception. “I hope the field continues to garner ardent supporters, and I want to see us celebrate our champions,” she says. She doesn't have to look far to find those champions. As managing editor of the Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education, she reads work on open educational practices from authors across the country and finds it "eye-opening and inspiring." She's had no shortage of supporters in her own corner of the field: Heather Hankins and Rachel Schruaben Yeates, collaborators on many Open Access Weeks at KSU; mentors like Jeff Gallant and Tiffani Tijerina through Affordable Learning Georgia; her colleagues at JOERHE and the KSU library, and many more. Every open door was, at some point, held open by someone.
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