Survey of U.S. and Canadian librarians on open pedagogy

With the growth of open pedagogy has come the growth of library support for open pedagogy. Likewise, more and more case studies are demonstrating how librarians use open pedagogy to support student growth in information literacy, specifically the Association of College & Research Libraries’ Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education. However, little has been done to look at the broader picture of how librarians are supporting open pedagogy and how ready they feel to do so, especially in connecting open pedagogy to information literacy. This data comes from a survey of librarians in the United States and Canada who work in information literacy instruction and/or open education about their practice in open pedagogy.

Methods
The project used a survey, created in Qualtrics, to help answer the research questions. The survey was designed with four broad sections. The first focused on gathering background information about the participants and their institution, as well as their comfort level with open pedagogy, support provided at their institutions for open education, and then finally whether they have supported open pedagogy in a higher education course. Those who answered negatively to supporting open pedagogy were then directed to a second section available only to them about their interest in eventually supporting open pedagogy. Those who answered they had supported open pedagogy were directed to a third section that asked them about their experience with open pedagogy. Finally, all participants were directed to the fourth section, which asked them about barriers and needs to help support open pedagogy.

The University of Nevada, Reno's Institutional Review Board granted the research project an exempt status. The survey was open to any active academic librarian in the United States or Canada who currently works in library instruction and/or open education. The authors opted to focus on these two areas of librarianship as the most likely areas to support open pedagogy.

The survey was launched to seven listservs: ACRL Scholarly Communication, ACRL Instruction Section, ACRL Library Instruction Roundtable, ACRL Community and Junior College Libraries Section, SPARC’s LibOER, Creative Commons Open Education Platform, and the Medical Library Association’s MEDLIB-L. Reminder emails were sent on July 19 and August 7. Two hundred and eight respondents began the survey; 15 did not meet the inclusion criteria, and 48 did not complete the survey, leaving 145 respondents. No question required a response, however, meaning response totals for some questions might be less than 145. The data was cleaned and analyzed using RStudio version 2022.02.3+492. 

Open-text responses were removed from this dataset to help protect participants' privacy.