One thought I’ve had for a long time is that it would be good to have some sort of heuristic about how much time you might spend searching for existing materials before you started rolling your own, based on a general idea of how long it takes to create such materials from scratch. e.g. for each one hour of material, it’s worth spending at least 10% of your up-front time searching for existing materials to re-use before diving into development yourself. Assuming rational behaviour (and I don’t think that’s always a sound assumption) it could serve as a starting point for discussion with faculty on their course development behaviour.

Some educators want a complete package provided by a publisher while others want to develop their own way of engaging students with the material.

In the space between those two extremes it would seem that there was ample room for a style of preparation which involved searching for and combining the best of what is available, and many of us think that is where we belong – but when push comes to shove we bifurcate and either go with a complete package or “roll our own” completely.

Perhaps those of us who can’t live with the flaws we see in a ready-made publisher’s package also tend to judge OERs more harshly, and/or the work involved in selecting and incorporating the best OERs (even after “discovery”) is not sufficiently less than that of actually developing our own “perfect” alternatives.

Scott Leslie may be on the right track with another 1/4-baked idea – OER “virtual reference librarian” at EdTechPost, but I suspect that it may be less with the idea itself than with the doubt he expresses as follows:
<<Is “discoverability….

Sounds like this point-of-view may jive with the reluctance-to-act-despite-clear-desire that @Mike C cited above.

So there’s definitely something interesting going on here..

My office did a survey of faculty recently, to find what services they want from CELT (my unit). And of course we had all the stuff we wished they would have chosen (help integrating new methods of data visualization into the classroom, designing collaborative community engaged projects etc.)

But the clear winner was “Help finding and integrating free online educational resources into your course”

I mean it won by a huge margin, not even close.

That said, it’s not like we are overwhelmed here with requests of that sort. In fact, we didn’t have one single one of these this semester (that is, any OER request that *orginated* from the faculty as an OER request — we do work OER into our other work with faculty).

As much as we hate the just-in-time “customer service” model, we may have to build something that at least *looks like* a service model at the front end, even if it is more community based under the hood — because that’s the idiom they get.

I’m going to talk to my boss about this today, see what we could pilot.