By: Charlene Martoni and Jason Puckett

Georgia State University (GSU) Library is once again hosting the Open for Student Success Symposium, an online conference where educators and students share knowledge, practices, and research centered around open education. The 2025 event, to take place March 7, will feature two keynote speakers. Virginia Clinton-Lisell, Associate Professor of Education, Health, and Behavior at the University of North Dakota, will discuss her recent research investigating student perceptions of access codes and their impact on student success. Paola Corti, Open Education Community Manager at SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) Europe, will also share how her work seeks to break barriers in the Open Education Movement and harness the power of an international community of librarians.

Last academic year, the symposium’s coordination team decided to transform their approach by fully opening it to anyone curious about open educational resources and their applications for higher education. Presenters represented Chattahoochee Technical College, Clayton State University, Columbus State University, Georgia Southwestern State University, Georgia State University, Jefferson Community College, Kennesaw State University, Middle Tennessee State University, University of Georgia, University of Utah, and Valdosta State University. Additionally, the symposium coordinators obtained permission from speakers to publish recordings of the 18 presentations to an openly accessible library research guide under a Creative Commons license. The event received high levels of attendance, with over 100 registrants and 80 unique attendees. 

Notably, GSU professor, Hosanna Fletcher, and her students have participated in the symposium since its founding. Fletcher teaches a sociology course where she guides her students in the investigation of a social problem. Each year, her students have elected to investigate educational affordability, focusing on open education as a strategy to address the issue. Fletcher and her students will be participating in the symposium again in 2025, demonstrating how the event engages educators and students in open pedagogy and transformative learning. 

The symposium will expand further next year with the selection of a theme of “Open Education: Fueling Equity in Learning.” The team has also put out a special call for GSU students to share their voices, seeking to highlight student-centered projects that culminate in strategies to address issues in open education. The symposium team has also developed a proposal rubric, adapted from the Georgia Library Association Conference evaluation rubric, and they intend to publish the 2025 symposium’s openly accessible recordings with accompanying open educational resources submitted by presenters. 

The call for proposals for the 2025 Open for Student Success Symposium is now open! Proposals by any educator or student are welcome and are due by October 25, 2024. Session formats include 45 and 20-minute live sessions, as well as pre-recorded presentations. Questions can be sent to Charlene Martoni at cmartoni@gsu.edu. 

About the symposium coordinators:

Though a world-wide event, the Open for Student Success Symposium started as a collaboration between two librarians, Mary Ann Cullen and Charlene Martoni, who were selected to represent Georgia State University (GSU) in the 2022-2023 OpenStax Institutional Partnership. The duo was later joined by their colleagues, librarians Jason Puckett, Denise George, and Stephanie Burnham, and this year, the team added librarians Christina Gangwisch and Brooke Fry to expand programming capacity on the university’s six campuses, and beyond.  

To learn more about Georgia State University's Library, go to https://library.gsu.edu/.

By Lisa M. Echols

When Ann Rogers, Program Specialist for Ninth District Opportunity (NDO), got word that parents wanted more support to encourage reading at home, she reached out to the Hall County Library System to create a reading challenge that would impact more than 2,500 Head Start students in 25 Georgia counties!

Ninth District Opportunity is the nonprofit that manages Head Start and early Head Start centers around North Georgia, from Towns and Union Counties south to Cobb and Oconee County. Its preschool centers “promote school readiness by providing social, cognitive, and emotional development for low income children.” These amazing centers are free to attend and cover all aspects of education for kids and parents. 

Ms. Rogers envisioned a reading challenge similar to 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten, where classrooms across NDO could count both the reading they were doing at school as well as the reading families were completing at home and work toward reading goals in each classroom. Children and classrooms could earn prizes for meeting goals, and by incentivizing reading, families would feel supported in continuing their children’s literacy journey at home.

With input from NDO, Youth Services Director Lisa Echols developed 1,000 Books With Head Start, a Beanstack program that fit its needs for a multi-county, multi-center reading challenge. Each classroom would be encouraged to read 1,000 books throughout the year. Centers could create a “reader” account for each of their classrooms. Each month, the classrooms would track the books they read and also send home paper logs for parents to track reading efforts after school. At the end of the month, the center director would enter the reading totals into each classroom’s reader account. Classrooms could earn things like cupcake parties, and children could earn badges and books to keep forever, funded through Head Start grants and community partners. Families were also encouraged to join the 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten program at their local library for even more fun and prizes!

1,000 Books With Head Start premiered in January 2024. With only five months until the end of the school year, there was some concern that perhaps classrooms wouldn’t have enough time to reach their challenge goals. We wanted our challenge to be exciting and encouraging, not frustrating. We shouldn’t have worried. The Head Start centers and families embraced the challenge and ran with it. We were amazed to see that, by the end of the first month, they had already finished 75,000 books! By the end of May, every Head Start center and classroom reached their reading goal with a grand total of more than 285,000 books read throughout the 25 NDO counties.

Now that the work of developing the program has been tackled and our initial trial program found to be a shining success, NDO and the Hall County Library System are looking forward to starting the challenge again for the 2024-2025 school year and looking to break our previous records in reading for preschoolers! For more information about the Hall County Library System, check out our website at www.hallcountylibrary.org.