PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Berkshire Community College (BCC) congratulated Professor of Life Sciences Fayette Reynolds for winning second place in the Massachusetts Open Educational Resources (OER) Advisory Council's first annual OER Olympic Awards.

 

Reynolds created BCC's Bioscience Image Library, which offers students and the general public free access to microscopic images of plants, animals, bacteria, fungi and more. The images are particularly useful for students studying biology, botany, zoology, histology and microbiology.  

 

Winners of the OER Olympic Awards were selected by a subcommittee of the OER Advisory Council, which evaluated more than 25 nominations of outstanding faculty and staff members from public institutions across the Commonwealth. Reynolds's prize includes a $750 honorarium. 

 

Open educational resources are free of copyright and fees, allowing anyone with access to a computer the ability to download and share them. Each winner of an OER Olympic Award was judged to have gone above and beyond the call to create, adapt or adopt OER for academic use institutionally, regionally, nationally or internationally. 

 

"We are incredibly proud of Faye's work in developing an OER bioscience database. She is a leader in supporting significant OER development in the state, but her work goes much further as she is impacting thousands of students around the world," said Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs Karen Hines, who noted that the database gets up to 10,000 hits per day, with total views close to three million. 

 

Awards will be presented by the OER Advisory Council in May 2022. 

 

Reynolds realized she couldn't find copyright-free images to accompany the manuals she was creating — and recognized the need for free teaching and learning resources across all disciplines. She began the process of photographing microscopic details of various plant specimens using BCC's microbiology camera. 

 

Spending 50-60 hours a week taking photos and writing annotated descriptions of each image, Reynolds cataloged 730 images of roots, stems, leaves, tissues and more, later adding more than 400 macro images of reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals.  

 

"I have received many emails of thanks from students around the world who rely on the digital library for study or projects, and from instructors who are grateful to have found a public domain resource that allows them to create their own Open Educational Resource textbooks and laboratory manuals," Reynolds said. 

 

There are now nearly 1,200 images in the collection, all within the public domain — meaning they can be used, reused, adapted or modified for any purpose, without restriction under copyright or database law. And the project continues, with microscopic images of complex tissues and organs in humans about half complete. 

 

"We should give a quality educational experience, including access to learning opportunities, without a lot of expense," Reynolds said. "Some things just need to be free."