The Five Colleges of Ohio announced today that Megan Mitchell, Academic Engagement & Digital Initiatives Coordinator at Oberlin College, has been named as Program Director of the Collaborative for Digital Engagement and Experience (CODEX), beginning May 15. Megan replaces Jacob Heil, who served as Program Director in 2021-22 and leaves the role to assume a new position at Davidson University. While maintaining her current position at Oberlin, Megan will lead the CODEX project during its first phase funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation through June 2024.
The Program Director leads CODEX faculty development activities designed to promote the integration of digital practices and projects and open educational resources (OERs) into the curricula at Ohio Five colleges. These include an annual summer institute for teams of faculty, librarians, technologists and students to consult with national experts and collaborate on designing new or revising existing courses, a microgrant program to support course development, skills development workshops, and funding of faculty participation in external digital scholarship summer workshops. A five-college CODEX committee of deans, faculty members, librarians and technologists advise on the program’s progress, reporting to the Ohio Five Academic and Library Committees. In its two years, 14 new CODEX courses were added to the curricula of Ohio Five colleges.
As Oberlin’s Academic Engagement & Digital Initiatives, Megan works with faculty, students, and library and archives staff on creating digital collections, curating online exhibitions, and other projects using a variety of open source platforms. She has been an active member of the Five Colleges of Ohio Library subcommittees for Digital Collaboration and Digital Stewardship, and she has co-created and presented a number of workshops for faculty on digital scholarship tools. She is currently a member of the steering committee of Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (ILiADS). Prior to working in Digital Initiatives, Megan was a Reference & Instruction Librarian at Oberlin. She earned her MLS at Rutgers University, MA in Art History at Case Western Reserve University, and BA in English and Women’s Studies at the University of Richmond.
“Megan has been a valued and dedicated contributor to the CODEX project and the Ohio Five digital scholarship work that preceded this five-college collaboration,” commented Executive Director Sarah Stone. “She is an experienced collaborator with faculty, students, librarians and technologists, the core group of CODEX participants, and we look forward to her experience and leadership in this next phase of the project.”