Global Diversity in Education
Educational settings are microcosms of the broader global diversity landscape. Students bring their various backgrounds, cultures, and experiences into the classroom every day. When asked about why global diversity awareness is important to her, Brigeth Rivera (she/her), our Vice President of Marketing, shared that in school, she often tried to “fit in and not make being a Nicaraguan immigrant” who she was. However, it was the genuine interest and curiosity of her college classmates that encouraged her to reconnect with her roots as well as ask more questions to learn about the unique backgrounds of others around her. As a result, she now strongly believes that “what makes us unique and different is our superpower.”
Along with interest and curiosity, recognizing opportunities for positive representation of global diversity in the classroom is an excellent way to affirm the uniqueness of your diverse students. Averie Connell (she/her), a Regional Sales Director at Lumen, reflected on the importance of global representation in the classroom and in content by saying that while representation definitely matters on a societal level, “positive representation is even more impactful within the classroom; representation supports students in the development of realistic, yet aspirational, expectations of themselves and their classmates.” She shared that as a Jamaican immigrant, seeing other Jamaicans (like Bob Marley, Kamala Harris, Colin Powell, and Usain Bolt, just to name a few) who have made significant contributions to U.S. society and around the world served as a source of great pride and motivation to her and other Jamaicans. Because of her experience as an immigrant, she can say with confidence, “Students who see themselves represented in a positive light in the classroom feel more confident in their abilities and are more motivated to challenge themselves.”
One of our Front-End Engineers, Annalyn Sarmiento (she/her), has been impacted by how her Filipino culture and identity were (or were not) represented in her classrooms. Although she was fortunate to have grown up in a diverse community filled with other immigrants and their children, it was rare to encounter lessons with people or cultural examples that she could relate to. “Having this experience in school impacts the work I do at Lumen because I understand firsthand how including more diversity in the course content and examples can be beneficial to students.” She believes it’s important for faculty to celebrate and to be aware of the global diversity of their students “because it can support and enhance the student learning experience.”
Understanding Cultural Norms in Global Diversity
Besides representation and inclusion, understanding varying cultural norms and expectations that your students may be experiencing is another important aspect of global diversity awareness. Jessica Szewczyk (she/her), a Product Marketing Manager at Lumen, experienced not feeling worthy of academic or career opportunities due to several cultural reasons. “Being raised in a Polish household as a first-generation American, there wasn’t any precedent for me to understand how to get into college, let alone how my life would look on campus as a first-generation student. It’s rare to see Poles continuing in education, with many in older generations thinking it’s unnecessary, especially for women.” This is an excellent example of how not all students have the same access to information and support as it relates to higher education. For this reason, trying to learn about your students’ unique backgrounds and how they affect their education is critical for educators. As Jessica told us, “Having culturally aware professors, managers, and colleagues helped give me the confidence to be an advocate for myself.”
Global diversity awareness is an essential aspect of educational settings and the broader society. It involves embracing and celebrating students’ unique backgrounds, offering positive representation, building confidence, and understanding the impact of cultural differences on a student’s educational journey. By fostering a diverse and inclusive educational environment, we can empower students to succeed and thrive.
Embrace Global Diversity in Your Teaching
At Lumen, we strongly believe that small changes can make a big difference in the overall student experience. As an educator, you have the power to create an inclusive environment that embraces the diversity of all students. One way to do this is by using an “introduce yourself” survey to learn more about your students and their unique backgrounds. Another way is by incorporating diverse resources, images, and materials into your teaching.
If you’re interested in learning more about digital courseware or tools that can help you make these small, yet meaningful changes, we encourage you to check out our latest courseware- Lumen One. Lumen One is designed with an equity-focus empowering both faculty and students to thrive in their teaching and learning journeys while embracing their unique abilities and diverse perspectives. Register here to get a glimpse of Lumen One and it’s equity-focused design.
Reflections From Our Team:
“We can facilitate more effective learning by promoting positive representation of diverse groups and honoring various perspectives in the classroom and in the content we create.” – Averie Connell, Regional Sales Director
“Global diversity is a source of strength, offering a plethora of ideas, traditions, and experiences that can enrich our lives and contribute to creating a compassionate and harmonious future for everyone.”- Brigeth Rivera, Vice President of Marketing
“Having materials that promote diversity in the classroom can help promote self-awareness and cultural awareness for students and teachers. Global diversity in the classroom and the content helps create a friendly and inclusive environment for students, which can enhance a student’s experience in school.” –Annalynn Sarmiento, Front-End Engineer
“I’m proud to work for Lumen Learning, a company whose mission is to achieve unprecedented learning for all students. Students deserve affordable and accessible learning materials, and they deserve to feel like they have ownership of their learning and belong in their classrooms. I’m grateful knowing that my position helps students feel seen not just during Global Diversity Awareness month but every month.” – Jessica Szewczyk, Product Marketing Manager
The post Embracing Global Diversity in Education: A Reflection on Global Diversity Awareness Month first appeared on Lumen Learning.]]>
The award was granted to recognize the 20+ RCC faculty members who completed the Belonging and Inclusive Teaching Fundamentals Fellowship, a professional development course offered through RCC’s Provost Faculty Scholars and Lumen Learning’s Circles fellowship program that helps educators create inclusive learning environments and prioritize student voices. Over the course of nine weeks, Rockland educators collaborated virtually with other faculty peers to enhance their teaching practices with an increased focus on diversity and inclusion.
The course had an overwhelmingly positive response from participating faculty members. For Peter Marino, lecturer of psychology at RCC, the fellowship directly impacted his approach to building inclusivity and community in the classroom. Marino highlights several strategies he implemented in his teaching practices, including assigning readings from diverse sources and voices and giving students space to consider and discuss their own identities in relation to course material.
“I can say with confidence that my students benefited from greater personalization and caring provided by the brave and safe spaces that developed,” Marino shared. “Growing consciousness of belonging has enlightened my students as well as myself greatly.”
In addition to creating a deeper sense of belonging for RCC students, the Lumen Circles fellowship gave faculty the opportunity to build cross-disciplinary connections with one another.
Assistant Professor of Sociology Dr. Rebha Sabharwal shared that “it was extremely valuable to see how other disciplines deal with topics such as power, privilege, and intersectionality. As the world shrinks and our knowledge and empathy increase, we benefit from safe platforms where we can communicate our struggles and share successful techniques with one another.”
Rockland faculty’s participation in the Provost Faculty Scholars Program and Lumen Circles fellowships is part of an ongoing partnership between Lumen and RCC to strengthen the college’s teaching and learning center. The program evolved from Lumen’s broader partnership with SUNY to support implementation of wide-scale use of Lumen’s digital courseware, OHM, Waymaker, and professional development platform Lumen Circles. Lumen Learning’s partnership with SUNY allows faculty to get the support they need through comprehensive faculty development experiences while also providing students and educators with access to equitable and inclusive digital courseware that will enable them to make higher education more affordable and accessible for all students.
Rockland’s HEED Award recognition comes as colleges and universities nationwide face enrollment declines in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Community colleges in particular are struggling to enroll and retain students, and administrators have been left scrambling to find answers. Lumen’s work with RCC and SUNY can serve as a template for other institutions to not only recoup pandemic losses but further advance equity for minority and underserved student groups.
If you’re interested in learning more about Lumen Circles, visit lumenlearning.com/what/circles/
The post Lumen Learning partners with Rockland Community College faculty to improve DEI efforts first appeared on Lumen Learning.]]>Together, Rockland and Lumen are seeking to design solutions that create equitable educational results for all students. While user testing is a common practice for education companies, socioeconomic status has a significant influence on participation in volunteer activities such as user testing. As a result, low-income students and students of minoritized races are less likely to participate. The Rockland-Lumen partnership addresses this by creating the environment, structure and support to engage students with a broad range of lived experiences in designing equity-centered learning solutions.
“Education companies try to create products that work for everyone,” said Kim Thanos, CEO at Lumen Learning.
“The reality is that the needs and experiences of our students are not monolithic, and our solutions cannot be either. At Lumen, our mission is to enable unprecedented learning for all students. Today, race and income are often predictors of how students will persist in courses. If we want to change that, we have to better understand the needs and challenges faced by our Black, Latinx, Indigenous and low-income students, and invite them to the table to actively participate in designing solutions.”
Rockland Community College has a rich history of building programs that provide students with a strong academic foundation and real-world applications that prepare them to achieve their career goals. As the first college to launch the user testing concept this fall, Rockland will work closely with Lumen to support the student interns and refine the center concept. “At Rockland Community College we actively seek collaborations that improve the lives of our students and the vitality of our community. This is a wonderful opportunity for our students to apply their education to an initiative that builds job skills and makes a difference in the world. We look forward to contributing to a more positive learning experience for students across New York and throughout the country,” said Dr. Michael A. Baston, President of Rockland Community College.
The testing center will also build upon Rockland’s ongoing work to create a more inclusive campus, efforts that have included the launch of a “Steps Beyond Statements Working Group” to turn the college’s commitments to racial equity and inclusion into concrete actions. As part of that work, the working group worked with students to lead focus groups with their peers that led to actionable recommendations for transformative change.
As part of an equity-centered design process, Lumen Learning’s user testing center will seek the experience and feedback of a broad range of students. Paid student interns will become a part of Lumen’s product design team. With support from the Rockland and Lumen teams, student interns will learn about the products, identify questions to investigate, and then recruit peers and run the tests.
“Students will sit with us and look at the data,” explained Carie Page, Senior Product Manager with Lumen Learning.
“When you’re not a student, it’s easy to have blind spots. Our goal is that the interns will enrich our understanding of the students’ experiences, in particular the experiences of Black, Latinx, Indigenous and low-income students. Interns will interpret the results as students. This approach will bring student voices into the process to interpret the data through their unique perspectives. Students will also connect their work directly to career options and job skills.”
For Lumen, working with Rockland Community College, a SUNY institution, on this important initiative is indicative of the collaborative partnership it has had with the system for over nine years. Lumen has been working alongside the SUNY OER Services team to provide SUNY faculty and students with unlimited access to well-designed course materials through SUNY’s Ready-to-Adopt OER Catalog, all available at no cost to students.
Over the next year, Lumen plans to open additional testing centers at MSI’s across the country. “We plan to create this user testing structure, replicate it on other campuses, and share what we learn with the field broadly,” said Thanos. “We believe this approach can improve Lumen’s solutions, expand the models for equity-centered design, and create a lasting impact for the participating students. We want the interns and the testers to be themselves and to know that their voices are valued and need to be heard.”
The post Lumen Learning and Rockland Community College Create First Student Testing Center to Address Equity Gaps first appeared on Lumen Learning.]]>In January of 2020, we started an experimental community-driven continuous improvement project with a few of our Waymaker courses. This was the continuous improvement process we followed:
- We added a “Contribute!” button to the bottom of every content page.
- The “Contribute!” button sent users to a Google Document version of the page with comment and suggestion privileges turned on.
- Any student or teacher had the ability to write comments or suggestions in-context on the page.
- We monitored suggestions, provided timely feedback, and decided whether to include the suggestions in the course.
- If we included the suggestion in the course we would add the contributor’s name to the acknowledgments section. If not, we responded to their comment with an explanation as to why we were not taking their suggestion.
Throughout the first half of 2020, despite working through a global pandemic, we had an average of 20 community contributions per week. We were pleasantly surprised to find that the contributions came from mostly students! Students were finding small errors, areas for improvement in diversity, equity, and inclusion, or areas where they wanted more practice. The feedback we received was invaluable and allowed us to improve those courses. Due to this success, in fall 2020 we rolled out the process to all of our Waymaker courses.
During fall 2020, we received an average of 150 contributions per week across all of our Waymaker courses. Again, the majority of these were from students who found small text errors, pointed out difficult words to include in our glossaries, made suggestions to improve the diversity, equity, and inclusion of our course materials, and sometimes commented when they were having a hard time learning the material. We even saw a few students starting to collaborate in the Google Documents discussing a particular issue.
Thanks to this community-driven continuous improvement we have many students and teachers included in the acknowledgments sections of our book. Introduction to Psychology, for example, has 58 people listed in the Acknowledgments section of the course content, indicating that those individuals made a suggestion or improvement to the content that ended up being accepted.
We’re excited to continue making efforts to grow awareness and participation in our community-driven continuous improvement work. Our next initiative will be a half-day virtual summit. Anyone interested in being part of our community-driven continuous improvement work in specific courses will be invited to attend. The first half of the summit will consist of presentations and panels from expert teachers showing how they have done continuous improvement in their courses, and then everyone will get hands-on and dive right into continuous improvement, working on the learning outcomes our nationwide data shows students struggle with the most in a specific course.
Stay tuned for more details or email us at info@lumenlearning.com for more information.
The post An Update On Our Community-Driven Continuous Improvement Efforts first appeared on Lumen Learning.]]>Running the Play
There is a truism in marketing: If there’s a website, it must be real.
While this isn’t always the case, websites are a phenomenal tool for sharing information within and beyond your campus community. Having a website gives your OER initiative a greater sense of presence and significance. Your website might begin as a single page announcing what you’re trying to accomplish using OER to impact affordability, access and student success. Eventually it can grow into whatever you want or need it to become.
Examples from the OER Community
Check out these examples shared by others in the OER community:
- Houston Community College: HCC Z-Degree website
- Ivy Tech Community College: OER Home
- Lansing Community College: OER at LCC website; OER LibGuide
- Portland State University: OER LibGuide
- Salt Lake Community College: Open SLCC
- University of Mississippi: OER at OleMiss website
Use these steps to plan and launch your website:
1. Define your objectives for the website.
Once you’ve defined what you want your website to achieve, it will be much simpler task to create the content you’ll need. Common objectives include:
- Explain what you’re doing and why
- Broaden awareness about your initiative
- Direct people about where and how to learn more
- Publicize events and resources available to your campus community
- Highlight success stories and experiences of faculty and students using OER
- Report out on your impact and achievements
2. Figure out how you’ll build the website.
Explore tapping into your campus resources for for website-building and support. Communication, public affairs, IT, or other departments may be able to help with know-how and assistance, as well as guidance on domain names and policies regarding institution-affiliated websites.
If that path isn’t an easy one, consider setting up your own website using Google Sites (Google email address required) or another simple-to-use website-building tool.
3. Map how visitors will navigate your website.
Outline a site map – a list of website pages and the content you’ll include on each one. Unless you’re building totally from scratch, you’ll probably work within a website template that has a pre-built navigation structure. Think through what to call the different pages and navigation links, so that your website is intuitive and information is easy to find.
4. Create and add content.
Using your objectives to help prioritize your efforts, make a list of the different pieces of content and information you want to include. Decide how you’d like to lay out the content, page by page. Then start creating it.
Remember, the best websites tend to be clean and concise. They’re also very visual. Consider these tips:
- Make good use of headlines and headings to guide the visitor’s eye.
- Look for ways to incorporate graphics, photos, videos, and other media, along with (or instead of) text.
- Use forms to capture information about who’s visiting your site and interested in learning more.
5. Launch your website.
Once you’ve built your site, be sure to tell people about it. Use email, a campus newsletter, events, or even a newspaper article to help get the word out about your site.
Helpful Resources
Running the Play
Organizing an OER Summit can require a big investment of time, effort and money but can reap many benefits ranging from establishing communities of OER adopters to gaining future support from senior institutional or system leaders and state representatives. Events can range from half to full-days with workshops or meetings happening before or after the event to maximize the opportunity to meet face-to-face.
How to Make It Happen
Here are guidelines for hosting a successful event:
- Start planning well in advance. It is easy to underestimate the logistics involved in organizing these events so it is best to start far in advance. Planning for a local event on your campus should begin several months ahead. For statewide or regional events, planning should begin 9-12 months in advance. Some of the key logistical issues to be worked out include:
- Venue – Whether you plan to use a conference center, hotel or be hosted on a local campus, these facilities often book up quickly. Also keep in mind that the venue will likely dictate the maximum number of attendees so selecting the right size space is also important.
- Hotel and Travel – If you expect attendees to travel and stay overnight you may need to arrange for hotel blocks. Consider your primary audience when selecting hotels and make sure the cost is within their expected travel budgets. It can often be helpful to find a location to which the majority of participants can drive to without having to stay overnight.
- A/V and Technical Support – While issues such as wireless Internet access and projectors may seem like details that can be addressed closer to the event they often require many months to work out. Even a minor issue with Internet access can have a major negative impact on the event so best to plan for technology from the start.
- Plan for a diverse audience. OER events of this nature often attract a diverse audience, ranging from faculty with limited experience to experts who have been creating their own OER for many years. There is also often a mix of background including faculty, librarians, instructional designers, deans, etc. Planning to address the needs of the majority of attendees is important to factor in early on in the planning. Some tips include:
- Select an appropriate keynote and help them prepare – Consider keynote speakers who will be of interest to the diversity of the audience. Make sure they know who the audience will be and make sure they avoid using jargon or assuming everyone in the audience has basic knowledge of OER.
- Create different tracks based on audience interest – Organize sessions based on tracks such as beginner, intermediate and advanced or librarian, instructional designers, faculty, etc.
- Be careful not to scare off the beginners – Early adopters of OER often have a deep passion for their work and because of this are happy to dedicate large amounts of time and effort to their OER courses. While it is great to have early adopters share their work and passion for OER, they can leave beginners with the impression that adopting OER requires a lot of effort when that is not always the case.
- Timing is key. A campus-focused OER Summit can be a great way to generate awareness and excitement as you’re getting started – or to boost enthusiasm and showcase the impact of an ongoing OER initiative. It’s usually best to launch regional or statewide events for the first time once there is some initial momentum at more than one institution. Organizing a “summit” before there is enough awareness or interest can result in a poorly attended event which can then make it hard to get support for future events. It is also helpful to time the event with the launch of major initiatives such as a faculty mini-grant program.
- Use the planning process to engage new partners. Given the scope of effort associated with such events it can be helpful to engage other organizations in the planning process to help spread out the workload. This can also help build new relationships that will continue on after the event is over. Even if you’re planning an event focused only on your institution, consider inviting faculty and staff from neighboring institutions. This can help networks and open up new collaboration opportunities.
- Consider special sessions for senior leaders. Provosts, Presidents and local and state legislative leaders often have full schedules and expecting them to attend a full day event may not be realistic. Considering offering an invitation-only executive briefing breakfast, which could include the keynote speakers, during which you can highlight key benefits of OER. You can encourage them to stay for the keynote and also see if they can have one of their senior staff stay for the full day.
- Make it memorable and fun. Look for ways to create a lasting impression about the power of OER. Student+faculty panel presentations often create memorable moments as people hear how OER impacts individual lives, teaching, and learning. Take a page from Lansing Community College’s Regina Gong and serve OER cookies. Creativity (and cookies) may bring people back for the next year’s summit.
Expert Tips on Planning Effective Meetings
In addition to the recommendations above, you can learn a lot from attending great meetings and learning from seasoned event planners. Did you have a memorable, life-changing experience at a conference at some point? Consider how to emulate that experience in your own meeting.
Expert planners from the Rockefeller Foundation have published a guidebook that may be a useful resource: “Gather, the Art and Science of Effective Convening.”
Helpful Resources
LibGuide containing LCC’s OER Summit proceedings, keynote videos, and so forth.
Guidebook for event planners, published by the Rockefeller Foundation, about how to host effective in-person gatherings
Event Website
Event Website
Event Website
Photo by davide ragusa on Unsplash
Running the Play
Does your institution award “Faculty of Year” recognition? Do you have some other way of recognizing faculty achievement at the end of the school year? If so, what about giving monthly, semi-annual, or annual awards to faculty who are doing exceptional work with OER?
Award programs don’t have to be expensive or complicated. The primary purpose is to recognize great work. As you do that, you’re elevating colleagues, saying thank-you, and generating greater awareness about the impact your institution is making with OER.
Here are the basic steps:
- Invite a few fellow faculty members and OER advocates to be part of the award committee.
- Defining what you want to recognize: Is it the number of students impacted? Teaching and learning innovation? Cost savings? Curating and developing course materials? Collaboration and teamwork?
- Identify the criteria you’ll use to select award-winners.
- Create a simple award proposal or nomination form to capture the information you’ll evaluate as you’re making the awards.
- Design the award itself: Decide what award-winners will receive.
Awards can be simple or involved. Try some combination of these ideas:
- A simple digital award (similar to a badge) sent via email
- A certificate of recognition
- Announcement of the award on a webpage, with a brief profile describing the work you’re recognizing
- An article or profile on a campus website or included in a newsletter sent to faculty
- A small monetary stipend or gift card
- A “swag” bag of campus paraphernalia with a hand-written note of congratulations
- A video interview featuring the faculty member and some of their students
- Participation in a panel of fellow-award winners talking about what they’ve done with OER and its impact on teaching, learning, and students
- A note of recognition to the department head, dean, and provost
When teachers go out of their way to try OER, it’s important to show some love for their commitment and dedication. Awards provide important recognition within the campus community, and they are also an easy way to help faculty substantiate their professional development using OER on their CVs!
Pro-Tip:
Collaborate with a senior administrator to send out a digital award. Deans are a good match for this announcement because they get to report out on something positive in their departments. You write the award announcement, create the digital award, and support the administrator sending out the faculty award.
Helpful Resources
-
- Information about Lansing Community College’s OER Award Program, including application categories, requirements, proposal forms, evaluation criteria, and timelines.
-
-
- Nomination form for awards announced monthly by BCcampus to recognize significant accomplishments and impact with OER
-
Photo by Audrey Fretz on Unsplash
Running the Play
Why OER Office Hours? Office Hours often work for students because it’s an time when they can come to meet with a faculty member informally, ask questions, and get help. The same principle applies when you’re working to help faculty members get acquainted with OER, learn what it’s about, and give it a try.
Start by marking off regular times on your calendar when you and other OER champions can be available for OER Office Hours. Let your campus community know about this resource and how they can take advantage of it.
It can be tempting to hold OER Office Hours where you work with the hopes that people will stop by to chat with you. A desk and a computer are all you need to create a space for impromptu conversations. What about changing locations to meet faculty where they are?
Pro-Tips
- Schedule weekly drop-in mobile office hours near each department during hours when faculty hold their own office hours.
- Set up a desk in a well-trafficked area where faculty have to walk past you. This might invite them to ask you questions, and you can talk to them.
- Create a small easily portable sign to let people know you’re there for OER Office Hours. Your sign can also become a conversation piece.
- Make time to meet with adjuncts who teach in the evening and on the weekend. Most adjuncts are not paid for office hours, so it can be hard to reach them. Research the evening adjunct teaching schedule and seek them out for conversation by inviting them to your office hours.
Ideally, you should schedule office hours near every department once a week during the term. Keep the agenda loose. Be ready to answer all sorts of questions, demo a course, and help people get their hands on actual OER so they can see what it’s really about.
Most importantly, look available for conversation! Don’t sit there and check email. Greet people, chat, and engage with everyone who walks by including students. Over time, you might find a new champion or new ideas for your project.
Helpful Resources
Coming Soon!
Photo by Steven Hille on Unsplash
Running the Play
Even the most disorganized team can score an occasional touchdown, but to sustain the win with OER you’ll need to establish policies that ingrain the use and promotion of open educational resources within your institution’s culture. Here are key steps:
Understand what OER Policy is and why it’s important.
This “Free to Learn” guidebook, developed for higher education leaders, provides a helpful primer about open educational resources and the role of campus leadership in creating an environment that supports their use by faculty and students. This Policy Development Video Series from Open Washington provides video segments from OER experts along with and supporting materials to help you through the process of assessing, reviewing, formulating, and enacting an OER policy at your institution.
Use simple, best practices-based tools to start creating your own OER Policy.
The OER Policy Development Tool can help you quickly get started developing OER-friendly policy for your institution. This freely available, interactive policy-builder tool was developed by Amanda Coolidge (Senior Manager Open Education, BCcampus and Institute for Open Leadership Fellow) and Daniel DeMarte (Chief Academic Officer, Tidewater Community College and Institute for Open Leadership Fellow). Designed for college and university governance officials and those with responsibility for leading OER initiatives, it walks through various dimensions of OER-related policy and provides sample language institutions can use to define and implement these policies.
As you go through the tool, you may select policy positions and components relevant to your institution and your goals for promoting and scaling effective OER adoption. After you’ve selected the policies that apply to your context, the tool generates a policy document for you based on your selections. This process allows you to easily draft a policy framework that suits the needs of your institution, and get the ball of sustainability rolling.
See what others are doing with OER-friendly policy.
More and more institutions are finding ways to build OER-friendly policy into how they operate and support teaching and learning. Wikieducator provides a curated list of institutions with exemplary OER policies.
We also recommend looking through other helpful resources curated below.
Helpful Resources
OER Policy Development Tool from the Institute for Open Leadership
A OER policy planning tool developed by two Fellows from the Institute for Open Leadership, Amanda Coolidge (Senior Manager Open Education, BCcampus) and Daniel DeMarte (Chief Academic Officer, Tidewater Community College).
Video series by Open Washington featuring leading experts on OER policy, how and what policies to implement at your institution to increase the success of your OER initiative.
List institutions with exemplary OER policy, curated by WikiEducator
A database of current and proposed open education policies from around the world.
An OER policy development guidebook for community college leaders developed by Hal Plotkin and Creative Commons
A toolkit designed for higher education guide for higher education stakeholders to help you review your own institutional policy environment and institute changes that facilitate collaboration and the promotion of OER
Running the Play
Some OER initiatives are fortunate to have sufficient internal resources and expertise to support them as they grow, typically drawing from the library, the center for teaching & learning, and other parts of the organization. Others struggle to provide all the support their faculty members need, either because internal resources are stretched, or because interest in OER adoption outpaces the capacity of the teams tasked with supporting it.
Fortunately, there are great “plays” in the realm of partnerships. You can partner with a variety of organizations to increase your capacity and support for OER adoption. Here’s how:
Identify where you’re seeing gaps, bottlenecks, and pain points.
Where are your gaps and blind spots when it comes to supporting OER adoption? Do your faculty struggle with where to find OER? Not understanding how open licensing works? How to bring it into the learning environment technically? How to approach course design using OER? How to assess quality? As you identify areas that outstrip your internal expertise and bandwidth, it provides guidance on what types of partnerships could be beneficial to build your capacity and support your faculty more fully.
Identify potential partners with solutions and/or expertise to fill your gaps.
A variety of organizations provide worthwhile products and services to help you remove barriers to OER adoption for your faculty. These might include companies, non-profit organizations, advocacy organizations, other educational institutions, and individual experts.
Conduct research and make inquiries about who’s doing the kinds of things you want to achieve – and doing them well. Keep in mind the open education community is doing a lot of things that have never been done before. This means some of the most valuable partners might be those you trust to help you figure out something new.
Get to know potential partners and how they work.
Use the internet, conferences, webinars, and other information sources to check out partners and request getting-to-know-you meetings. Find out how they typically engage with organizations doing the types of things you want to do. How do they work with faculty members? Talk to their current partners and customers, to learn about their experiences and whether the partner’s approach would be good for your project.
Inquire about costs and payment models for the type of partnership you’re exploring. Different organizations have different models for how to engage with their people, products, and services. Payment models range from totally free to “donation requested” to membership fees, subscriptions, and charges per student or per service engagement. What will work best for you, given your administrative structure, budget, and what you’re trying to accomplish?
Select and develop partnerships to help you remove barriers and achieve your goals.
Once you find a partner that is a good fit, commit to developing this relationship so you can realize its full value. Fruitful partnerships require attention, time, and collaboration. Make the effort early to set partnerships up for success based on common goals and milestones.
Bringing in a new partner is a tremendous opportunity to raise awareness and build momentum around OER adoption. When you take advantage of this opportunity, you’ll make quicker progress towards accomplishing the things you want to see from both OER and the partnership itself.
Potential Partner Organizations
The following list is a sampling of organizations working actively to support OER adoption and faculty professional development related to OER in higher education.
- BCcampus – Support for innovative teaching and learning practices
- CCCOER – Consortium for collaboration and professional development around OER adoption among community colleges
- Cengage OpenNOW – Digital courseware designed using OER
- Creative Commons – Open licensing and related advocacy
- Intellus – Digital courseware designed using OER
- Lumen Learning – Digital courseware designed using OER, faculty support, and adoption expertise
- Merlot – Searchable OER library, repository, and creation tools
- OER Commons – Searchable digital OER library, repository, and network
- Online Learning Consortium (OLC) – Faculty professional development
- Open Textbook Library – Search for and review openly licensed textbooks
- OpenStax – Open textbook publisher
- SPARC – Library and librarian support for OER
- TopHat – Digital courseware designed using OER
Helpful Resources
Coming Soon!
Attributions: Photo by Rémi Walle on Unsplash