Create a website to let your campus community (and the world) know about your OER initiative and the impact you’re making with OER.

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.

Attributions:

Glowing lightbulb photo by photo by Kari Shea on Unsplash

Develop and practice your elevator pitch for OER: a succinct, persuasive sales pitch that lasts roughly the length of an elevator rode.

Note: Asterisk denotes this is a proven, high-impact play.

An important tool for any champion or evangelist is having a good elevator pitch: a succinct, persuasive pitch aimed at piquing their interest and enticing them to want to learn more. The elevator pitch gets its name from the idea that you may only have the length of an elevator ride to capture someone’s attention.

For an OER champion, a compelling elevator pitch might offer your best opportunity to convince someone to try OER. And there’s one thing constant with any elevator pitch: the more you practice, the better it gets.

What makes a good elevator pitch?

A strong elevator pitch will:

• Identify the problem you’re solving
• Explain your solution and why it works
• Make it personal and passionate by sharing facts, actual benefits, and concrete examples of how your solution impacts real people
• Invite your audience to take a specific action

Craft Your Pitch

To get started, write out some talking points, or even a complete script explaining how OER can help solve important problems for students and faculty on your campus. Tie in themes that are important to the people you’ll talk to.

For example, is textbook affordability an important issue for students or campus leaders? If so, estimate the cost savings your OER initiative has achieved so far and mention it in your pitch. Is student success or retention a particular focus? If so, be sure to explain how OER can impact these important outcomes. Is academic freedom an important issue for faculty? If so, talk about how OER offers faculty increased control and academic ownership over their course materials.

Use this Elevator Pitch Worksheet tool, developed by Houston Community College’s OER initiative team for an AACC presentation, to help you think through what’s happening with your OER initiative and how you might craft an effective elevator pitch.  

Once you’ve drafted a pitch, it’s time to practice, practice, practice. Share it, see what resonates, and make adjustments.

Tailor Your Pitch to the Audience

When developing your elevator pitch, focus your key points and benefits on the audience. You might have a standard elevator pitch you use for faculty members, and variations of it you use when you’re talking to administrators, librarians, or instructional designers.

Similarly the “ask” at the end of your pitch should be tailored to the audience. You might ask faculty to review an OER course or textbook, and share their feedback with you. You might invite administrators to attend an OER Summit or another meeting where a faculty+student panel is presenting about their experiences using OER. Think about the role each person might play in building your OER initiative, and then invite them to take some action that could move them towards becoming your ally.

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Organize a local, regional, or statewide event as a “summit” for OER veterans and newcomers to learn from each other, share experiences, and find opportunities for networking and collaboration around open education

Note: Asterisk denotes this is a proven, high-impact 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:

1. 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:
   1. 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.
   2. 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.
   3. 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.
2. 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:
   1. 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.
   2. Create different tracks based on audience interest – Organize sessions based on tracks such as beginner, intermediate and advanced or librarian, instructional designers, faculty, etc.
   3. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.”

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Find opportunities to increase your impact by identifying courses with the combination of high enrollments, high DFW rates (Drop-Fail-Withdrawal), and high textbook costs. These courses are prime targets for shifting to OER.

Note: Asterisk denotes this is a proven, high-impact play.

Are you wondering which courses are a good starting point for the shift to OER, or where to target efforts to scale up OER to all sections? DFW analysis can help you answer these questions.

DFW (Drop-Fail-Withdrawal) rates provide clues about where things are breaking down for students trying to move through your institution’s programs. Classes with high DFW rates often present obstacles for students in terms of access to and affordability of course materials. OER helps remove these obstacles and set students up for greater success.

Here are the steps to complete your DFW analysis focused on which courses are great targets for broadening your impact and ability to scale use of OER:

1. Request course data: Ask your institutional research office for the following data:
   • List of the top 20 highest-enrollment courses at your institution
   • DFW rates for each course
2. Request or find bookstore data: Ask your bookstore for (or look-up online) the average cost of course materials for each of these top 20 highest enrollment courses.
3. Add your data to this spreadsheet or something like it, to help you compare enrollment levels, DFW rates, and potential cost savings for courses that shift to OER.
4. Identify which courses have solid OER available. Look up which courses have great OER content available, using sources you trust like the Lumen Course Catalog, BCcampus Open Textbooks, or OpenStax.
5. Note which courses have receptive faculty or department heads. Capture this information in the spreadsheet because these are always low-hanging fruit.  
6. Note where curriculum review is already in progress. If curriculum review or course redesign is already planned or in progress, these courses may be good targets because the department is already poised for change.
7. Set priority levels for shifting each course to OER, based on the combination of factors captured. Give a higher priority to courses with these factors:
   • High DFW rate
   • Large number of student enrollments
   • High potential textbook cost saving if you shift to OER
   • Receptive faculty and/or department head
   • High quality OER already available
   • Curriculum review / course redesign already planned or in progress  

This process helps you compare relevant information about the courses that represent the greatest potential for making a broader impact with OER.

The analysis itself can be a great conversation-starter with administrators and department heads, helping them capture the vision of what OER might offer to improve student outcomes. Consider turning the analysis into a program proposal to set strategy and generate greater administrative support for scaling your OER initiative.

After the Number-Crunching

Once you’ve completed the analysis, start working with faculty, department heads, and other colleagues to gauge receptivity for exploring a shift to OER. As you identify who’s willing to move forward, set targets you can work towards together, as illustrated in the following table:

Course Name	% enrollments using OER today	Target %: Spring 2019	Target %: Fall 2019
College Algebra	0%	12%	45%

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Invite OER veteran faculty members from your campus or neighboring institutions to share what they’ve done and how it is impacting teaching and learning in their courses. Host these presentations in departmental meetings, lunch & learn sessions, virtual roundtable discussions, teaching & learning center seminars, or other professional gatherings.

Note: Asterisk denotes this is a proven, high-impact play.

The first step in organizing effective peer sharing is to identify faculty who have experience with OER and who are willing to participate. In some cases it may be worthwhile to offer some form of compensation for their time and efforts. While it is of course important to gather positive and successful examples, being able to share challenges, obstacles, and how those were overcome can lead to highly impactful conversations.

Also keep in mind opportunities where an OER Faculty Panel can be a part of larger OER or other teaching and learning events. In most cases, approximately 60-90 minutes allows for enough time to hear from faculty and facilitate a constructive question and answer session.

Example: SUNY OER Faculty “Roadshow”. The full day schedule

Time	Description	Participants
8:30am	Arrival and light refreshments
9:00am	Welcome	Campus Representative
9:15am	Keynote	SUNY OER Services
10:30am	Break
10:45am	Faculty Panel	Faculty Advocates from across SUNY
12:00pm	Lunch
1pm	Copyright Session	SUNY OER Services
1:45pm	Breakout Sessions by Discipline. Sessions may vary, but typically include: ~Arts & Humanities ~Science & Technology ~Math ~Social Science ~All Disciplines	SUNY OER Services & Faculty Advocates
3:45	Conclusion – wrap up in breakout groups	SUNY OER Services & Faculty Advocates

The following is a sketch of the agenda specifically for the Faculty Panels:

Facilitator: Brief overview and introduction of panelists

“Origin Stories”: each panelists gives a ~5 minute story of their experience using OER

Facilitated Questions: the facilitator opens general discussion with one or two questions of his/her choosing. These can be aimed at specific panelists or open to all.

General Questions: open the floor to questions from the audience. Generally there are more questions than time to answer them all. If the questions lag, the facilitator can again seed conversation with additional questions of his/her choosing.

Facilitator: Brief closing remarks

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Invite a panel of students who have used OER to speak publicly about how using open educational resources makes a difference for them financially and academically.

Note: Asterisk denotes this is a proven, high-impact play.

Nothing brings home the power and impact of OER quite like hearing the voices of students talk about how open content makes a significant difference for them financially and academically. Student panels can help you win hearts and minds across the campus community. Hearing about the very real positive impacts of OER on students can help move faculty from “not interested” towards “I’m willing to try this out.”  

Host the panel in a forum where your target audience(s) will see and hear the messages you want them to understand, such as a faculty senate meeting, professional development day, a teaching and learning conference, or even a virtual session via a webinar.  

Here are tips for hosting a successful student panel about OER:

• Identify strong student spokespeople. Having authentic student voices advocating for scaling OER adoption can be a powerful motivator for faculty and senior administrators.  While students do not need to extensive speaking experience or deep knowledge of OER, it does help to identify students who
  • a) feel strongly about the impact OER has made in their educational experience, and
  • b) feel comfortable speaking to groups and feel passionate about the values of OER.  

Ask faculty using OER to recommend students with whom they’ve had conversations about the experience of using open content. Attending student meetings, informally chatting with students in the library or bookstore or meeting with student government groups are good ways to identify student spokespeople.

• Select a great moderator. Choose a moderator for your panel who is skilled at asking questions, listening, and eliciting thoughtful responses from the panelists. Generally this role is performed best by a faculty member or other OER champion who is familiar with the students and how OER is being used on campus.
• Develop and circulate great questions … in advance. A great panel boils down to asking great questions to thoughtful speakers. Questions that allow people to tell their personal stories help engage the audience emotionally and begin to truly care about this issue. Take the opportunity to go through the questions with panelists. Coach them around identifying personal stories and examples they are comfortable sharing. Discuss key ideas and themes you’d like to bring out during the discussion, and identify how their perspectives can reinforce these key themes.
• Consider these sample questions:
  • Tell me about your experience in courses that use open educational resources and how it’s different from other courses.
  • What difference have OER courses made in your life and your ability to juggle the demands of school with the rest of your life?
  • What’s the biggest difference has OER made for you academically and how you learn?
  • (For faculty) How has using OER impacted your course design, pedagogy, and how you teach?
  • How are OER courses different from non-OER courses? Do you find these are positive or negative differences, and why?
  • What do you tell other students about using OER course materials?
  • What advice would you give a faculty member considering whether to shift to OER course materials?

• Provide student panelists with data points and reference materials. Panelists can be particularly convincing when they share a combination of personal experience and hard facts. While there is a significant amount of materials available for students to learn more about OER, the U.S. Student PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups) provides a lot of background information as well as regular national reports that can be particularly useful.
• Mentor and coach student government representatives.  It’s wise to build bridges with student government leaders and get them involved in the causes of textbook affordability and OER. Consider including them in organizing the OER student panel discussion where appropriate.  Providing mentorship and coaching in these situations can be important. Student government representatives can often feel compelled to be strong advocates for their constituents, and they can benefit from a thoughtful approach to engaging with senior leaders, as well as what makes for solid institutional policy. For example, having a student representative demand that the institution mandate faculty use of OER could become counterproductive in efforts to gain faculty support.
• Record, record, record. If possible, record the panel discussion or arrange for a separate video recording session so you can use the panel opportunity to produce short (1-3 minute max) video testimonials that can be posted to web sites or shared on social media.

More Pro-tips:

Capture Student Video Testimonials whenever possible. The Panel Discussion is a great focusing event, but you can also look for opportunities to interview and capture students’ experiences on video at other events. OER Summits, conferences and institutional events are good places to plan to interview students about their experience with OER.

Invest in professional video production. While face-to-face events are often best, having a few video clips of students talking about the value of OER to them is also very useful.  While it can be OK to have students shoot videos on their phones or use other informal methods for producing videos, it can be worthwhile to invest in at least one professionally-produced video.  The resource links below have several examples.

Attributions:

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Set up a “sandbox” course to give faculty members the opportunity to see, explore, and evaluate an OER course in their own discipline and learning management system.

Note: Asterisk denotes this is a proven, high-impact play.

In our experience, once a faculty member sees Lumen OER course materials in their learning management system, it’s easier for them to envision adopting, adapting, and teaching an OER course. They can review the course on their own terms and determine the best path forward.

Here’s how this play works:

As an OER champion for your campus, you can ask your Lumen point person to provide Waymaker cartridges for some of our most-requested courses, such as College Success, Psychology, Sociology, Marketing, and Introduction to Business. We provide the course cartridges along with easy-to-follow instructions for how to import the content. You create shells of those courses in your learning management system. Use your institution’s numbering  and naming system, for example change “College Success” to “Learning Frameworks EDUC 1300.”

Because these new sandbox courses are in your LMS, you control who gets added to them and you can reset as needed. This gives faculty an opportunity to explore OER on their own time and without you.

You may set up a generic login as a teacher and add the faculty as students or teachers – however you want.

Give the faculty members a heads up that they can treat these sandboxes like a textbook review. They won’t be able to copy the content into a blank course from the sandbox. If they are interested in the course, they can either contact you or the Lumen team directly.

Attributions:

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Deliver a “Why OER?” presentation to help key stakeholders understand what OER is and why it makes a difference for students, teaching, and learning.

Note: Asterisk denotes this is a proven, high-impact play.

The “Why OER?” presentation is an essential tool for any OER champion. It’s your basic pitch for to help any administrator or faculty member understand what open educational resources are and the benefits of OER for students, faculty, and the institution.

1. Identify what makes your stakeholders tick. Will they perk up when they hear about textbook cost savings? Improved passing rates? Increased retention? More control over course content? As you develop your presentation, look for ways to reinforce the benefits and themes they care most about.
2. Gather stories. Gather real-people, real-impact stories about how OER is making a difference. Ideally these are
3. Hone your slide deck. Curate and refine slides to fill a ~30 minute presentation block (plus Q&A). Thanks to CC-BY, many champions have benefitted from using and adapting David Wiley’s slides about the power and impact of OER for their purposes.
4. Incorporate helpful media and pertinent evidence. Identify media, research results, outcome data, and other material to help strengthen your case. Choose resources you know will resonate with your audience. See the Helpful Resources below for ideas and a starting point. 
5. Crib from the masters. Watch presentations and recordings of other open education advocates making the case for OER. Pay attention to their examples, stories, and approach. Take notes about how to strengthen your own delivery.
6. Practice, practice, practice. Find opportunities to give your presentation and solicit feedback.

Refine your elevator pitch. In addition to your 30-minute presentation, develop a ~5 minute elevator pitch to convey the most compelling case for OER at your campus.

Attributions:

Neon “Open” Sign photo by Alex Holyoake on Unsplash

Invite a faculty panel to present at a local conference, professional development day, OER event and/or a regional/national conference.

Note: Asterisk denotes this is a proven, high-impact play.

Faculty panel discussions provide a prime opportunity for faculty members to share their experiences about teaching with open educational resources. They serve a dual purpose of recognizing the achievements of educators who have tried something new, while also demystifying what it takes to make the switch to OER.

Hearing from fellow faculty members about what works and how OER impacts teaching and learning can encourage others to explore this path.

This play is pretty simple:

1. Identify opportunities to present a faculty panel discussion to an interested audience. This session format can be very effective at conferences, professional development events, and other meetings at the department, college, system, state, discipline, or national levels. Panels may be staged in-person or virtually, depending on the event.
2. Commit your panelists to participate. Invite people who will be willing and engaging presenters, and who get excited about sharing what they’re doing with peers.
3. Develop and submit your session proposal. Submission deadlines may occur months before the actual meeting, so be sure to work within any applicable deadlines.   

Below are several few examples of session descriptions we’ve used for a faculty panel to discuss their experience with Lumen’s OER courseware. It helps to have faculty from different institutions and disciplines to do most of the speaking, with another representative (such as an OER initiative leader or a Lumen point person) as the facilitator.

1. Coordinate the logistics. Once your session is confirmed, it is most effective for a session leader or facilitator to take the lead on coordinating how to structure the session and the role each panelist will play. Scheduling a brief coordinating call and circulating a session outline help make sure everyone is on the same page. It may also be helpful to distribute a common presentation template (if slides are needed, which may or may not be the case) and schedule an at-conference meeting for panelists to connect in advance of the session.

Sample Faculty Panel Descriptions

Example #1 (from WCET 2017)

Doubling Down on Human Connections in the Age of Digital Courseware

Speaker: John Gibson, Faculty, Business & IT, Glendale Community College

Speaker: Paul Golisch, Executive Director

Speaker: Alyson Indrunas, Director, Teaching and Learning, Lumen Learning

Speaker: Olga Kopp, Professor of Biology, Utah Valley University

Offering a variety of approaches to personalized and adaptive learning, digital courseware has the potential to help or harm the learning experience, depending on how well it supports both instructors and students. Using a show-and-tell approach from a multi-year implementation of digital courseware designed using open educational resources (OER), this session explores how courseware can impact student success by strengthening integration, communication, learner feedback, and curricular flexibility. Informed by learning data analysis, it also offers cautionary guidance about what happens when real-world students and teachers use – or fail to use – courseware as designed, and the net impact on student outcomes.

Example #2 (from ELI 2018)

Improving Access, Affordability, AND Achievement with OER in Maryland

Speaker: MJ Bishop, Director, Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation, University System of Maryland

Speaker: Katherine Cameron, Associate Professor, Applied Psychology & Rehabilitation Counseling, Coppin State University

Speaker: Josh Baron, Executive Director, Lumen Learning

Open educational resources (OER) are openly licensed instructional materials that are also typically available at little or no cost. While university administrators and state legislators are quick to hone in on potential cost savings for students, studies suggest OER also show promise to enhance learning. This session will discuss how a statewide initiative in Maryland is exploring the promise of OERs to reduce students’ cost of attendance as well as maintain, and perhaps improve, learning outcomes. Besides replacing pricey textbooks with OER, some faculty are also using technology-enhanced OER to implement personalized learning strategies aimed at strengthening success.

Example #3 (not submitted)

Title: Student Engagement Approaches For Transitional Studies – Personalized Learning and Customizable Courses

Description: “Personalized learning” is a buzz phrase, but what does it mean for teaching and learning? This interactive panel session will feature a show-and-tell from faculty piloting next-generation courseware. The panel’s facilitator will be Lumen Learning’s Director of Teaching and Learning and the eLearning Director and an adjunct faculty member from Walla Walla Community College. They will discuss strategies of moving from an eTextbook to the Waymaker courseware for a Transitional Studies course.

The panel will focus on 1) mastery learning; 2) student agency and metacognition; 3) day-one access to content using open educational resources; and 4) faculty-student personalized learning connections. This panel will share experiences and lead an interactive discussion about opportunities to explore and evaluate efficacy of personalized learning as well as how to customize courses.

Attributions:

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Structure your OER program in ways that provide opportunities to clarify planning and communications to a variety of stakeholders. This following model can be readily adapted to a variety of contexts.

Identifying your audience(s).

The OER Adoption Maturity Model was intended to be a helpful clarification of how individuals and organizations can progress in working with OER. The model is intended for a variety of audiences, especially:

1. Those new to OER.
2. Those already aware and interested in implementing OER but looking to organize a plan for propelling OER adoption.
3. Those who are already actively adopting OER and need to structure efforts underway by a variety of people, departments, and so on.

Structuring your model.

The structure of the model relies on the identification of two categories of progress.

1. Progress Stages. For the original model, the categories were “OER Initiate”, “Launch District”, and “Ambassador District” (the colored zones in the center of the model). The two later categories come from definitions outlined by the federal #GoOpen campaign to identify differing levels of competence, experience, and progress of an institutional OER program (in this case, public school districts). A third category, “OER Initiate”, as added to address those entirely new to OER, acknowledging them with a categorical identity and to offer some suggested first steps to get them going.
2. Progress Criteria. These criteria identify specific actions that can be undertaken to drive and sustain OER adoption. Some of the criteria are more generalized, suggested actions. Others are identified as specific commitments that trigger progress to the next “stage” of maturity (those identified in bold). Detailing brief descriptions of associated actions is highly recommended, and examples are listed in a chart in the model linked in the resources section below.

Although the model implies a fairly linear structure, when presenting the model it’s worth noting that it need not be implemented in such a way. Rather, the stages and criteria are intended to be wayfinding markers for

• individuals to understand their own progress in working with OER as well as in relation to others across an organization
• Organizations to understand the direction and maturity of OER adoption among individuals

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