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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.”

Photo by davide ragusa on Unsplash

Identify areas where your institution wants to make an impact with OER, including impact points that motivate key stakeholders to engage (such as student success, textbook cost savings, or academic ownership). Set near, medium, and long term goals for OER adoption and impact, and identify how you will measure progress towards these goals.

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

The best time to reach new faculty is at the start of the school year. See if you can present to part-time faculty about your work to lower the cost of textbooks for students. It’s also important to remind the faculty who do the hiring of faculty to talk to adjuncts your institution’s commitment to OER. A simple message that you value the work of open education will go a long way.

Part-time faculty have the potential to reach a lot of students. Let’s say you hold a workshop on OER and you “only” have three part-time faculty show up. That might seem like a failure, right? Consider how many students those part-time faculty members reach with their teaching and you’re actually making significant impact. The Utah Valley University’s Psychology department, for example, sets up course shells that they share with all of their adjunct faculty when they are hired. Cerritos College’s business department supports their adjunct faculty with “master classes” that adjuncts can customize or adopt as is. Making the adoptions of courses easy and approachable for your adjuncts is time well-spent on behalf of your students.

Pro-tip:

Ask your department chairs for a list of new part-time faculty so that you can reach out personally to them. It’s a nice way to welcome new part-time faculty to your campus. Invite them for a coffee-conversation. Ask them about their experience with OER at other institutions–you might get new ideas from them and gain a new champion as a result.

Attributions: Photo by MD Duran on Unsplash

Identify areas where your institution wants to make an impact with OER, including impact points that motivate key stakeholders to engage (such as student success, textbook cost savings, or academic ownership). Set near, medium, and long term goals for OER adoption and impact, and identify how you will measure progress towards these goals.

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

When you define what success means for your OER initiative, you’re creating a common vision and understanding of what you’ll work to achieve. To do this, you will need to evaluate the range of positive impacts from OER and which of these are most important to your organization. Once you understand what success looks like, you can identify strategies that achieve results in the areas that matter most, and you can motivate key players to engage.

It is important remember that there are different goals and motivations across the organization. It can be helpful to set broad goals for the program, but also create more specific goals that align with departments or disciplines.

Step 1: Align top level program goals with the college’s strategic plan and most important priorities.

Often the college’s mission and strategic plan emphasize specific priorities such as affordability and access, or completion and success. If the OER program links directly to these goals then it is possible gain broader support. It is also helpful to engage those tasked with tracking and measuring progress on the strategic goals to assist in measuring impact of the OER program.

Step 2: Identify departments that are likely to participate, and understand department-level goals and challenges.

Often departments have specific goals or challenges. For example, the math department may be considering a pathways curriculum. Often departments have specific goals to support or guide adjunct faculty members in a consistent way. Can OER be the vehicle to help achieve existing goals or accelerate initiatives rather than competing for focus? Define specific departmental goals for adoption and impact that support the department goals.

Step 3: Consider goals that address specific issues that faculty members are grappling with in the discipline.

Tailor goals to the needs and opportunities you see within your organization. For example, if natural science faculty members are struggling to teach students who are not buying textbooks due to cost, then savings goals are very important in this discipline. If the composition faculty members are using inexpensive readings then they may become more interested if goals center around student engagement or improved learning results.

Step 4: Consolidate the goals and measures into a two or three-year plan.

While it is difficult to predict results over a longer period of time, the compounding nature of the impact of OER is much more compelling when viewed over a longer planning horizon. For example, one faculty member moving three sections of a course to OER may only result in $5,000 in savings in one term, but over two years that can exceed $30,000. Similarly, student learning and success results often require a longer timeframe to track and measure.

What Types of Goals Should You Set?

In defining measurable goals for OER programs, the following areas represent common opportunities for impact.

Program Impact Goals

• Number of students enrolled in OER courses
• Number and percentage of OER sections
• Number and percentage of high-enrollment courses with an OER option
• Number and percentage of faculty members trained in use of OER
• Degrees or certificates with an OER pathway

Cost Savings Goals

• Total textbook savings
• Single term textbook savings
• Number of students benefiting from savings

Faculty and Student Satisfaction Goals

• Faculty perceptions of quality
• Faculty challenges to overcome
• Student perceptions of quality
• Student benefits
• Student challenges to overcome

Note: While all OER approaches will achieve impact and cost savings goals, completion and learning goals often require a more complete focus that goes beyond simply using openly licensed learning materials.

Progress and Completion Goals

• Reduction in drops relative to control group or historical patterns, with impact on completion and tuition revenue
• Course throughput relative to control or historical patterns, combining impact of drops, withdrawals and students failing to earn a C or better relative
• Program completion rates relative to control or historical patterns

Student Learning and Engagement Goals

• Earliest access to OER materials by students (when do students actually access the available OER)
• Student engagement in OER learning materials
• Student success in achieving challenging learning outcomes
• Improvement in student success in achieving challenging learning outcomes based on revisions or enhancements to OER
• Student participation in OER development or refinement 

Attributions: Photo by MD Duran on Unsplash