4.2 Building Campus Alliances

Introduction

Units 2 and 3 explored interactions with students, faculty, administrators, and librarians as stakeholders. In subunit 4.1, campus alliances were identified as one of the key components of a successful OER program. In this subunit, we’ll dive deeper into how those alliances are formed. We'll help you identify specific stakeholders you may want to engage and we'll explore specific strategies you can use to engage them. Faculty are clearly one of your key alliances. Developing faculty-focused strategies is also going to be a big part of our time together in Minneapolis. This subunit will mostly be devoted to getting a sense of faculty incentives beyond altruism. At the end of unit 4, we’ll share and discuss our campus alliance outlines with our cohort.

Required Readings and Resources

Identifying key stakeholders and understanding their different motivations is one of the most valuable things you'll do as an OER champion at your institution. This job will inevitably lead you to talk to many people around campus. Knowing how to connect with them and manage those relationships in a unique and personalized way will be tremendously beneficial.

The reading list below includes many of the key stakeholders you'll encounter. Some that matter in your specific campus context may be missing from this list. For most of the stakeholders we've listed, a corresponding reading digs into their motivations. Please make sure to read all of these linked resources. 

Key Stakeholders and Their Motivations

Jasmine Roberts is a faculty member at Ohio State University and provided insights as a campus OER leader from her unique perspective. As you read her article, think about the unique needs of faculty members at the institutional, departmental, and disciplinary level: Where Are All the Faculty in the Open Education Movement? Links to an external site.

You should also be aware of the Babson Survey Research Group's "Freeing the Textbook: Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education, 2018 Links to an external site." Links to an external site. (CC BY SA 4.0 Links to an external site.). This is an annual report that dives deep into faculty usage and perceptions of OER. You don't need to read the whole thing, but certainly skim it to be aware of the major findings. 

  • Other librarians who aren’t you. We dug into the role of libraries and librarians in unit 3. How can you engage your colleagues to ensure they don't pigeonhole OER as "your thing"?
  • Bookstores. As the primary source of textbooks on campus, the bookstore is an important stakeholder to be aware of. While a bookstore may offer resistance to an OER program, there is a surprising amount of diversity in business models and cultures at different campus stores. A campus-owned bookstore may view your OER program differently than a Follett or Barnes & Noble outlet with a for-profit mission. On the other hand, many campus stores see greater revenue from branded clothing and memorabilia than textbooks, and may be enthusiastic about partnering with your program as a sign of their support for student success. Temple University's associate university librarian Steven Bell completed a survey of librarians and bookstores in 2017 and shared his findings on the state of library-bookstore partnerships in this area (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.. As you read, start to develop strategies for engaging your campus bookstore with an understanding of the incentives that drive different types of stores.
  • Student government groups. Individual students have various incentives as we learned in subunit 2.1. But what about student governing bodies? Student government groups hold a lot of power on many campuses. You might be able to rally their power and influence behind a cause you care about — OER perhaps. Read this toolkit to identify national resources for engaging student government groups (e.g., Student PIRGs, Student Government Resource Center): Open Textbook Alliance’s Student Government Toolkit: Making Textbooks Affordable Links to an external site. (CC BY 4.0 Links to an external site.). 
  • Online learning / LMS gatekeepers. Many OER champions who also work with faculty designing online courses often use the online course redesign process as an opportunity to bring up OER — i.e. "if we're putting in all this work to update your course anyway, we might as well look at your textbook and if we can improve it with OER." Sneaky (and smart).
  • Instructional designers & disability resource centers. Instructional designers care about alignment. Chances are, most courses aren't aligned well because faculty are forced to adapt their course to fit a commercial textbook. With OER, faculty can make the content accommodate their outcomes, not the other way around. Similarly, disability resource centers can go to bat for OER on your behalf if they understand the unique ability to ensure all content students see is editable to ensure accessibility.
  • University leadership. Read Lumen Learning's "Annual OER Report Card, Links to an external site." paying special attention to the sections talking about aligning OER program goals with your institution’s strategic plan. This is a key way to develop a sustainable program and win over leadership. 
  • Two resources discuss various perspectives:

The last thing we'd like you to read in this subunit is the content below, which comes from subunit 5.5 "Opening Up Your Institution" of the Creative Commons Certificate Links to an external site. (CC BY 4.0 Links to an external site.). 

 

Subunit 5.5 "Opening Up Your Institution" of the Creative Commons Certificate, licensed CC BY 4.0

Education institutions around the world are trying to figure out how to support their educators, staff, and learners in using, revising, and sharing OER, with new open education practices, and the communities that sustain them. How can education leaders use various policy tools to support and promote open education?

What if there were institutional policies that supported your open education work? What if money and time were available to educators who wanted to redesign their courses to make them open? What if promotion and tenure guidelines rewarded sharing your educational resources and/or research? What effect might pro-open education policies have on you and your learners?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Education institutions have a broad menu of open education policy options from which to choose.

  • Raise awareness of the existence of OER and the benefits for your learners and faculty.
    • Action: Host an annual “open education” day at your school or university.
  • Empower stakeholders to drive your institution’s open education strategy.
    • Action: Create an Open Education Task Force comprised of learners, faculty, accessibility experts, deans, bookstore, financial aid, library, instructional designers, eLearning, etc.
  • Ensure all of the content you fund is OER.
  • Issue a call-to-action to solve an education challenge.
    • Action: Create an OER Grant Program. Appropriate funds for supporting faculty and staff to shift your 50 highest enrolled courses from closed content to OER.
      • Example: Maricopa Community Colleges in Arizona started an open textbook initiative to lower costs of teaching materials. They provided grants to create open courses and train faculty on OER. Learn more about their process here Links to an external site..
  • Leverage existing strategic documents to support open education.
    • Action: Add open education goals to key institutional strategy documents.
    • Action: Identify and track key performance indicators that improve when courses/degrees adopt OER.
      • Example: Increasing student outcomes, increasing the percentage of learners who can access 100% of the learning resources on day one, reducing dropouts during add/drop periods, increasing credits taken per semester, decreasing student debt, decreasing time to degree.
  • Make it easy to share OER.
    • Action: Join a global OER repository and make it simple for your educators and learners to find others’ OER and share their OER. Provide professional development.
  • Ensure educators have the legal rights to share.
    • Action: Change the contract between the institution and the faculty/teachers so the educator has the legal rights to CC license their work.
      • Example: A Creative Commons policy in New Zealand gives teachers advance permission to disseminate their resources online for sharing and reuse. The policy also ensures that both the school and the teacher — as well as teachers from around the country and around the world — can continue to use and adapt resources produced by New Zealand teachers in the course of their employment. Creative Commons NZ have developed an annotated policy template for schools to adapt. Links to an external site.
  • Provide OER information to learners.
  • Reward sharing.
    • Action: Adjust promotion and tenure policies to reward the creation/adoption/maintenance of OER and publishing in open access journals. The creation and adaptation of OER should be appropriately recognized as curricular innovation and service to the academic profession during promotion and tenure review.

Enforcing Open Education Policies

The point of most open education policies is to ensure the publicly (or foundation) funded educational resources are available to the public with 5R permissions. When it comes to enforcing open education policies, many people play important roles.

The funder and its program officers need to understand the open policy, communicate the importance of it to grantees verbally and in writing, and follow up by checking to ensure the public has full access to the openly licensed content under the terms of the policy.

The university/college administration should provide support (e.g., hire a full-time OER/OA librarian) to faculty creating, remixing, sharing and adopting OER, and/or redesigning their courses toward open pedagogy/practices. Institutions can also review and modify (as needed) promotion and tenure policies to ensure faculty engaged in open education work are rewarded (not punished) during promotion and tenure review.

Final remarks

When education institutions support their educators, staff, and learners in moving from closed to open content and practices, open education thrives. Educators want to design the best courses, adjust their practices and pedagogy to empower learners to co-create knowledge, and push the limits of knowledge by openly sharing their ideas and resources with a global audience. But educators can’t do it alone. They need political, financial, time, staff, and policy support to shift to, and fully realize, the benefits of open education.

 

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