Developing Programs on Your Campus (Essential)

Faculty are busy, and in order to get their attention when there are so many competing demands upon their time, you have to be strategic, creative, and persistent in both recruiting faculty and in providing incentives.

This module focuses on developing open education programs on your campus. In this module you will:

Identify effective strategies to recruit faculty.
Focus on habits of mind to keep at the ready when talking about open education, especially to skeptics.
Consider ways to identify financial and non-financial incentives for faculty participation
Define the return on investment for incentives through student savings.

As a reminder, much of what we focus on here relates to faculty and the faculty workshop. However, you will likely find these questions, and the underlying concerns, to be important to a myriad of stakeholders: administrators, librarians, bookstore managers, students, and others. Remember that it often takes many conversations to introduce, clarify, and engage partners in open education. Stay with it!

Recruiting Faculty

Many of the successful strategies OEN members have employed to recruit faculty were from BC (before COVID). Now, in the COVID era, getting faculty's attention is even more challenging. That's all the more reason why it's important to go beyond general email blasts. Now is the time to be strategic.

First of all, take a targeted approach:

Focus on high-enrolled, general education courses for OER course redesign.
- These courses often have multiple sections, are aimed at the non-major, and fulfill pre-requisites. Those same challenges can make the case for OER more compelling - these are courses where the high cost of textbooks can greatly impact course completion and retention.
- The potential for big savings are found in these classes! An academic department that decides to adopt open course materials across all sections will lead to significant student savings.
Consider targeting courses with high-cost course materials.
- This is a great opportunity to get to know your bookstore managers. Many OEN members have found that opening a conversation with their bookstores about the high cost of materials leads to opportunities to explore alternatives, together. Is that the case everywhere? No. However, many campus stores have connections to print-on-demand services for students, and know a great deal about student efforts to save money.
Know your audience: at your institution, will non-tenured faculty be more likely to try OER for their courses than tenured faculty? Will adjuncts even have the opportunity to choose their own course materials, or is that a departmental decision?
- Before you hold a workshop, you may want to know if there is a textbook(s) in the OTL that they might be interested in, and if so, if they have the academic freedom to choose to change their course materials.

Secondly, take a networked approach:

Call in partners! The Library, the Center for Teaching and Learning, instructional design staff, and campus bookstores can be partners in growing your open education movement.
Put champions to work: All it takes is one well-respected faculty adopter to have a good experience with OER and then spread the word. Ask them to speak at events, invite their friends to workshop, and provide a brief testimonial about their students' experience with OER.
Ask champions to invite a friend. . . or three!

Finally, welcome tough questions.

Rainbow colored welcome sign on wood

Photo by Belinda Fewings Links to an external site. on Unsplash Links to an external site.

Welcome tough questions. You aren't there to judge the books they have chosen; instead, you are there to offer them an alternative choice if it meets their educational objectives and the needs of their students. Encouraging and not becoming defensive when tough, sometimes critical-sounding questions are posed during a workshop takes time, but patience pays, and curiosity should be encouraged! We will practice answering some tough questions later.
For more ideas, check out Lumen's OER Champion Playbook Links to an external site..

Once you have faculty or stakeholder's attention, it's important to be prepared to talk about open education in productive, constructive ways. The next section will focus on ways to talk about open education and habits to keep in mind.

Additional Resources

Activity: Practice Answering Tough Questions

Directions: Please practice thinking through how you might answer a faculty who posed tough questions. We will be practicing answering these questions live later.