Good Habits for Talking About Open Education (Essential)
This section focuses on developing habits for talking about open education. In this section, you will:
- Explore strategies that engage and empower stakeholders in conversations around open education.
- Consider talking points for responding to challenging questions in open education.
- Identify steps you can take to deepen your authentic voice when talking about open education.
Talking to faculty about something new can be difficult and uncomfortable. After offering the workshop hundreds of times, we have seen and heard a lot from faculty, stakeholders, and our members! From those experiences, we'd like to share some lessons about delivery and tone with you. In this video, Senior Managing Director Sarah Cohen shares some of these lessons and offers you suggestions for preparing to have successful conversations on your campus.
Hopefully, these habits will prove helpful to you. Remember, the first time you talk about open education, it might not go as well as you'd like. Don't give up!
Beyond practicing good habits of mind, we'd encourage you take a few more, concrete steps.
Localize your slide deck
We've said it before and we'll say it again, making the slides, the data, and the stories in your presentations and examples make a big difference. Localizing your slides Links to an external site. can provide greater context and urgency.
Consider practicing your elevator pitch.
You are probably familiar with the concept of the elevator pitch but just in case - imagine you get on an elevator with a faculty member or department head with whom you've been trying to connect about open education. You have three floors to make your case. What do you say?
While the OEN's Faculty Workshop can be used for formal presentations, it can also be used to help you build your own elevator pitch. Whether you run a full workshop or use the slides from the workshop for a presentation (they're yours to use - they're CC-BY!), consider the workshop framing. The reason why the workshop has been successful is because it follows this formula:
- The deck concretely outlines the problems associated with affordability and access.
- Open educational resources are presented as one concrete solution.
- We encourage you to localize the deck so it suits your faculty, your students, and your unique institutional challenges.
- In the deck, we are inviting faculty to take a specific and concrete action: to review an open textbook in the Open Textbook Library.
How might that formula help you with an elevator pitch, conversation, or presentation? Please see OEN's openly licensed Action Plan Links to an external site. for more examples of elevator pitches, localized slide decks, and more! The OEN's Certificate in OER Librarianship program provides mentorship, a robust curriculum, and a cohort of fellow librarians to help librarians build a sustainable, customized Action Plan for their campuses.
However you move forward, keep these suggestions in mind, don't forget that you are not alone.