11 Planning
Knowing your audience
The first point of consideration when creating a marketing strategy is understanding the audiences for any given message. For open and affordable course markings, this means understanding the general climate and institutional context around course materials affordability and open educational resources (OER). For example, any existing outreach should be reviewed as an important component of launching a new marketing promotion. If no general outreach on open and affordable course materials is in place, a plan to raise awareness throughout the institution is paramount.
Initiative coordinators should gather data about awareness of low-cost resources among faculty and students at the campus level and use it to inform the creation of introductory messaging. If awareness is already high, then messaging can focus on the specifics of the open and affordable course markings initiative. If awareness is middling to low, as is likely, messaging will need to incorporate explanatory and persuasive content about the importance of such alternative resources as OER, the benefits open and affordable resources can bring to both students and instructors, and how low-cost materials fit into broader issues of student success and retention (Fischer et al. 2015, Hilton et al. 2016b, and Colvard, Watson, and Park 2018). Overall, communication and branding campaigns should take baseline awareness into account, raise awareness broadly, and highlight the open and affordable course marking initiative in particular.
awareness
A variety of resources are available as alternatives to high-cost college textbooks, including openly licensed materials, but many instructors are not yet knowledgeable about non-traditional resources. In the 2018 Babson College Survey, 54% of faculty reported being unaware of OER, while just 13% of faculty reported being very aware of OER (Seaman and Seaman 2018). In addition to general awareness problems, surveys have shown that instructors sometimes conflate free resources with OER. For example, instructors often assume that all library resources are OER because they are free for patrons to use. Similarly, instructors often identify free online videos, such as TED Talks, as OER, even though many such videos are under a license that does not allow for remixing. Institutions should decide how important it is for their stakeholders to understand the differences between library resources, OER, and low-cost resources, and the definitions they apply to each.
Students are also often unaware of OER and what OER can mean for their educational experience. For example, a 2018 report for the Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission found that only 12.5% of community college and 7.3% of public university student respondents were aware of what the acronym OER meant (Freed et al. 2018). When students are unaware of what the “OER” refers to, it can be difficult for them to understand why it matters that these resources are bein