Program Management
8
Marco Seiferle-Valencia and Jeff Gallant
Building familiarity with OER on campus is a key part of the outreach and promotion work OER program managers must undertake to help expand the adoption and promotion of open course materials. When thinking about building awareness at your institution, it helps first to determine what the overall OER climate is. Campuses with existing robust OER programs will have different needs than those whose OER efforts are more nascent. This chapter provides a guide to conducting an environmental scan to establish starting points for helping your institution build familiarity and interest with OER.
Conducting an Environmental Scan
When considering where to start or refine your strategy for building familiarity with OER at your institution, an environmental scan can give you and your team a firm foundation to start with. An environmental scan is an examination of the environments surrounding your program with special regard to how they interact with, support, or possibly hinder your program’s mission. When conducting an environmental scan for an OER program, consider these questions in order to get a full picture of your institution and its surroundings:
Internal Environment: Your Institution
How does materials adoption work at your institution?
Check for departmental or institutional policies which may affect whether instructors have the agency to select materials for their own course sections. For example, departments may adopt a single set of resources for use in large introductory courses at one institution, while faculty may select their own resources at another. The amount of agency an instructor has in selecting materials may also differ depending on their status (full-time, part-time, adjunct). Finally, there may be external factors which influence the choices instructors make, such as vendor incentives, automatic billing programs, or minimum sales requirements for discount prices on materials.
What are the current OER adoption levels on campus?
Gathering accurate data regarding how many faculty are adopting OER at your institution or system can be a daunting task, but some of this information may already exist. If your institution has comprehensive materials adoption data through a campus store or auxiliary services department, for instance, this data would be a great place to start looking for OER adoptions. Check with the providers of this data to find how it’s reported and whether or not they see the data as largely accurate. For institutions where adoption data is incomplete or disregards OER adoptions, you may only be able to estimate the current use levels by conducting a survey.
What can you discern about attitudes towards OER at your institution?
Take a look at the current activities within places that support teaching and learning; there may be open education activities taking place, along with open-friendly faculty learning communities, which may have the potential to discuss OE