Supporting OER Adoption
13
Abbey K. Elder
OER program managers are often asked to locate OER as part of their daily work. This work is usually supported through OER consultations, meetings with faculty that inform the content and subjects that the OER support staff will seek out.
The OER consultation process is similar to research consultations, which the librarians on your team may already be familiar with. Locating and sharing content may be a simple exchange over email, or it may be a more involved process that requires the support of go-betweens like subject liaison librarians or other OER support staff. To help you consider how you might implement this work at your institution, a basic guide for structuring an OER consultation is provided below.
There are four basic steps to every OER consultation:
- The preliminary message or meeting, where you gather course-level information.
- Follow-up meetings, which dig deeper into the needs of the instructor.
- The identification of content that fits the parameters identified in steps 1 and 2.
- Sharing content you identified with the instructor.
Gather Information
Before you can start looking for open content, you first have to gather information about the course in which it will be used. An easy way to do this is through a standard OER consultation request form. Create a form that faculty must fill out to request a consultation with you or another support person at your institution for help locating OER. When sharing a form like this, be sure to place it prominently in a place that is easy for faculty to find. A form that people can’t find isn’t of much use to you!
A basic OER consultation request form should contain at least three things:
- Instructor’s contact information
- Course code and number
- Details about the current textbook(s) and/or readings currently assigned
In addition to these three items, you can also ask for a copy of the instructor’s syllabus and/or course schedule, though this will require a “file upload” option within the form itself, which is not possible on every platform. You will need this information later, but you can request it from the instructor directly if necessary.
Although consultation request forms can be as simple or as complex as you’d like, we recommend keeping the forms as short as possible to lessen the burden on faculty filling out the form. A good example of a basic OER Consultation Request Form is provided below, from Florida State University Libraries:
Once a form has been filled out, you or another member of your team will need to follow up with the instructor for the next step of their consultation. For example, you may ask that a student worker on your team conduct the initial OER search for the instructor, or that the subject liaison librarian for your instructor’s department meet with them for the initial consultation. Some project management tools (e.g., Smartsheet) can alert members of your team when a consultation request form has been filled out s