17 Opening Up your Institution
How education institutions can support open education content, practices, and community with policy.[1]
Photo by Stories of change, CC BY 2.0
Why It Matters
Educational institutions around the world are trying to figure out how to support their educators, staff, and learners in using, revising, and sharing OER, with new open education practices, and the communities that sustain them. How can education leaders use various policy tools to support and promote open education?
Learning Outcomes
- Consider if and why you need a policy to accomplish your open education goals
- Understand the menu of open education policy options
- Assess your existing institutional policies
- Understand how to develop an institutional open policy
Personal Reflection: Why it Matters to You
What if there were institutional policies that supported your open education work? What if money and time were available to educators who wanted to redesign their courses to make them open? What if promotion and tenure guidelines rewarded sharing your educational resources and/or research? What effect might pro-open education policies have on you and your learners?
Acquiring Essential Knowledge
Educational institutions have a broad menu of open education policy options from which to choose.
Raise awareness of the existence of OER and the benefits for your learners and faculty.
Action: Host an annual “open education” day at your school or university.
Empower stakeholders to drive your institution’s open education strategy.
Action: Create an Open Education Task Force comprised of learners, faculty, accessibility experts, deans, bookstore, financial aid, library, instructional designers, eLearning, etc.
Ensure all of the content you fund is OER.
Action: Draft, adopt, and implement an open licensing policy requiring university / school funded resources to be openly licensed. Use the OER Policy Development Tool to build an open policy for your institution. You can find examples of open policies others have created at the OER Policy Registry (global) and North American OER policies and projects
Issue a call-to-action to solve an education challenge.
Action: Create an OER Grant Program. Appropriate funds for supporting faculty and staff to shift your 50 highest enrolled courses from closed content to OER.
Example: The Maricopa County Community College started an open textbook initiative to lower costs of teaching materials. They provided grants to create open courses and train faculty on OER. Learn more about their process at their website, Maricopa Millions OER Project.
Leverage existing strategic documents to support open education.
Action: Add open education goals to key institutional strategy documents.
Action: Identify and track key performance indicators that improve when courses / degrees adopt OER.
Example: Increasing student outcomes, increasing the percentage of learners who can access 100% of the learning resources on day 1, reducing dropouts during a