Not all the work of creating an OER can fall on you as a single OER content manager. In this case, your Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) are the faculty and instructors who are creating or adapting the content of the OER. You are there to help them manage their project, not create the content for them.

What kind of training you offer to authors, adaptors, and adopters will depend on how much you expect them to do and what services you can offer. It’s very important to set those expectations right from the beginning, preferably in a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) or some other form of agreement. For example, you may not want to give your authors access to the publishing platform. If you choose to give authors access, you may need to set some guidelines for what the authors can and cannot change in the text and how often. If your author or adaptor is expected to provide you with a manuscript in a specific format, make this clear as well. If you are requiring your faculty adopters, adaptors and authors to participate in some kind of professional development opportunities, put that in the MOU as well.

When training authors, much of the content is similar to training your team. For example, your authors should have a basic understanding of what OER are, fair use, copyright, Creative Commons licensing and which type of license they can choose, where and how to find OER, and how to write an attribution statement and the basics of accessibility.

In addition to the basics listed above, your training of authors or adopters should address some of the known faculty concerns about and obstacles to OER adoption or publishing.

1. A lack of awareness of OER
2. Concerns about the quality of OER
3. Not knowing where to begin or a lack of confidence
4. Difficulties in finding suitable OER
5. Workload concerns (i.e., takes too much time to create or redevelop my course or the belief that it is too difficult to create OER)
6. Belief there is no material out there for a specific discipline and/or no ancillaries are available
7. Academic freedom and intellectual property concerns (e.g., loss of control over content)
8. Unclear about how OER might help with the tenure and promotion process
9. Unclear understanding of copyright, fair use and CC licenses and a fear of liability
10. Fear that the bookstore will retaliate in some way or at least not cooperate
11. Belief that students will just spend the money elsewhere (e.g. recreation) (Cuillier 2018, Harold and Rolfe, 2019)

These objections or obstacles can keep a faculty member from adopting, adapting or authoring an OER. The best way to respond to these questions is to be prepared ahead of time. The Open Education Network (OEN) provides an excellent Guide to Answering Tough Questions (OEN “Guide,” n.d.). In addition, you will want to ground your responses in the literature so keeping up with new publications is a good habit. Here are some additional Frequently Asked Questions pages you may want to review.

• OpenWashington FAQ. (Open Washington 2019)
• George Mason FAQ (Algenio 2021)
• A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources. (Wikisource 2013)
• OER Mythbusting. (OER Policy for Europe, n.d.)

Consider gathering the questions you get from faculty and making your own FAQ page to which you can point faculty who have questions or concerns. Writing your own FAQ will help you formulate your responses and make them more relevant to your faculty and institution.

Program Lead Tips: Address Misconceptions Early

There is already a lot of research. about faculty and student perceptions of OER. Addressing these perceptions and misconceptions at the beginning will save time and misunderstandings (See Chapter 4 of The OER Starter Kit for Program Managers, "Talking about OER").

When offering training, you may want to partner with your local teaching and learning center. That way your offerings get more exposure and you don’t have to do all the work. In addition, collaborating with a teaching and learning center helps people to view authoring and adopting OER as teaching and learning practices. These centers have communities of faculty who are interested in learning more about teaching so this is a good way to establish connections. Consider recording workshops for future interested SMEs and authors or adopters who cannot attend.

Types of Training Offered

General OER “101” Workshops

These workshops are introductory and for those faculty or instructors who are new to OER and the issues surrounding affordable learning. They can be a brief ½ hour or as much as a full day or even several days.

Topics often presented include:

1. High cost of textbooks – How the cost of textbooks has been rising for decades.
2. Impact on students – How students get around buying expensive textbooks by sharing with a friend or relying on the library course reserves.
3. What is OER? – A basic understanding of this concept is essential. Faculty may have a different understanding of OER than you do so it is important to get on the same page and clear up any misconceptions early on.
4. Why is OER important? -This may vary according to your institution but mostly it has to do with cost savings, accessibility of resources, and opening up the classroom.
5. Why would a faculty member choose to give their work away? – This is a common concern. While it may feel like you are giving your work away, OER always have to be attributed, giving the author a wider audience and impact with each reuse.
6. Finding appropriate OER – One common faculty complaint is that they have a hard time finding OER. In a workshop, you can point them in the right direction.
7. Evaluating OER – Faculty will ask about the quality of the OER. Just like a regular textbook, it is up to the faculty member to do a thorough evaluation of the content, layout, readability, and ancillary materials.
8. Pros and Cons of using OER
9. Open Pedagogy -This may not come up right away but it is the next logical step in going open and some faculty may already be familiar with the concept.
10. Creative Commons licenses – How and when to use the licenses and how to determine what you can do with an openly licensed work.
11. Basic copyright and fair use – Again, just to be on the same page about what can and cannot be done under fair use.
12. Time factor involved in adapting and integrating OER into a course – Faculty will be concerned about the time it takes to adopt, adapt or author an open textbook. Be honest about this; it is a time-consuming process but in the end, the course will make a positive impact on their students.
13. Integration of OER into your Learning Management System (LMS) – For many faculty having the OER in the LMS is a big incentive for moving to an OER.
14. Writing an attribution statement – Most faculty will not know how to do this so you will need to walk them through the process.

For adopters or adapters, you may wish to cover more specifically:

1. How to remix licenses: This is essential for adaptors who will be looking to remix one or more OER. It is also important to train your authors on how they need to keep track of those resources so that everything they use in their own resource has an appropriate attribution.
2. How to track and attribute images: This is very important and often overlooked until the end. Again, adopters need to keep careful track of the resources they used so that they can apply a proper attribution to any images, graphs, charts or other media they use.
3. Creating ancillary materials: If the project includes test banks, simulations, games or other material that is not in a standard format, you will need to let your author/adapter know how this material should be created and formatted for maximum accessibility and remixing.
4. Copyright and fair use: A clear understanding of what is and is not under copyright and how fair use comes into play is essential. Here, you may want to review the Guide for Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Educational Resources (Jacob, Jaszi, Adler and Cross 2021). Keep in mind that some institutions are more risk-averse than others so checking with your general counsel is probably a good idea.

For authors, you may want to add

1. Textbook design: Layout and design are generally not in the author/adaptor repertoire unless they have published a textbook in the past. 
2. Pedagogical devices or tools and how to use them appropriately: Pedagogical devices include such things as worksheets, glossaries or vocabulary lists, chapter or module summaries, etc. An example of an OER textbook that uses pedagogical devices is Modern Philosophy. by Walter Ott at the University of Virginia. 
3. Universal Design for Learning: UDL is a way of constructing learning material that is open to everyone. See Chapter 18. for more on Universal Design for Learning.

Program Lead Tips: Keep Track of Image Sources

Whether you are working with authors or adaptors, one important topic to address with them is tracking their images or other resources they plan to incorporate into their OER. Faculty may come to you with a collection of images they want to use but don’t have the information to attribute them properly (and sometimes they don’t have permission to use the image at all). Provide an Image Tracking template (either a spreadsheet or a Word document) where authors and adaptors can enter the name of the picture, the URL, the license, the alt-text tag and any other important information. Encourage your authors and adaptors to track images from the very beginning.

You may want to offer a general workshop to your authors/adopters after they sign an MOU or other agreement. For this workshop, you can cover such things as the terms of the MOU, set expectations about what you can and cannot provide, talk about milestones and deadlines, review the publishing or creation process, establish communication protocols, etc. You may actually want to break this up into a small series of workshops so that no one gets overloaded with information.

Some examples of workshops that are offered include:

• OER textbook workshop: The Open Education Network (OEN) offers workshops on OER and OER textbooks which concludes with a call for participants to review an open textbook. Reviewing an open textbook can be an excellent starting point for faculty who are interested in OER but not quite ready to commit to moving to an OER.
• In-depth workshops: Workshops are similar to online courses, although in most cases these are more abbreviated (3-8 weeks). These may be synchronous or asynchronous. Because they are multi-week, these workshops allow faculty to develop a more in-depth understanding of OER, where to find them, and, more specifically, how to integrate OER materials into their courses. They allow for more faculty reflection and insight and can support faculty members who are adopting or authoring an open textbook. These workshops are often delivered using an LMS or via a website such as LibGuides. Some may require registration and include face-to-face components while others are completely asynchronous and self-paced.

Some examples of openly-licensed multi-week or multi-module workshops include;

• Open Content to Transform the Classroom (Bloom, n.d.)
• OER Up To Speed (Morehouse, n.d.)
• Houston Community College OER Certificate. (Smith 2016)
• Open Washington. – Offers a 10 module self-paced online tutorial on copyright and licensing, OER, and Creative Commons licenses, among other topics. This tutorial may be useful to your faculty and yourself, as someone who is new to OER. (Open Washington, n.d.)
• Introduction to Open Educational Resources (Arteaga and Watkim, n.d.) Now - ASCCC Basics

Faculty Guides and Resources

Faculty guides are manuals or other resources that walk faculty through the process of finding, evaluating, adapting or adopting OER. These guides are often in the form of an openly licensed Pressbook or website such as a LibGuide and faculty can use these as a resource or a “step-by-step” guide through the creation process. Some institutions also use these guides in their faculty author training programs. Examples of guides or publications include:

The Rebus Community

• A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students (Mays 2017)
• The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far). with accompanying video series on YouTube.(Ashok and Wake Hyde 2019)

BCcampus

• BCcampus Open Education Self-Publishing Guide. (Aesoph 2018)
• BCcampus Open Education Adaptation Guide. (Aesoph 2016)
• BCcampus Open Education Adoption Guide (Aesoph 2019)
• BCcampus Open Education Faculty OER Toolkit (Moist 2017)
• Authoring Open Textbooks. (Falladin and Lauritsen 2017)

You can use any of these resources in your training program as they are all openly licensed. At some point in the future, you could produce your own faculty guide that is tailored to your needs and institution.

Communities of Practice

Faculty support is essential to making an OER program a reality. Not only do they need to support the idea of OER but they will also need some support to help them as they adapt, create and integrate OER into their courses. Communities of Practice (CoPs) are used in many disciplines as a way to offer support and guidance to individuals working on similar projects. Communities of practice are made up of practitioners in a specific discipline or domain. They build community or relationships with each other as they explore and learn about their chosen domain (Wenger, MacDermott and Snyder, 2002). Koohang & Harman (2007) also note that CoPs are a way to address the issue of sustainability since the group works together to solve problems or share learning experiences.

CoPs for OER groups can be an effective way of engaging the faculty and providing professional growth in these areas. They are generally long-term (up to a year or more) and have criteria or expectations by which the participants need to abide. CoPs may be invitation only or application-based. Wright and Lambert (2019) have created an excellent resource about CoP for OER groups.

If you are interested in developing a community of practice at your institution, be sure to check out Pikula and Johnson’s work. on CoPs (or learning circles). 

(Johnson and Pikula 2018). Keep in mind that these take some time to develop.

Professional Development

There are many opportunities for you to personally engage in professional development but you should also keep your faculty authors and adaptors apprised of any opportunities. Professional development, in this case, are learning opportunities that are outside of the basic or in-depth workshops. Some of these opportunities may be local or regional and it is unlikely that your author or adaptors will know about them. Scanning the various lists and blogs can help you identify relevant local and regional professional development. Many states or regional organizations have an annual OER symposium or conference. These are often free or have a minimal charge. Faculty may not be aware of these so keep them posted about these opportunities. Check around with colleagues in your network to discover more of these opportunities.

• Open Education Symposium. at the University of Alberta is an example of a local professional development opportunity. In 2022, it was held during Open Education Week which is a great way to get future authors or adopters involved in OER.
• Another local example is the Missouri A&OER Symposium.

In addition to local or regional workshops and training, there may be state or national professional development opportunities such as conferences or workshops. Faculty may also be looking for opportunities to present their work, so letting them know about a conference that may be of interest will be appreciated. Regional or national opportunities include

• OpenStax has hosted a CreatorFest (an annual hack-a-thon) for faculty interested in incorporating OER into their courses. It is an intensive 4 day workshop. The 2020 CreatorFest was canceled due to the pandemic.
• Open Oregon Educational Resources Annual Symposium is an example of a regional professional development symposium.
• Open Education Conference.
• OEGlobal. The OE global conference is currently being held online due to the pandemic but will hopefully resume as a face-to-face conference in the near future.
• While it isn’t a symposium, Open Education Week (usually held in early March) is a great time to offer professional development to your faculty or to attend events hosted by other institutions or consortia. There are many great events to choose from during Open Ed Week.

The good news is that many of these conferences and symposiums are often available to anyone and are frequently recorded (especially during the pandemic) so you can listen later.

Most of these professional development opportunities will be useful to you, your team, and to your authors and adopters. Don’t hesitate to take advantage of these as it will also help you build your support network.

Conclusion

Training future authors or adopters of OER works is an important part of your job as project manager. You don’t have to know how to do everything but expect that people will look to you as the expert in open license publishing. Take the time to familiarize yourself with the topics described above so you can answer many of the questions likely to arise.

Recommended Resources

• OpenWashington FAQ. (Open Washington 2019)
• George Mason FAQ (Algenio 2021)
• A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources. (Wikisource 2013)
• OER Mythbusting. (OER Policy for Europe, n.d.)
• Faculty Communities of Practice on Open Educational Resources: A Toolkit. (Texas A&M University Corpus Christi, n.d.)
• Developing a Community of Practice for Open Education with CCCOER. (West and Daly 2017)

The Open Educational Resources (OER) program at the University of Hawaii (UH) began in 2014 with the hiring of a full-time librarian dedicated to OER adoption at the university system’s flagship campus, UH Manoa (UHM). Early work with OER at the campus level focused on curation and archiving of openly licensed textbooks and courses, the first step in an adopt, adapt, create strategy cast by administrators and stakeholders within the university.

Based in the UHM Outreach College and working collaboratively with system IT Services and the UHM Library, the OER librarian led introductory OER workshops, facilitated open textbook reviews with the Open Education Network, and created an institutional repository dedicated to OER. Adoption and uptake of existing OER grew during this two-year period, including large-scale adoptions in the subject areas of physics and economics. After the departure of the OER librarian in 2016, I joined the UHM Outreach College as the OER Technologist, tasked with moving the OER program into the ‘adapt’ and ‘create’ phases of the strategy.

Prior to this role supporting OER across the campus, I spent several years within the UHM College of Education designing online courses and programs. Even earlier, I worked for Creative Commons on their education and science initiatives, so I was comfortable with copyright, open licenses, and open source technology tools in addition to traditional instructional design methods. To make use of this expertise, I set out to create tools for UH instructors that would be useful to them as they became OER curious, translating complex and potentially intimidating concepts around copyright and publishing into consumable ideas.

Developing our workshops

A primary goal of the UH OER program was to empower faculty with the basic skills and knowledge needed to confidently work with OER. To do this, we had to identify the skills and knowledge that faculty needed, and to build our workshops around those competencies. Many of the skills and knowledge we identified as necessary for confident OER use overlapped with existing frameworks for digital and information literacy, which served as guides for developing a set of useful, tangible competencies. Beetham and Sharpe’s pyramid model of digital literacy development helped when framing OER work as an ongoing process, one which may potentially become part of an instructor’s professional identity ( Joint Information Systems Committee 2014). The Seven Elements of Digital Literacy from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) describe knowledge and skill areas within digital literacy — what it means to meaningfully participate in a knowledge economy as a student, researcher, or academic professional. At that time, most members of the UH OER interest group served in librarian roles, so the search for OER competencies included a review of ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education as well (Association of College & Research Libraries 2014).

Working from these digital and information literacy frameworks, I combined the outcomes associated with several existing OER training programs (Washington SBCTC, Leeward Community College, Kapiolani Community College), revised them to include technical competencies, and created a baseline set of OER competencies which would inform our workshops’ structure. Each competency represents a common activity associated with OER work, ranging from understanding fundamental advocacy arguments to understanding the various terms associated with Creative Commons licenses.

Key OER Competencies as Defined by UHM Library:

• Define and describe the importance of OER
• Differentiate between copyright, fair use, Creative Commons licensing, and public domain
• Identify resources that are openly licensed, in the public domain, or all rights reserved
• Distinguish between different types of Creative Commons licenses
• License a work with a Creative Commons license
• Upload a work into the UH OER repository
• Combine work with different types of Creative Commons licenses
• Properly attribute a Creative Commons licensed work
• List useful repositories and search tools for finding OER
• Find OER that are relevant to a specific area of study or research
• Assess the technical openness of an OER (ALMS framework.)
• Download an OER from the UH OER repository
• Describe techniques for creating accessible OER
• Describe the steps necessary to plan for OER adoption

I tailored the more general competencies to be UH-specific, referencing our institutional repository, and added competencies for adapting existing OER such as combining work with different open licenses and basic content accessibility practices.

The list of competencies was then split into three buckets, and a three-part workshop series was constructed around them. First, an introduction to OER with background on our program and foundational ideas of open education. Next, a deep dive workshop on copyright and fair use, including understanding and using Creative Commons licenses. Lastly, a workshop introducing the publishing tools we support at UHM, emphasizing the fundamental necessity of technical openness and accessibility. This three-pronged approach was intended to equip faculty with the essential skills to begin their process of working with OER, independent of expertise and other resources available to them.

Adapting the OER workshops into a workbook

Each workshop was broken into written lessons that align to the key OER competencies we had identified, forming the UH OER Training. guide published in 2018. Each lesson includes ancillary content with links out to further resources, plus H5P.-based formative assessment items placed directly in the text. Putting to use the more common types of H5P interactivity, multiple choice and drag-the-word activities are embedded at the end of each module, providing simple checks to ensure learners are progressing. At the conclusion of each chapter is a summative assessment that requires learners to submit their OER findings (after a search) or share OER they have adapted slightly.

Modifying works on the fly can be an intimidating task, so gentle guidance and ample time can be helpful in training of this kind. The guide itself is a meta-OER, an OER about OER, and was built to be “open” in terms of having an open license (CC BY) and being shared in a technical format that allowed maximum remixability. Using the open source tools, both technical and legal, we demonstrated the potential of OER to lower barriers to collaboration, setting the stage for a range of reuse scenarios for this instructional content.

Making OER production workflows clear

Part of this process required the demystification of OER production, exposing tangible methods for both adapting existing content, and producing new works. Building off of traditional instructional design frameworks, I first outlined the start-to-finish process one would expect to go through when adapting or creating OER (Meinke 2017). The workflow went through several early iterations internally (within the UHM Outreach College) and then was released for comment via several OER interest groups and membership organizations. The workflow became a foundational piece of instructional content used in OER workshops, and was designed to orient potential OER reusers to the tasks, roles, and steps through a project.

During this process, I referenced OER-specific production workflows, especially that of OERu, and the CORRE model., which provide zoomed-out views of content production, revision, and reuse (Meinke 2016). The arrangements and sequencing of steps lended to my thinking on how collaborative projects reach milestones and produce new versions. However, they do not have an end per se because loops involving feedback and iteration are fundamental to taking advantage of OER. It is distinctions like this that make openly licensed and therefore openly modifying content so powerful, and so they were incorporated into our workflow for our faculty. Similarly to the UH OER Training guide, adapted versions of the UH OER Production Workflow diagram have been developed at higher education institutions across the United States. These tools were designed to be most useful internally at UHM, but designing for creative reuse was emphasized from the beginning.

What we’ve accomplished

We offer OER training each semester using the training guide and production workflow at UHM, which transitioned to online delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to this, our three-part training had been offered solely face to face, but fortunately transitioning online with this training was straightforward. Feedback collected after our workshops through the UHM Center for Teaching Excellence continue to be positive, and new projects take form consistently following the training. OER development grants are offered each year at UHM as well, and these trainings have become a starting point for many projects later funded by the Outreach College.

Doing outreach is an important job for both program leads and general OER/ZTC support staff, but it requires a set of skills that we aren’t often equipped to do. In this section, we’ll cover some basics for marketing OER/ZTC and partners you can ask for support, both on and off campus. In the next section, we will expand this overview to look at more general tips around building and managing your program’s brand.

What is Marketing?

The American Marketing Association defines marketing as

“the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services, to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational objectives” (Bennett, 1989).

For the purposes of this topic, we’ll focus on the last section of that definition, “creating exchanges that satisfy objectives.” Marketing isn’t just about branding and logos. It is also about making connections with people based on your experiences and your ties to a common goal.

While traditional marketing is focused on selling a product to a wide base of consumers, marketing for institutional initiatives is more focused on broadening awareness of existing and future support. In other words, just because you’ve built something, that doesn’t mean that your program will see widespread usage. You will want to continue to promote your program throughout its growth to ensure that your community is aware of your work and its evolution over time. Proper use of marketing tactics can ensure that your community is aware of the programs you’ve built and can take advantage of the opportunities you’ve provided for them.

Building a Brand Identity

Before you can set out on promoting your initiative, it’s a good idea to put together a brand identity. A brand identity is a set of standards that make your program recognizable at a glance for your audience. Your brand identity might include a recognizable color scheme, logo, character, or motto. You may tie your brand identity into your institutional branding by utilizing your institution’s colors or mascot. Keep in mind that if you are using your institution’s branding you may need approval from an institutional marketing or communications team before finalizing your branding. Next, we’ll look at a few examples of how brand identities are crafted.

A good example of a clear brand identity is an OpenStax textbook (See Figure 7.1). The basic, bold text implies that their textbooks provide a clear and general overview of common general education topics, which reflects the background of OpenStax’s work.

So, how should you approach branding for your OER/ZTC program? There are no hard and fast rules here, but there are a few tips and tricks that you can follow.

Creating a Logo

The branding for your OER/ZTC program should be three things: simple, clear, and consistent. This work usually starts with your logo or an icon that represents your work in some way. For example, The Iowa Open Education Action Team (Iowa OER), a grassroots action team supporting the use of OER in the state of Iowa, developed their logo within an outline of their state to represent the scale of their group.

Another consideration you might bring to your logo’s design is how it will be perceived by your community. Since Iowa OER includes representatives from state universities, private colleges, and community colleges, they carefully avoided using a color scheme in their logo’s text that was representative of any single school among their ranks, and instead incorporated colors found in the branding for OER Commons, a popular OER referatory. By doing this, the group was able to present itself as an inclusive force for their community rather than one focused on a specific demographic.

For an even simpler graphic, we can look to Kansas State University. KSU’s Open/Alternative Textbook Initiative developed their OER icon, a book with an “O” on the cover, to be recognizable even at a small scale. This was done because it would be used as a marking denoting the use of open materials in their course schedule. This graphic is clear, easy to read, and emblematic of the initiative itself, by representing open textbooks with a book icon.

Aligning with Your Identity

Like KSU did with their OER icon, your branding should be reflective of your initiative’s work in some way. Think about your audience and what you want them to feel when they see your program’s marketing on campus. Does your program have a unique name or tagline that influences the way you present it (e.g., playful, bold, colorful, or innovative)?

A great example of a program whose name and messaging align clearly with their work is Central Virginia Community College (CVCC). CVCC uses the tagline “OpenEd CVCC: Innovation and Affordability” as their program’s name and their icon features this theme of innovation through graphics of light bulbs, gears, and representations of various disciplines.

CVCC’s logo is more complex than the ones we shared in our “simple” section. However, this isn’t a problem in their case. Keep in mind that the simplicity of any graphic will depend on where and how it’s used. CVCC’s logo might have more going on than KSU’s icon, but it is meant to be used at a larger scale, so it can accommodate this complexity. If your logo will be used in print materials or as a smaller icon, that’s when you’ll want to focus on simpler designs. For graphics that will be displayed more prominently, though, a larger graphic works fine.

Be Consistent with Colors and Phrases

Finally, your OER/ZTC program’s brand should use the same color palette and phrases consistently. By using the same themes and colors, you can easily tie your programs, services, and promotion materials together in a way that resonates with your audience. You might do this by connecting your program’s branding to institutional branding by mirroring color choices or even naming conventions. For example, openCI. (Channel Islands) uses its institution’s color palette in its logo’s design, making its program feel like an extension of institutional networks rather than an external or “extra” program on campus.

Open CI’s logo makes for a great case study because it exemplifies each of the tips we’ve given thus far:

• The logo is simple and easy to read.
• It contains an effective icon representing their work, a book which is also an open padlock reminiscent of the open access logo.
• The color choice and use of “CI” in the logo make it clear that the program is tied to the institution.

Program Lead Tips: Pilot before you commit

It can be tempting to jump right in with a website redesign, a new logo, and a full box of new marketing materials for your OER/ZTC program. However, we would caution against jumping ahead with this work all at once. Instead, pilot your ideas first.

Get feedback from your team or committee before pushing out changes at the institutional level. For branding changes, like alterations to your OER/ZTC program’s logo design, use your new logo and color scheme on a website or digital materials before ordering physical materials in bulk, just in case the changes you make are not well-received.

Promotional Materials

A good promotional strategy should include multiple facets, from physical materials to digital communications. Below, we’ve compiled a table of promotional materials you might use on campus, and examples of each type.

Get in contact with partners at your institution to learn more about the processes and options available to you and how you can best leverage the support at your disposal. If you have a marketing team available to you that orders pens and other materials for campus events, get in contact with them about their vendors and how you can leverage their existing workflows for ordering materials to support your OER/ZTC Program. This might be as simple as ordering buttons and posters through your University Printing Office, or it may require you to browse a third party’s marketing catalog or to create materials yourself if you lack funding for your work.

Annual Events

Creating promotional materials and graphics can make your OER/ZTC program recognizable on your college’s campus, but just because you’ve created materials doesn’t mean that people will find or learn from them. As a program lead, you will need to find ways to implement your messaging and events on campus. Leveraging annual events like Open Education Week in March and International Open Access Week in October can ground your work in a given time of year and focus your programming around a topic or theme (Open Education Global, n.d.; SPARC, n.d.). The Open Education Week website. lists past events and provides downloadable promotional materials to help you kickstart your event planning and coordination. If these weeks regularly conflict with other events at your institution, that’s okay. You can celebrate Open Education Week the week before or after it falls. So long as you are consistent in the general time you hold these events, they will still gain recognition at your institution and faculty will come to expect them.

Program Lead Tips: You don’t have to start big

It can be daunting to host a week’s worth of events centered around Open Education each year. Here’s a tip for those of you just starting your OER/ZTC program: don’t worry about it! If your institutional community has low awareness of OER and you don’t know many faculty who would be interested in learning more, planning a week of programming might be wasted effort. Instead, take the time to develop regular introductory OER workshops and set up meetings with departments across your institution to raise awareness of your work. Rather than building new events, leverage existing campus events to promote your OER/ZTC initiative, such as orientations for new students or new faculty. It doesn’t matter when you do this work, only that you find a time and place that works for you.

To learn more about partnering with campus stakeholders, see page 2.2 Building Your OER Team.

Communications Plans

As you are pulling together events, materials, and features to highlight OER/ZTC in your community, it can help to have a clear plan for how and when each of these will be implemented. In other words, you should familiarize yourself with communications plans. A communications plan helps you structure your outreach work by organizing your messaging strategies for specific audiences according to a timeline with measurable goals.

When developing your communications plan, list the promotional materials you will be sharing, the audience you want to address, and the channel(s) through which you’ll be sharing your message. Having these considerations in place early can help you better format the materials your team creates. For example, for social media graphics aimed at a student audience, you’ll want to prioritize big ideas, catchy graphics, and a simple message. In contrast, you can expand upon your message in newsletter articles and blog posts aimed at faculty and administrators by adding references to your services and the data you’ve collected assessing your program’s work.

In addition to planning what you will be creating, your communications plan should factor in the time it will take to draft, create, and implement each item. Think of it like a structured timeline for your semester’s OER/ZTC work: what do you hope to create, and how will you ensure that you are reaching a wide audience with your message during the semester, and not just when you have time to create all that you’d like to share. Keep in mind timing to avoid finals week, midterms, and other busy times in the semester where your audience may not be amenable to contact or additional work.

To make assessing your communications plan feasible, start with measurable goals in mind. We recommend using SMART goals as you are developing your communications plan. SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic, and Time-related (Doran, 1981). While the specific words ascribed to the acronym have changed over the years, we will use the original term, assignable, for “A” because it brings to mind something that is often overlooked in open education: someone has to do this work. If you can’t assign a project to someone on your team, you won’t be able to meet your goal. Below are a few examples of SMART goals for marketing open education programs:

• We will develop and provide two additional training sessions or workshops about open pedagogy during the fall semester.
• We will release five social media graphics highlighting Faculty OER Champions weekly during the month of March.
• We will present on the impact of our program at department meetings for three academic departments during the academic year.

Getting Help

There is one thing we’ve left off of this section that needs to be addressed: how do you make the graphics, logos, and other materials your program needs? If you’re lucky, you have someone in your office or department who creates graphics for you already and who is knowledgeable about the systems in place to help you create and order promotional materials. If not, you at least have experience creating digital graphics and access to software that can help you do your work well, like GIMP, Canva, or Inkscape.. Most OER program leads have to navigate their marketing work slowly, either because they lack experience doing this work themselves or because they don’t know how to get support for their work.

Program Lead Tips: Instead of giving up, get help!

You can get help marketing your OER program from on campus resources like marketing or communications professionals in your institution, members of your OER committee with interest in marketing support (students can be an excellent support system for this work, as our Case Study 6. author attests), or even through outside help. Reach out to other OER program leads whose work you admire and ask for advice. They might have a specific tool they used to create their own logo(s), or they may have promotional materials available in formats that you can edit and palette swap for your own use.

Asking for help through OER listservs can be a great way to not only build your own network of peers but also to gather files, graphics, and other examples of promotional materials that you can adapt for your own work. After all, many of us openly license our own materials to support the open community at large.

Conclusion

Developing an effective marketing strategy will signal to your institution that your OER/ZTC program is growing, tied to institutional values, and enduring. Having a marketing and communication plan for your program can help ensure that your work is acknowledged, and that you can continue to grow your efforts over time, as more faculty and students learn about your program. Explore a variety of marketing tactics and materials based on the support and funding you have available to you, and don’t be afraid to ask for help from peers and partners if you aren’t sure where to start. Marketing may seem daunting at first, but it doesn’t have to be.

Recommended Resources

• OER Advocacy Template (Library as Open Education Leader 2017)
• Communication Planning. (Watt 2014)

Building familiarity with OER on campus is a key part of the outreach and promotion work OER program leads 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 section 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/ZTC 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 OER topics alongside other innovative ideas in teaching and learning. The presence of these activities increase the likelihood that faculty and staff at your institution are already aware of OER, and in addition, partnerships with these departments or offices providing these activities would be an easy way to schedule more focused OER sessions. Library focuses related to Open Education, such as Open Access or Open Data, may be the most common activities to bridge with an OER/ZTC program.

More direct ways of discerning attitudes toward OER at your institution include one-on-one interviews, moderated focus groups, and surveys with open-ended survey responses. Looking at trends in this data will help you identify overall sentiments, and grouping your data by subject area, position, and other factors will help you understand more localized differences between groups of instructors regarding OER and ZTC.

External Environments (your region, state, nation, etc.)

What is the recent history of OER efforts within your state or region?

This may start with some web searching, but consider contacting any OER program leaders within these environments as you find them. Look for OER library guides, websites, and other markers of existing programs near you to help identify peers as well. Library consortia and regional higher education compacts with open education programs will often be glad to help, and open education leaders tend to be very amenable to discussions about their programs and how to get yours started. Open education conferences, from regional to international, will help in forming networks with other open education leaders close to you. National and international open education organizations, such as the Open Education Network and the Rebus Community, are also wonderful places to explore OER collaboration.

Which institutions does your institution consider aspirational peers? Do they have an OER and/or open education program?

Knowing this information will help when discussing the potential for an OER/open education program with executive leadership at your institution, and knowing how leadership views aspirational peers will help as well. For example, if you are within an institution which looks to only “tried and tested” efforts in the field, identifying these within your institution’s aspirational peers will help in communicating the potential success and rationale for starting an OER/ZTC program. Institutions could also function as the aspirational peer and the “pioneer” for other institutions; in this case, it may benefit you more to communicate the innovative side of OER/ZTC programs, such as open pedagogy, contributing to a global and growing collection of resources, and the power of being able to remix or revise materials to meet specific instructional objectives.

Are there state-wide or system-wide vendor deals which affect open educational resource adoption, adaptation, and creation?

Look for wording mentioning “day-one access” or “inclusive access,” as this is usually how these programs are titled in a marketing context. Some commercial resource contracts with automatic billing may include discounts based on the volume of adoptions or student purchases, which may be steering administration and/or academic departments in favor of adopting those resources (Vitez 2020).

There may also be existing contracts between your institution or system which may create new opportunities for the program as well – for instance, if you have an existing subscription to a teaching and learning tool that may enhance open pedagogy, this may be both a good place to start with project suggestions and an opportunity for a partnership with the office that initiated this contract.

OER Audiences

With the specific data on your open environment in mind, think about potential audiences with whom you wish to build familiarity and hopefully a positive valence towards OER. These groups can include:

OER Ready

Faculty who are ready and/or open to adopting OER. These are faculty and graduate students who are either at the start of a new curriculum design process or are interested in converting an existing course to OER materials. They are aware of the advantages of OER but may need support in identifying the exact platform or materials they will use. Folks like this are primed for something like an Open Education Network workshop, or similar, which can rapidly orient them to the resources out there to get started. Faculty who are OER Ready are often poised to become OER Leaders once they’ve successfully undertaken a course conversion project.

OER Leaders

OER Leaders are those teaching faculty and graduate students at your institution already using OER in their courses. Perhaps these instructors have designed their own OER from scratch using a custom platform, or adopted a high-quality open textbook. In addition, OER Leaders might include librarians, instructional designers, administrators and leadership, and others with OER experience and knowledge, who can speak to the powers and potentials of open course materials. Their enthusiasm may be shared through lightning talks and showcases, conferences, scholarly publishing, campus promotional materials, and even directly in conversation with fellow faculty and students. Social media spaces like Twitter and Facebook are also sites of productive conversation and engagement amongst OER Leaders and the OER Ready.

OER Agnostic

Campus community members in this category aren’t familiar enough with OER to have a vested interest or opinion. Faculty who fall into this group are potential OER Adopters and Leaders waiting to happen!

To reach the OER Agnostic, strategize about what information is available at your institution pertaining to OER and what wider OER adoption might mean for your institution. OER Agnostic faculty might not be interested in promotional materials specifically branded around OER cost savings but may respond well to sessions that emphasize some of the unique pedagogical advantages of OER, for instance the potential of OER to advance diversity, equity and inclusion with materials and content engaged around social justice concerns.

Part of the challenge for program leads will be discerning the messages that resonate most on their campuses – here as in seemingly most all cases, consulting with liaison librarians, instructional designers, and others doing front facing work directly with faculty, can help program leads identify key areas of concern where OER adoption might offer benefits related to access, cost, representation, or technological affordance.

OER Averse

People in this category might have negative perceptions of the value or efficacy of OER, have had negative past experiences with a specific open resource, be intimidated by the perceived technological elements of open, and/or may feel that traditional publishing options are more sophisticated or authoritative. Others may support the concept of OER on campus, but be concerned about the additional labor contributions required of often overloaded faculty to rework courses to use new course materials. OER program leads should strive to identify the concerns raised by the OER Averse on their campus and address those concerns in programming and OER related services offered.

Some suggestions for addressing these common pitfalls include:

• Making sure the scale and scope of the work required of the program is appropriate for the compensation offered.
• Designing and iterating program requirements based on participants’ actual capacity. Initial goals may need to be scaled back or up depending on what people are actually able to accomplish.
• Building a list of talking points you think are impactful for your specific audience(s) that engage with questions around OER quality, cost, and ease of implementation.

Assume your audience is often unaware of the huge amounts of money and power wielded by big publishers and may even enjoy a friendly relationship with sales representatives who visit campuses to help promote and sell textbooks. Create opportunities to educate about the real cost impacts of traditional publishing, as well as addressing the many known factual errors or shortcomings found in traditional publishing.

Clarifying a Campus Vision of Open

Many faculty are now familiar with OER as a term, but there’s still a lot of understandable confusion given the overlap of emerging terms like Open Education, Open Pedagogy, OER, Open Access, as well as the relative complexity of related topics like Creative Commons. Create opportunities to educate stakeholders, especially teaching faculty, about what these different terms mean and the different ways they can positively impact their work. This might mean workshops, invited presentations to faculty senate, short videos, blogs featured in your institution’s publication channels, social media presence, or more. The goal is to help define and clarify what Open will mean at your institution.

Engaging Campus Partners

Many OER program leads or coordinators will be taking on their OER work as a small part of a full-time position. Thinking creatively about how to engage campus partners can help create a larger OER impact than would be accomplished working alone. Partners like the library, instructional support units, student advocacy groups including student governments, and even more formal structures like faculty senates can all be engaged as effective partners in advocating for OER on campus. Program leads are wise to introduce themselves and their programs to these potential partners, and to develop organic points of collaboration when aligned goals arise.

Conclusion

Building familiarity with OER means making sure the key stakeholders at your institution have the knowledge and language they need to engage effectively around OER. This complex goal resists a one-size fits all approach, so project managers should expect to develop plans and goals customized to their program’s desired outcomes. Considering different OER user groups, and how to reach them, as well as planning for how to engage campus partnerships and existing OER programming in building familiarity, are just a few strategies OER Project Managers might use to grow OER activity on campus.

Recommended Resources

• OER Champion Playbook: Building Awareness & Enthusiasm. (Lumen Learning, n.d.)
• 20 Questions to Ask about Open Education [pdf]. (BCcampus 2019)