38 The OER Advocacy Action Plan
The OER Advocacy Action Plan
Your OER advocacy action plan provides you with a step-by-step structure to help you achieve your goals for promoting the use of OER within your institution and in higher education more broadly. With the goal of gaining support for greater OER use in educational institutions, you need an effective plan to communicate to key stakeholders the message that your OER activities have significance. An OER advocacy plan will keep you on track to convince those with influence to make the changes needed to promote the use of OER. Your plan can be a living document that you revisit as you review the results of your advocacy activities and refine your advocacy strategy.
—’OER Advocacy – Create an Action Plan for OER Advocacy’ in the Open Educational Resources Advocacy Toolkit by CAUL, licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license, adapted from OER Advocacy Plan Worksheet by SPARC, used under a CC BY 4.0 license.
The 8 Parts of an OER Advocacy Action Plan
- Goals — What OER project, behaviors or actions do you want to inspire?
- Processes — What is the process for actualizing these goals? Where are the critical steps in the process that will make or break your success? Key steps may include securing funding or permission for a project.
- Decision-Makers — Which decision-maker(s) have the power to advance your proposal at the critical step(s)? Write down who they are and why open education might be important to them.
- Time Frames — When do you intend to start your project or idea? How does this fit within the school year or institutional planning process?
- Influencers — Who or what influences your decision-makers? Be creative in thinking about what arguments, information, people, stakeholder groups and relationships might help convince decision-makers to support your project.
- Strategies — What is your approach to getting decision-makers to support your project? Strategies may include demonstrating support for the project from the campus community or actively getting leaders on campus to persuade decision-makers.
- Tactics — What specific actions will you take to execute your strategy? It might help to make a process list, like setting up a recipe. Think about how your decision-makers can be reached and the many types of influencers.
- Communication Plans — Use this section to outline how you will talk about your initiative with people outside your project group. You’ll likely have multiple audiences, and it’s a great idea to develop a communication plan for each one.
Why Create an OER Advocacy Action Plan?
Planning your OER advocacy will help you tailor your activities for a particular purpose and audience. An advocacy plan will help you identify what you need to prepare before you implement your strategy. This allows you to focus on what’s important in a specific situation so that you achieve your intended outcomes. Once you have evidence of the benefits of using OER to support your advocacy, you can communicate your tailored message to your stakeholders.
What does an OER Advocacy Plan Look Like?
Your OER advocacy plan will need to include numerous key elements, which will be discussed in more detail throughout this section of the Toolkit. Resources designed to help you understand these elements, what you must consider in your plan and what a completed plan should look like include:
An action plan template – Use this template (adapted from the SPARC OER Advocacy Plan Worksheet by SPARC, used under a CC BY 4.0 license) to start your plan and make it relevant to your situation and institution.
Explanations of elements of the action plan:
- identifying OER advocacy opportunities
- micro activities for quick wins
- gathering evidence for your action plan
- identifying barriers to OER adoption
- identifying partners and stakeholders
- sample scenarios that provide opportunities for advocacy
- sample completed advocacy action plans to illustrate how to write an action plan for a specific audience.
Gathering Evidence for Your OER Advocacy Action Plan
Collecting different types of evidence to share with stakeholders and decision-makers can help support your arguments for how using OER can benefit your institution. Below is a list of common types of evidence used in OER advocacy.
Data
Map the environment for textbook use at your institution with data on:
- Use of the library textbook collection – Ask your library collections team for usage statistics such as ebook usage, holds on prescribed texts, ILL statistics, searches for commercial books, downloads, searches for open access books, etc.
- Course enrollment – Collect statistics on the number of students enrolled in courses using commercial textbooks. Consider whether compulsory courses assign commercial texts – these courses are often high-enrollment, first-year courses. Degree completion is predicated on these courses, and access issues are compounded when commercial texts are set.
- Costs of commercial textbooks assigned as required course readings – You might consider presenting these figures as an aggregate. For example, how much the average first-year student is expected to pay for textbooks (this could be broken down by degree), whether these textbooks are used across multiple courses (thus representing a better return on investment), or the total expected expenditure each year on textbooks by undergraduates.
- Open textbook adoptions – Collect data on the amount of money students at your institution save by using open textbooks, such as this student savings calculator created by the Open Textbook Initiative.
Impact Stories
Use impact stories to illustrate positive outcomes of OER adoptions and projects. The Stout interview above is an example of this. At UNO, we also regularly honor adopters as Textbook Mavericks (using the UNO mascot for the name.) In addition to Stout and Craig Tuttle’s team, you can read about adopters Steffi Jesseau and Zac Suriano, and Cameron Logsdon, Stephanie Larsen, and Abbie Syrek.
Curate Your Own Evidence
Evidence of the impact of OER use in your institution and local region acts as a powerful incentive for decision-makers and potential adopters. As the use of OER grows, curate testimonials from teachers, students and other stakeholders to create an impact story of your own.
In most institutions, access to this type of data can be spread across many departments. Using the examples in this section is a good starting point to identify potential sources of data and to identify local custodians at your institution.
Identifying Barriers to OER Adoption
Understanding the potential barriers or challenges to OER adoption can help you develop strategies for specific audiences. Some stakeholders may be resistant to OER so you’ll need to prepare responses to common questions and concerns. For example:
Findability
| Barrier | Response | Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| It’s challenging to find OER. It’s much easier to find a traditional textbook. | Likewise, it can be difficult to find OER due to the variety of ways OER are produced, published and shared. However, OER collections and repositories help bring OER content together to make it easier to locate. | Prepare a guide with links to key collections and strategies to find OER in different discipline areas that you can share with your stakeholders.
Ask for feedback on the suitability of the located resources, and use this as an opportunity to deeply engage with a discipline or subject area. Lastly, consider tailoring a short list of ‘recommended repositories’ that act as a starting point for staff to search unassisted. |
Availability
| Barrier | Response | Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| There are no suitable OER for a specific topic. | There is low OER coverage in some subject areas. You may not be able to find an OER for every requirement of a course. You may be able to find OER that the stakeholder could tailor for their course, or outline support available for them to create their own OER. They can add or remove content from existing OER or mix multiple resources together to create a resource suitable for their course. New OER are regularly being developed, so if nothing is suitable, there may be an option available soon. | Find examples of OER activities that have potential to be tailored or remixed for different subject areas.
Maintain awareness of the development of new OER in particular disciplines. If you can locate an OER in the discipline, ask the staff about its suitability for the curriculum. Should the feedback include actionable statements requiring change to the resource, this could be a catalyst to engaging staff in repurposing or redesigning the OER for local use. |
Quality
| Barrier | Response | Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| OER are freely available, so they must not be as good as paid content. | OER are often created by discipline experts and undergo a process of peer review to ensure the quality of the resources. Staff should review any OER they plan to adopt as they would any resource they intend to use in their course. If an OER is not perfect, Creative Commons licensing will typically allow the staff member to adapt the content to fit their needs. You can refer to research on OER and student success here. | Show examples of peer-reviewed OER and share studies that look at student learning outcomes from the use of OER in courses. If you’re starting with a discussion about open textbooks, consider using the Open Textbook Library and showing the transparent reviews that accompany over 80 percent of these texts. Encourage staff to leave reviews if they use OER. This is an effective way to contribute back to the open community and reframes the discussion as one of participation. |
Time and Technical Knowledge
| Barrier | Response | Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| It takes time and technical skills to use OER. | It can take time to find, adapt or create an OER. Maintenance and improvement of existing OER will also take time. OER authors may need to learn how to use a particular platform and how to make content accessible. Setting up a grant program or providing support options can help to alleviate this concern. | Establish avenues for OER support within the institution, as open education can be positioned as a natural extension of many existing responsibilities. Librarians can help locate and evaluate OER, learning designers can advise on pedagogically sound ways to integrate OER with learning outcomes, and graphic designers can support remixing and repurposing activities. Prepare a guide that explains how to do the technical steps, how to make content accessible and where to get support. Offer workshops that help build skills for adapting or creating OER and communicate ongoing support strategies. |
Copyright
| Barrier | Response | Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| Copyright for OER is difficult to understand. | OER generally use Creative Commons licensing with ‘plain English’ statements that explain the permissions and conditions of re-use. OER authors can add an attribution statement that indicates which CC license they have applied to their resource and a link to the specific license. This allows the author to be correctly attributed whenever their resource is re-used and to set conditions on how it is used. | Clarify support options for open licensing, such as requesting advice from a copyright officer or librarian. Seek ways to integrate open licensing and attribution with existing information sessions (for example, copyright training). Prepare a guide that explains the different CC licenses, how to select a CC licensee for a work, and how to correctly attribute others’ work. Consider too whether CC licenses can be incorporated into copyright FAQ webpages and other similar resources. |
Identifying OER Partners and Stakeholders
You’ll need to know who your potential partners and stakeholders are to successfully implement your OER advocacy action plan. Partners will be able to support and contribute to your advocacy plan through the sharing of information, resources, and capabilities. Stakeholders can include anyone who will influence OER outcomes or be affected by OER initiatives. The diagram below provides an overview of OER advocacy partners and stakeholders.
—’OER Advocacy Partners and Stakeholders’ in the CAUL OER Advocacy Toolkit by CAUL, licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.
Key Partners and Stakeholders for OER
Below is a list of key partners you’ll need to include in your OER advocacy action plan. You can find more in-depth information on identifying your key allies for OER creation and adoption to Target Your OER Advocacy.
| Partner | Advocacy |
|---|---|
| Library | Libraries often have key services, infrastructure, and expertise that can help further OER initiatives. Library staff may have insight into key issues through their provision of resources and interactions with staff and students. |
| Faculty | You want faculty to use OER in their courses. Faculty need to be aware of the benefits and support OER implementation to become OER practitioners. |
| Learning Designers | Learning designers work with faculty to build course content. Having allies in this community will help to spread the message and ensure greater implementation. |
| Students | Resources used in courses affect student success and wellbeing. Understanding their experiences and raising awareness of OER in this group is crucial to the success of your action plan. |
| Organizational Units | Administrative staff, leaders, heads of schools and directors set priorities for their units and can share information relevant to OER. |
| Governance | Governance staff are responsible for the overall direction of strategic planning in the organization, create policies and control finances. It’s important to build awareness and support for OER in this leadership group so that OER is considered a part of the strategic goals. |
| Committees | Committees carry out policy and administrative work for the organization and can influence strategic planning decisions. There may be multiple committees that are significant to your OER advocacy goals. Teaching, academic program and student committees all have a role in the advancement of OER. |
