Section 8: OER Initiatives – From Small to Large

In this chapter,  we are going to continue to discuss building a grants program, look at several real-world OER projects. Open education initiatives take many shapes and sizes, depending on funding, partners, and institutional buy-in. It is important to remember that even the smallest project can begin building the relationships needed to develop larger initiatives later. Start where you can, with what your budget and labor capacity allows. A librarian tasked with testing the waters of OER work, but given no budget and with other existing job responsibilities, might only be able to undertake the first part of the scan we discussed last week – meeting with stakeholders, discussing OER, trying to identify allies or future projects. And that would be a year well spent. And they could build upon that work by developing educational programming for their institution’s center for teaching, curating subject-specific OER Libguides, and identifying grant and funding opportunities. No labor is wasted that builds and leads to something greater.