Developing Open Education Alliances

• Schedule meetings:
  • Internal library meetings with colleagues to start an OER awareness discussion
  • Request a few minutes in department meeting to introduce library support
• Resources:
  • the time of colleagues and faculty
• Develop:
  • network of colleagues and faculty for discussion and promotion or resoruces
• Connect:
  • Yes, both colleagues and faculty
• Deadlines:
  • Starting discussions before May would be ideal jsut to plant the idea as people look towards the fall

The biggest need we have at this moment is time! We have a lot of projects ongoing (migration of our digital collections, creating the author guide resource we mentioned in our other discussion post, our current call for proposals for our Affordable Course Content Awards, and a migration to our new Pressbooks instance). Our outreach will inevitably be shaped by these projects as they wrap up, so taking time to reflect and plan intentionally once we are situated with our new resources will be crucial.

Outreach to faculty on an individual and departmental level will continue to happen and is the focus of our shorter-term planning. 

Long term, we'd like to conduct an environmental scan to assess OER usage, not relying on a self-reporting form! This will inform how we plan to grow and scale our program.

Karen, I understand firsthand how difficult it can be to find time to reflect and plan intentionally with all the things going on. Will you put aside time, perhaps over the summer, for a retreat or something else that could help with that?

Karen, 

I agree with you - we need time.

I believe though, if we join forces; when more collaborators come togther, the work will move faster.

Nice meeting you . Stay in touch

-Charuta.

I need to talk more with the other OER committee members on my campus. As a new member of the committee, I haven't had a lot of opportunity to speak casually and get to know many of them. I think they will be my strongest allies to help me meet my goals. The only other librarian on the committee (who is also a co-chair) will be retiring this summer, so I think that I should have some good talking points and a better idea of how I will go about achieving my goals at least by the end of the summer. I want to go into the next academic year with a solid grasp of what the committee can (and wants to) do. 

• Block time for this work
• Re-review planning template
• Need to finish drafting the plan
• I need some feedback on my plans - are they reasonable, who can help me to not take this on all myself? 

  • Is this a role for my supervisor?

  • For someone else?

• Mentor who will check in on me “how is it going”?

• Be part of a community that is trying to move things forward so that I don’t feel alone in this work / get less stuck

• Apply for AAC&U Institute

• Build a stronger support network for myself

It was nice meeting you Anita.

I agree we need to block certain time every week for this OER work. Small and steady steps.

Best wishes and stay in touch

-Charuta.

My next step is to develop an overview plan for adoption with time frames to present to the department interested in OER for their core courses and send the email outreach message to the department. I need to curate a collection of some possible texts and share the information on grants for adoption.

I need a few hours to sit down and organize my ideas about next steps because these sessions have given me so many ideas, I'm all over the place. But that's all good. I keep reminding myself that this is not an easy path or journey and like so many others, I've been at it a long time at my institution and system and it takes patience. 

Certainly I will bring the planning template to our committee which was my first goal, and share all the resources. 

I will also work with our grant recipients as well as the team administering the grants to get some solid traction and scale, hopefully making it a great experience for all involved so it leads to a larger program.

Deadline? Maybe some for the end of the semester but others continuing on for a few years, I hope. 

My next step is to identify about 2-3 concrete goals/tasks, get organized, set a reasonable timeline, and start to work towards completion.

Additional Components to Develop: Implementation and Assessment Plans

Timeline: All plans completed, approved, and prepared for implementation by Spring 2025

Next steps: draft full program proposal-deadline July 2024
 

Next Steps:

1. I definitely need to be more vocal and active at my institute to increase OER awareness. We do have an OER committee but unfortunatley none of the faculuty who actually are in OER development are part of it. This needs to be fixed. I think I will take up this challenge in the upcoming academic year and work actively on this front.

2. Find more collaboartors acorss other Va colleges and work with them.

Resources:

1. The planning template is super helpful.

2. I liked playing around with the Open author tool. I know I can create / develop my own OER and curate existing material easily

3. I even have identified paltforms to share my OER work with others. 

Resources I would like to get:

1. As a biology faculuty I struggle with getting licence free good quality images, I would like to get connected with an illustrator. So that we can create some

2. I have attended several workshop in online teaching and have learnt that an instructional designer ( someone who knows Canvas better than me) would be immensely helpful in actually translating the work created by faculty ( lectures slides or test banks) into user friendly canvas shells. If the OER material is hosyted within Canvas, then it will be utilized by many more faculty. 

Deadlines:

1. In AY 24/25 I will become active in my institutes OER committee.

2. By the end of Fall 2025 I will have created most of my BIO 101 material as OER and will be host it on Canvas.