OER Academy: Leadership & Advocacy

Welcome

ISKME's OER Commons Team has designed these OER Academy modules to support and advance your open educational practice. Our comprehensive OER toolset and immersive professional learning program will assist educators in enhancing their capacities to use, evaluate, curate, and create OER. 

This module provides participants with an exploration of OER leadership and advocacy. We have designed these modules to first spark the learner's interest in the topics covered and then dig deeper into the content through presentations, storytelling, and demonstrations of the tools. We will offer opportunities for learners to practice exploring the resources and tools, and reflect on how they might use them in their work. 

OER Academy Outline:

Introduction to OER  (3 modules)

- Module 1 - Overview of the what, why, and how of OER; including an exploration in open licensing and a showcase of OER use cases from around the world

- Module 2 - Content Discovery: identify teaching and learning goals, search and browse collections

- Module 3 - Curation and Collaboration of OER with groups, shared folders and discussions

Quality Evaluation (2 modules)

- Module 1 - Quality: participants reflect and share their quality criteria for teaching and learning materials they use

- Module 2 - Tools for Evaluating: explore digital tools for assessing OER (Achieve Rubric, Rating, Comments)

Authoring and Remixing (3 modules)

- Module 1 - Authoring Toolset: demonstration of Open Author and Module Builders

- Module 2 - OER Design: discover instructional design supports, including templates

- Module 3 - OER Remix: overview of the what, why, and how of remixing OER

Open Education Practice for Curriculum Improvement (1 module)

- Deep dive into the feedback, refinement, reflection, and revision process

Leadership and Advocacy (1 module)

- Exploration and planning of ways to lead and advocate for OER

Pre-activities:

To participate in group discussions during the REFLECT sections you will need to create a login and join the Group. Please see instructions below

CREATE A PROFILE on OER Commons to be able to contribute to the discussions in our group, and to save, organize, remix, and author resources. Share some information about yourself and upload a photo or image here: https://www.oercommons.org/profile/edit

JOIN OUR GROUP Once you've logged in successfully, join the Introduction to OER Group by clicking "Join This Group"

Sharing Your Knowledge & Expertise

Something that we hear over and over again in our work supporting open educational practice is that people wish they would have found out about OER sooner. Educators realize that they don't have to "reinvent the wheel" when it comes to educational resources. They can instead adapt, modify, and customize the resources to fit the needs and preferences of their students. The more we share our resources and expertise, the more the greater education community benefits. To further the impact of OER, it is critical to lead and advocate for open educational practice at various levels of education.

presenting her OER project

REFLECT: Provide an example of how you have shared your expertise with the larger education community. Be sure to include what you shared, how you shared it, and what the outcome was of you sharing your expertise (what action did others take as a result of you sharing) Reply here

For example: I presented at a national conference with my educator and librarian colleagues on a project we did to advance educator and librarians' open educational practice through inquiry. We shared our project model, explored some inquiry lesson examples, and guided them through how to get started writing essential questions to explore in their work. The attendees took home lesson examples of how to do this work and a question to explore with their students. 

*Reminder: you will need to be logged in and join the Group to reply to the discussion.  

Ways to Share, Lead & Advocate

ISKME's Outreach & Advocacy Toolkit for Educators provides an overview of various online and in person outreach and advocacy methods.

EXPLORE: Read through the Toolkit and identify which methods you would like to utilize.

You don't have to be an expert to begin leading and advocating for OER. Librarian Stony Evans and Social Studies Teacher Brooks Lee are new to OER and documented how they are using OER Commons and Google Groups at their school via blogs and videos (see below)

PLANNING: To assist with your OER leadership and advocacy plan, consider the three questions below.

1. Content of your outreach - What do you want to share? (links, images, resources, videos, etc.)

2. Outreach method - How will you share? (social media, blog, presentation, etc.)

3. Outcome & Impact - What action do you hope others will take as a result of your outreach?

PRACTICE: Once you have implemented your OER leadership and advocacy plan, share what you did and what the impact was. Reply here

For example: I co-presented our open educational practice rubric during an Open Education Week webinar. I promoted the webinar via twitter using the hashtags #openeducationwk #OEP #OER #GoOpen. The webinar participants were very engaged and shared ways they can use the rubric in their work. We shared the webinar recording on OER Commons.

tweet

Thanks for sharing. We invite you to continue leading and advocating for OER in your education community and beyond!