RPT Dossier
Tell Your OEP Story
Much of the Reappointment, Promotion, and Tenure (RPT) process is being able to tell the story of why and how your open educational practice (OEP) matters. When you seek to retain or advance your academic rank through RPT, your dossier is the platform through which you will share your OEP journey. Your dossier may include your curriculum vitae (CV), candidate statements, and supporting documentation, which groups artifacts of your OEP with introductory cover sheets. Each element grants you varying degrees of detail and license to self-advocate for your OEP’s worth.
In this and subsequent sections, we share how to leverage each element to quantify and qualify your OEP contribution. Academics typically quantify their work through citation counts and other metrics. But in our subsequent guidance we will illuminate how you illustrate the quality of your OEP, following the advice of Michael R. Dougherty [Website] and OER advocates like Josh Bolick [Website], Abbey K. Elder, [Website] and Anita Walz [Website].
Why Your Story Matters: Methods for Demonstrating Impact of OEP
The most common way faculty quantify their work is through metrics such as impact factor, [Website] which measures citation counts. OER typically do not have the same impact factor as an academic journal would, but you can still quantifiably measure the impact of your OEP.
Quantitative Evidence: Start Collecting with Creation
Tell your story of growth over time by tracking usage metrics from the creation to the publishing of your OER and tangible research and service projects. Armor yourself with quantitative evidence of the impact of your OER and OEP and contextualize such data with your qualitative argument (discussed below).
Select the arrow to view guidance on collecting quantitative data of your OEP.
Guidance for Collecting Quantitative Evidence
What data could you collect?
- The number of colleges and universities that have adopted your OER for their courses, along with a list of these institutions.
- How many times your OER has been cloned, revised, or remixed by other educators (e.g., estimates from your Pressbooks administrator on reuse and adaptation).
- Drop-Fail-Withdraw rates to measure student retention in courses where your OER is used.
- Total student savings by comparing the cost of the previous commercial textbook to the OER.
Flip through the below accordion to identify platforms and services to increase and quantify the discoverability and accessibility of your OEP and, ultimately, aid in your storytelling. As always, we recommend talking to your librarian or mentor about your options.
OER Platforms and Statistics
Track Adoption and Adaption
Documenting the adoption and adaption of an OER is great for demonstrating the impact of your authorship. Instructors can self-report their use of your OER through an “Adopt This Resource” form linked on the homepage or front matter of your OER. See Hidden Voices in Gen Psych [Website] for an example and how-to guidance in Open Voices, Just Choices: OER for Social Justice Faculty Handbook [Website].
Tip: If you authored an OER using Pressbooks…
Your institutional network manager for Pressbooks has access to additional usage statistics, such as the number of times your OER has been cloned and course-level use, if connected to your Learning Management System (LMS). See The Pressbooks Network Manager Guide [Website] for conversation starters and walk throughs.
Qualitative Evidence: Contextualize Data Within Your Story
Your qualitative evidence fills in the gaps between the numbers and aids you in really advocating for the value and impact of your OEP. Telling an anecdote in your candidate statement or cover sheet or including an artifact of appreciation will allow you to share how your work has benefited students, how your OER improved through student feedback, or how you’ve become a leader on your campus, and in state and national communities. As you craft your story through your dossier, think of what elements will best illuminate your OEP and contributions.
Select the arrow below to view guidance for collecting qualitative evidence of your OEP.
Guidance for Collecting Qualitative Evidence
Awards and Recognition
If you received an OER creation grant or special recognition from an OER program or association, include your award letter or certificate to indicate your achievement.
- See our certificate templates to recognize your supporters or encourage an OER author to recognize the OEP contributors.
(Peer) Review Feedback
Peer review remains the most respected marker of scholarship, as Anita Walz of Virginia Tech University Libraries notes, and provides critical external validation for OER in promotion and tenure dossiers by demonstrating that the work has undergone rigorous review by experts in one’s discipline. Your OER may undergo additional reviews to ensure the quality of your OER, including accessibility, instructional design, copyright, copyediting, or social justice alignment. Including evidence of such reviews will strengthen your argument that OEP is valuable, hard work. Whether you are an author or providing a peer review, below are tools for reviewing OER:
-
Open Textbook Library‘s (OTL) peer rubric is a simple and widely used tool for peer review. They use it for reviews published on their website, so you can encourage peer reviewers to publish their review once you deposit your OER at OTL.
- OER for Social Justice built upon OTL’s resources to create a robust review packet including peer review and evaluations for copyediting, instructional design and accessibility, copyright and open licensing, and social justice content.
Letters of Support
Letters of support provide a qualitative “story” of your service and leadership within the institution and the broader academic community. Our letter templates are a good starting point, but even a simple email will suffice.
- Recognition of Contribution: If you peer review or contribute to an OER, ask the author, editor, or OER program coordinator for a letter documenting your contribution and its impact on the project.
- Mentorship Evidence: If you have mentored other faculty in Open Educational Practices (OEP), you should include recommendation letters from your mentees to document your role in expanding institutional capacity.
- Community Impact: For projects with a public reach, letters from community organizations, K-12 teachers, or administrators who have utilized your resources can testify to your work’s real-world impact and your role as an OER leader.
- Administrative Recognition: Letters from department chairs or deans can contextualize how your OER work aligns with the university’s strategic goals such as equity, access, and student retention.
Press, Appearances, and Media Mentions
Press, appearances, and media mentions can be incorporated into your dossier as evidence of external validation, professional leadership, and scholarly and public impact. Media related to your OER from international press releases, podcast interviews, or social media engagement demonstrates how your work is valued beyond your campus. Circulation or interaction metrics (e.g., views, shares, or “likes”) can help quantify this reach and influence.
Frame your media coverage in the following ways:
Leadership and Service
Categorize media coverage under Leadership and Personal Contribution or Professional Service
- Invitations to Appear: Being invited to appear in media or testify signifies recognized expertise and is a marker of community-engaged scholarship and leadership.
- Esteem: Interviews, features, and guest speaking provide evidence of professional recognition.
Evidence of Dissemination and Public Impact
Media coverage documents how your work reaches both academic and public audiences and can serve as external validation where traditional peer review may be absent.
- News and Practitioner Outlets: Highlight coverage in national or international media, practitioner journals, and respected field-specific blogs.
- Institutional Visibility: University news platforms can demonstrate institutional recognition and public visibility.
- Alternative Metrics (Altmetrics): Track shares, downloads, and engagement. Some institutions use tools such as “Impact Grids” to assess influence based on view counts or interaction levels.
Strengthening the Narrative
Weave media coverage into your narrative to:
- Demonstrate Strategic Alignment: Show how your OEP supports institutional priorities such as community engagement or public good.
- Show Geographic Reach: Utilize media mentions and usage data to demonstrate national or global influence.
- Highlight Innovation: Press reinforces claims of innovation and excellence.
Documentation Strategies
Maintain a digital portfolio, such as a social media or digital scholarship profile, that preserves media appearances through permalinks, web archiving tools like the Web Archive or Perma.cc, or by creating PDFs of digital content to prevent web rot. Rather than listing coverage, integrate these materials into your dossier and frame them to demonstrate reach, recognition, and impact, combining qualitative context with supporting metrics.
Student Feedback
As outlined in the SCOPE Framework [Website], student feedback gives you greater understanding of how students perceive or engage with your OER, its social justice goals, and more. Here are some ideas:
- Hold focus groups to ask students how the OER impacted their learning, whether it made the course more accessible, and if the availability of free materials influenced their decision to enroll.
- Cull your teaching evaluations for OER-themed comments.
- Conduct an anonymous student perception survey to better understand student learning needs. See sample student surveys [Website] collected by the Open Educational Resources Initiative.
Next Steps
Now that you have some general frameworks for your dossier, let’s move forward with examples from faculty who have successfully argued for their OEP value in their curriculum vitae (CV), candidate statements, and supporting documentation.
