Faculty

“In short, money is not the only incentive sufficient to engage users in open educational resource projects.”^[4] David Wiley

When faculty sought to create a comprehensive American history open textbook, they invited leading historians to volunteer contributions. Today, The American Yawp is sustained by an expansive coalition of editors, advisors, and contributors. You may need colleagues to contribute to your OER creation process or to adopt your OER in their course — both sustainability measures. Your big ask, though, must tap into their motivations for using OER. While you, OERFSJ faculty, were privileged to receive financial compensation, funding is not always available and should not be considered “the only incentive sufficient to engage users in open educational projects,” Wiley affirms.^[5] Your collaboration needs may evolve throughout the creation, implementation, and promotion of your OER, but the following reasons, motivations, and methods represent some of the enabling factors to recruit partners.

• Reasons to partner with (additional) faculty colleagues
  • Subject expertise for content
  • Technological skills
  • Special skill set, such as drawing or animation
  • More inclusive authorship
  • Diverse teaching perspectives
  • Standardized curriculum through common use of OER
• Faculty motivations for using and creating OER^[6]
  • Enjoy having the autonomy to try new teaching practices
  • Want to lower student educational costs
  • Desire to improve student learning experiences
  • Want quality instructional materials that
    • have learning objectives and aligned content, such as interactivities
    • are current and adaptable
    • are personally recommended by a colleague who has successfully used the OER
  • Appreciate collaborating with colleagues in open education
• Methods for seeking faculty involvement
  

  

  • Personalized email explaining how the project would benefit from their expertise.
  • Departmental presentation about
    • standardizing the curriculum
    • customization of OER to student learning needs
    • benefits of diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism OER content to students
    • social justice benefits of OER, including student cost savings
  • Conference presentations and scholarly publications regarding your open educational practices
  • Prominently link to an “OER Use” form on your Pressbooks homepage to collect how faculty are using your OER.

Recruiting your peers can be a continual process. As you create, implement, and promote your OER, revisit the needs of your OER project to determine how your network can help you improve your OER.

Students

Many of you are primarily motivated by wanting to create more positive and affordable learning experiences for your students. What better way to ensure your OER is student-centered than to involve them in creating and sustaining your OER? OERFSJ faculty teams utilized two primary practices of student involvement:

• Student employees can
  • Create H5P interactivities, such as the formative assessments in Hidden Voices in Intro Psych: A Companion Text Centering Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Anti-Racism
  • Design an OER cover, like the beautifully sketched one for General Chemistry 3e: OER for Inclusive Learning
  • Upload and format drafted content to Pressbooks
  • Implement feedback and correct errors
• Enrolled students, through open pedagogy projects, can
  • Write chapters
  • Create H5P
  • Contribute examples of final projects, such as
    • Student films in No-Nonsense Filmmaking
    • Podcasts and comics in Rhetorical Communities
  • Provide feedback through a suggestions form [guidance for creating a suggestion form]

OERFSJ Faculty Highlights

Jessica and Mischa Livingstone

When creating No-Nonsense Filmmaking, Jessica and Mischa Livingstone turned it into a community project, involving faculty and students in its creation and improvement. Here are some of their inclusive moves for sustainability:

• The authors motivated faculty colleagues to join the project through intrinsic motivation. Jessica noticed her colleague Vanessa Newell’s doodling in a departmental meeting and recruited Vanessa to illustrate the OER as a creative outlet for her personal passion. As a result, bunnies, aliens, and fruit add a comical tone to technical materials, making the OER more engaging for students. It also lessened the authors’ efforts to find or create images.
• The pair solicited student feedback beginning with their pilot content. If students found a minor error, the Livingstones edited Pressbooks in class to assure students that their feedback would be integrated.
• Inclusion of student films and profiles diversified perspectives in the OER and provided concrete and achievable examples to enrolled students. Films and profiles can be updated with student projects each year.
• Recruitment of faculty adopters was prioritized:
  • Mischa leveraged his position as a course lead to require the OER for a high-enrollment, multi-section course, and a departmental colleague did the same for another course. Doing so standardized the curriculum with quality learning materials.
  • Both authors promoted the OER at state, national, and disciplinary conferences as well as media postings through the university and Pressbooks, which named the text their Book of the Month.
  • To stay in touch with their growing network, the Livingstones also prominently linked OER use and suggestion forms in their Pressbooks to track adopters and their suggested improvements.

How can you utilize some of the Livingstones’ methods to create a sustainability community for your OER?

• OERFSJ technologies include
  • Pressbooks (supported by LMU and SMC), which includes:
    • H5P
    • MathJax
    • Editoria11y (built-in Pressbooks accessibility checker)
    • Hypothes.is (standalone social annotation tool that is also built into Pressbooks)
  • Microsoft Box (supported by LMU)
  • Google Workspace or Drive (supported by USF, SMC, and USF)

If you need additional tools, you should consider the monetary costs, training, and labor involved, especially if your team requires experts external to your team.

Step One: Evaluate Existing OER for Reusable Content

You began your journey by assessing relevant OER for adaptation using the OERFSJ rubric and the OER Evaluation and Gap Analysis Worksheet. Mark what open textbooks you wanted to adapt, if there were specific elements that were useful, or if there were things you wanted to avoid completely. As time progresses, you don’t want to review an OER you already discarded or write OER portions that you could have remixed.

Step Two: Map and Track

Next, we asked you to gather and categorize your found content using our assessment and content mapping processes and tool. It is vital that you note found content with a full attribution statement with licensing information. You can level up your organization by listing all the content you plan to remix in the Resource Adoption Tracker. The tracker would be particularly useful to document copyright permissions, fair use arguments, and multiple openly licensed sources.

Step Three: Assign Roles

Assigning roles within a team assures productivity and inclusion. Defined duties can be delegated based on individuals’ strengths or areas of desired professional growth. OERFSJ teams rotated leadership, divided authorship based on disciplinary expertise, or designated technology stewardship, such as H5P point persons. What roles would serve your team during creation, and how could these assignments change once you start teaching with and promoting your open textbook?

Creation Stage

Initially, you have a small but mighty authorship team. If you are a faculty team or solo author, you should have an OER librarian, instructional designer, or other supporters who are helping you navigate this terrain. You should identify roles for each person, which may include the following:

• Who will act as the team lead? (The lead manages the project by setting meetings and goals while communicating with the administration.)
• Who remixes or writes what content?
  • Content could be divided by disciplinary expertise or type of content — one person could find or create images and figures, for instance.
• Who handles technological aspects? (Appoint one or two people to learn and become the point-people for technology.)
• Who verifies licensing and attribution? (If you do not have this expertise, is there a librarian with copyright expertise who can do this?)
• Who ensures accessibility requirements are met? (If you are unfamiliar with standards and technology, is there an instructional designer available?)
• Who selects and finalizes the numbering of images, figures, and videos? (Track the numbering on your content map as well.)
• Who prepares front matter, acknowledgments, appendices, and style adherence? (See our publishing guidance for details.)
• Who will review the OER for publication? (In addition to team members, this may include peer reviewers, copy editors, and other experts.)

Implementation and Promotion Stages

Once you begin teaching with your OER, your team roles may shift to the new demand of maintaining and promoting your OER. Additionally, the composition of your team may shift with the departure or inclusion of members. What roles or areas of expertise does your team need at this juncture?

• Who will act as team lead? (Perhaps your team rotates these administrative duties?)
• Who manages technological aspects? (Do you cross-train members to manage workloads?)
• Who fields corrections to OER? (Does this person receive and make the corrections?)
• Who engages in promotion of the OER? (Does the whole team promote the textbook through scholarly activities?)

OER for Social Justice Faculty Team Highlight

When adapting a massive chemistry OER, Nicole Bouvier-Brown, Saori Shiraki, J. Ryan Hunt, and Emily Jarvis determined to update OpenStax’s Chemistry 2e with fresh content, including H5P formative assessments and fully accessible mathematical equations. While each team member applied their subject expertise to writing and revising content, they all held specialized roles as well.

• Nicole and Emily shared team lead responsibilities, ensuring project goals were met through diligent project management and communicating with OERFSJ administrators.
• Saori made formulas accessible, becoming a technical expert in GenAI, MathJax, and other tools to make the equations readable for screen readers and other assistive devices. Saori’s inclusive efforts ensured their OER was compliant with accessibility guidance and accessible to all students.
• Ryan created over 500 H5P interactivities for students to practice their learning in the Pressbook. With immediate feedback, students could self-assess and stay on track with their learning.

After implementing the OER in their teaching, each team member continues in their role. The team lead can collect and coordinate feedback for the team’s technical experts to implement. Visit General Chemistry 3e: OER for Inclusive Learning to appreciate their work. 

Step Four: Set (and Extend) Your Timeline

Finally, build accountability and goals for your team by establishing a project timeline, as outlined in our previous chapter. Some tips for meeting your own expectations:

• Set realistic expectations for yourselves — plan for more time when holidays or expected events take place.
• Establish regular meetings — even a quick 15-minute huddle every week can hold everyone accountable to deadlines and support each other.
• Expect the unexpected — technology crashes or other unplanned personal events call for grace and communication to keep a project rolling.
• Plan for assessment of your OER, if conducting research
  • This can include when you will deploy interventions, surveys, assessments, and which instructors will be involved
• Extend your timeline to maintain your OER throughout its use:
  • Appoint one point person to coordinate editing, ensuring edits are completed
  • Make ad hoc minor changes while teaching with the OER during the academic year
  • Update your OER with larger revisions between terms or at the end of the academic year