timeline
title Starting Open Prospectively
section Planning for Openness
Scoping : Setting clear goals
: Understanding your audience
: Stakeholder management
: Evaluation of success
... : ...
section Content
... : ...
section Launch and Implementation
... : ...
section Leveraging Benefits
... : ...
4 Where do you start?
Congratulations on making it this far! Your interest in Open Educational Resources (OER), and your willingness to learn about and implement them, is a testament to your dedication to accessible, equitable, and collaborative learning. Thank you for your commitment to this approach in education.
This chapter is an important waypoint in your open education journey. You’ve learned about what open education entails in Chapter 2, and now, you might be wondering how to practically apply it in your own context. We’ve designed this chapter to guide you through the first steps in that process.
We begin by discussing the choice between making educational materials open prospectively or retrospectively. Both these approaches offer unique challenges and opportunities. Although prospective design of OER will be easier in practice. Understanding the differences and challenges can help you make informed decisions when designing or adapting your resources. In this chapter we will take the first steps in the process of starting to create new OER or adapting existing materials to make them open. We start building practical checklists to help you navigate this process. Later in the process both paths will merge again.
4.1 Making it open: Prospective or Retrospective
Embracing open education represents a profound shift in the way we create, share, and interact with educational resources. As you embark on this journey, one of the first decisions you’ll encounter is whether to make existing educational materials open (retrospective), start new projects with open education in mind (prospective), or a combination of both.
Each approach comes with its own set of challenges and rewards. On one hand, opening up existing materials can provide immediate benefits in terms of accessibility and collaboration. On the other hand, this approach can be time-consuming and complex, especially when dealing with issues such as copyright and the technical aspects of transforming existing resources into open formats.
Starting fresh with open education in mind when developing new materials, however, can often be a more streamlined process. From the outset, you can design your resources to be open, eliminating the need for later adaptations. Yet, this approach may mean that valuable existing resources remain closed off, at least in the short term.
The decision between these two approaches is not a binary one. A successful open education initiative often incorporates elements of both strategies. Opening up materials is always a win, but it’s crucial to strike a balance between feasibility, effort, and the eventual result. You might find that while some existing resources lend themselves well to being opened retrospectively, for others, it might be more worthwhile to leave them as they are and focus on incorporating open principles in new projects.
Remember, the ultimate goal is to improve the accessibility and adaptability of educational resources. Whether you achieve this by opening existing materials or designing new ones with openness in mind will depend on your unique circumstances, resources, and goals. Let’s explore these two approaches in greater detail.
4.2 Starting Open Prospectively
Embarking on the journey of creating OER is a rewarding endeavor, but like all significant initiatives, it requires structured planning and execution. This process is delineated into four pivotal stages:
Planning for Openness: This initial stage lays the foundation. It involves understanding the why, what, and for whom you are creating the materials. It’s about aligning your objectives with the needs of your audience and considering the practicalities involved. Information on this stage will be presented in this chapter.
Creating Content: Once the groundwork is established, the focus shifts to the content. This stage is dedicated to crafting high-quality, accessible, and engaging materials. It encompasses not just the creation, but also the considerations of format, adaptability, and inclusivity. In Chapter 5 more details on this stage can be found.
Launch and Implementation: Here, the prepared materials are introduced to the world. This phase involves selecting the right platform, ensuring easy access for your target audience, and setting up mechanisms for feedback and interaction. For this, you need to work with the right resources, details on which can be found in Chapter 6.
Leveraging Benefits: The final stage revolves around the post-launch period. It’s about amplifying the advantages of open materials, such as promoting educational equity, sharing your work with a broader audience, and fostering community collaboration. Moreover, it emphasizes the importance of continuous improvement based on feedback and evolving educational trends. See Chapter 7 for more information.
For each of these stages, we will delve into specific phases, breaking them down to offer a comprehensive understanding. For every phase, actionable steps will be outlined to guide you seamlessly through the process of starting open prospectively.
Prepare to embark on a fulfilling journey that not only enhances educational access but also fosters a culture of collaboration and continuous learning.
4.2.1 Planning for Openness: Scoping
When starting to think about creating OER, scoping is a first foundational step. This section will guide you in defining your objectives and gaining insights into your learners’ needs, ensuring that your OER will be both purposeful and effectively tailored.
Setting clear goals
Setting goals and having a clear sense of direction is crucial when embarking on a journey to create OER. What do you hope to achieve by making your educational materials open? Is it to increase (free) access to quality education, promote collaboration among learners, or adapt to diverse learning needs and styles? Having a clear understanding of your goals will guide your decisions throughout the project and help you measure your success.
Understanding your audience
Understanding your audience will heavily influence the design and presentation of your OER. Who are your learners? What are their learning needs and preferences? How tech-savvy are they? What languages do they speak? Do they have specific accessibility needs? An understanding of your audience will ensure that your OER are relevant, useful, and accessible to those who need them.
Setting clear goals and understanding your audience might require some research and reflection, but it’s worth the effort. These two aspects form the foundation upon which successful open education projects are built. In this section we help you to clarify your goals by means of asking you scoping questions. They ensure that your project stays focused, meets learners’ needs, and achieves its intended impact. So before you delve into the details of creating OER, take some time to outline your goals and understand your audience, Exercise 4.1 can help you. It’s your first step towards a successful open education project.
Stakeholder management
Stakeholders play a pivotal role in the success of any open education initiative. Their buy-in, or the extent to which they support and are committed to the project, can significantly influence its implementation and sustainability. When considering an open education initiative, it’s essential to ensure that all key stakeholders, whether they be faculty, administration, and potentially students, are not only informed but also involved in the design process. Their unique perspectives, concerns, and insights can provide valuable feedback that can shape the direction and quality of the project. Additionally, their support can help to ensure longevity and sustainability of the project.
However, along with the advantages of involving stakeholders comes the task of anticipating and navigating potential challenges and barriers. Resistance might arise from educators who are unfamiliar with or skeptical about the benefits of open education. Some learners might prefer traditional learning materials or have concerns about teaching in the open. By creating OER, you put yourself out there and become vulnerable to criticism. You might receive feedback about the quality and relevance of your materials. Try to convince yourself and others that this is desirable, because in the long-run it will improve the quality of your materials. To help you with stakeholder management, you can use Exercise 4.2 to consider each group of stakeholders and strategize on how best to involve them in your open education journey. Additionally, Section 2.5 and Section 2.6 provide some overviews of (perceived) augments for and against open education to help you in discussing open education with stakeholders.
Evaluation of success
Before we turn to the practicalities in our planning stage, we should determine when we would consider the first version of our open educational initiative a success. Success can be measured in various ways, and it’s crucial to have clear metrics in place from the outset. Quantitative metrics, such as the number of users or downloads, can provide tangible evidence of the reach and uptake of your materials. For example, achieving a certain number of users within the first month of launch might be a benchmark for success, but perhaps not relevant if you develop the materials for a course with a fixed number of students. Qualitative measures can shed light on the actual impact and effectiveness of your materials. Feedback from users, testimonials, and direct observations can offer insights into how well the materials are meeting the needs of the learners. Did they find the resources engaging? Were the materials able to cater to diverse learning needs? These qualitative insights can guide future iterations, ensuring that the OER continue to evolve and improve based on real-world feedback. Be gentle for yourself and don’t expect to get everything right in the first iteration. But do consider what if important to you and your stakeholders and how you can measure that. Exercise 4.3 can help you to ask what you consider important, Example 4.4 provides examples of how you can measure or investigate success.
Does it all feel like a bit much to keep track of? Don’t worry, in Figure 4.1 you can find back the steps that have been described. Additionally, the Figure will be updated after each relevant section such that, step by step, the sequence of actions to create OER will be mapped.
4.2.2 Planning for Openness: Practicalities
After laying a solid foundation through scoping, it’s time to move into the practicalities of initiating an open education project. Every educational venture, open or otherwise, comes with its unique set of challenges. Open education, however, introduces its own nuances. From understanding the resources you need to committing the right amount of time, from developing a seamless content creation workflow to addressing copyright concerns, there’s a lot to consider. This section aims to provide a guide on how to approach these facets, ensuring your OER not only reach their intended audience but also are able to be updated and can stay relevant.
The heart of an open education initiative is not just the content, but also the entire ecosystem around it. This ecosystem includes the tools you use, the platform on which you share materials, the licenses under which you operate, the community you engage, and the feedback loops you establish. Each of these elements requires careful thought and planning. In this section, we’ll delve deep into each of these aspects, offering both advice and actionable steps. Whether it’s ensuring every learner can access your materials regardless of their abilities, or fostering a vibrant community that actively uses and contributes to your resources, our goal is to prepare you for every eventuality. So, let’s embark on this detailed exploration of the practicalities of open education.
Resource and Time Commitment
Preparation is extremely important. Creating new materials is a timely process, and it’s important to be realistic about the time and resources you have available. Although in Section 2.5 we mention that OERs can reduce cost for students, creating the materials can be costly. We need to understand the resources we have available and how we can use them effectively.
Every initiative, regardless of its scale, requires some form of financial investment. It could be for the design and hosting of a platform, compensation for contributors, investment in technology, or promotion of the materials. Start by estimating a budget for each phase of your project. Consider all potential costs and try to anticipate unexpected expenses. Always allocate a contingency fund, as unexpected costs can and will arise. Be clear about the time you and your team can dedicate to the project as a result of the budget. This includes content creation, reviewing, updating, community engagement, and addressing feedback. Allocate sufficient time for each phase, keeping in mind that some phases may overlap or take longer than anticipated.
Licensing
Picking a license is not something most people will enjoy doing, but it is important to do so. It has consequences for the way you can use the material in future, and the way others can use it. Chapter 3 is fully devoted to providing you with more information on this topic. But here we want to stress the importance of choosing a license. It is one of the most important practical steps if you plan for OER. For instance, it is important to be consistent in the way you license your material. If you use different licenses for different parts of your materials, it will be difficult for others to use them. Consider if you need credits if others use your materials. Can they change it? Can they use it commercially? These are all questions that you need to answer before you can choose a license. Section 3.4 points you to resources that can help you to answer these questions and pick the correct licence for your materials. We hope that by listing the licencing issue here in your practical steps, each time you go through the cycle of starting to plan for OER and you use this book, you will be reminded in the early stages of the process.
Platform and Content
Deciding on platform and content cannot fully be seen as independent from each other. If you decide to use certain content types, e.g. videos, PowerPoint, PDFs, you will need to consider the platform that can host these content types. If you already chose a platform, you will need to consider the content types that can be hosted on the platform you choose. Can you make it work? If not, you will need to reconsider either the platform or the content types. Chapter 6 helps you with some practical options to choose your resources and some examples of how others have done it will be given. There will be many more options out there that we do not describe, so feel free to explore and find what works for you. The planning stage is however the stage to make these decisions. When selecting platforms and content types for open educational resources, key considerations include the content creation workflow, encompassing quality control and collaboration methods; distribution and outreach strategies for sharing materials, and ensuring accessibility for all learners. Additionally, maybe you want to fostering engagement, collect feedback, or have iterative improvement of materials. We developed Exercise 4.5 to help you think about the content types you want to use and Exercise 4.7 to help you think about the platform you want to use.
To help you keep track of all the steps, we update our mapping in Figure 4.2. Here you can find back the steps that have been described up to this point.
timeline
title Starting Open Prospectively
section Planning for Openness
Scoping : Setting clear goals
: Understanding your audience
: Stakeholder management
: Evaluation of success
Practicalities : Resources and time commitment
: Licensing
: Platform and content
section Content
... : ...
section Launch and Implementation
... : ...
section Leveraging Benefits
... : ...
4.3 Making it Open Retrospectively
When you want to open up existing resources, you might feel like you have a head start because you already have materials. However, in practice, this does not always mean that the process is easier. To guide you through the process of making existing resources open, we will use slightly different steps than we did for creating new OER. The first two steps of the process differ from the steps we described in Section 4.2. The last two steps are more or less the same and differences will be adressed once we get there.
Evaluating Existing Resources
Where in creating new OER we start with scoping out our plans, in making existing resources open we start with evaluating existing resources. This is because you need to know what you have before you can decide what you want to do with it. Additionally, we have to start immediately with the issue of licencing. In Chapter 3 we provide an introduction to licencing. When making existing resources open, licencing becomes the first issue to deal with before we can continue. In this Chapter, the Evaluation of Existing Resources is discussed in more detail.Revision and Adaptation
Once you have evaluated your existing resources, you can start to think about how you want to make them open and what changes need to be made. In Section 5.2 we provide some considerations for updating content. We also give some practical tips.Launch and Implementation: Here, the prepared materials are introduced to the world. This phase involves selecting the right platform, ensuring easy access for your target audience, and setting up mechanisms for feedback and interaction. For this, you need to work with the right resources, details on which can be found in Chapter 6.
Leveraging Benefits: The final stage revolves around the post-launch period. It’s about amplifying the advantages of open materials, such as promoting educational equity, sharing your work with a broader audience, and fostering community collaboration. Moreover, it emphasizes the importance of continuous improvement based on feedback and evolving educational trends. See Chapter 7 for more information.
4.3.1 Evaluating Existing Resources
Opening up existing resources can be more difficult then creating new ones because you have to deal with existing materials that might not be in the right format, or that are not licensed in a way that allows you to make them open. Or maybe you have to deal with the fact that you have not kept track of the sources of your materials, and you do not know if you are allowed to make them open. Maybe you need to deal with someone who developed part of the materials before you took over the course. When starting to open up existing resources, the two big things to take care of are licencing and stakeholder management.
Licencing
When you want to open up existing resources, you need to make sure that you have the right to do so. This means that you need to know what the current licencing situation is. You need to know if you are allowed to make the materials open, and if so, under what conditions. If you are not allowed to make the materials open, you need to find out if you can get permission to do so. If you cannot get permission, you need to find alternatives or only partially open up the materials. Perhaps it is not immediately clear what the licence currently is. In that case, you may need to reviewing course materials, check with content creators, or consult institutional policies. In short, the first step is to identify the current licencing situation(s) and understand restrictions and permissions. Example 4.7 shows how you could map the existing situation.
Once the current situation is mapped, compatibility of the licences with each other and with your goals has to be assessed. Is it feasible to re-license the materials? If not, what are the alternatives? If it is feasible, what are the implications? What will the new licence be? Are you okay with using that licence or will you drop some of the more restrictive materials and create new materials in their place? Finally, do you want all materials to have the same licence or are you okay with different licences for different materials? The latter complicates things for any next iteration of the materials, but might be necessary if you cannot get permission to re-license some of the materials. In short, the second step is to review the compatibility of licences and develop strategies for materials with restrictive licences. Finally, it would be good if you at least mention the issue of consistency in licensing and even better if you keep a detailed record of all licensing decisions and justifications. This ensures transparency in licensing for end-users and potential collaborators. You could, for instance, keep these notes in a readme file.
Stakeholder Management
When you want to open up existing resources, you need to make sure that you have the support of all stakeholders. This means that you need to know who the stakeholders are, what their interests are, and what their influence is. For instance, who was the original creator of the materials. What is your institutions view on opening up materials that were designed by their employees. Does your employer agree that you open up the materials? If not, what are the alternatives? First, identify all stakeholders and understand their interests and influence. Once you have done that, get their buy-in. Communicate your plan of opening up the materials and address any concerns they might have. Try to navigate resistance by identifying potential sources of resistance before you start the conversations. Prepare strategies to overcome skepticism or objections. Address both the benefits and concerns that stakeholders might have, Chapter 2 can help you with both.
Hopefully your stakeholders are as enthusiastic as you are, or at least allow you to start opening up. Ideally stakeholders become active participants in the decision-making process. For instance, in deciding on the licences that should be used in your institutions views. Whether or not they become active participants, it is good to keep them informed throughout the process. What is the progress and what were the final results. Where can the open materials be found and how can they be shared.
Finally, it is good to keep a record of all communications with stakeholders. This ensures that you will not get into trouble later on if someone claims that they did not agree to opening up the materials. when opening up existing materials, you need to be more careful to avoid any issues down the line. To help you keep track of all the steps you need to take, we have created mapping that you can use to make sure you do not forget anything, see Figure 4.3. The Figure will be updated after each relevant section such that, step by step, the sequence of actions to make resources open will be mapped.
timeline
title Opening Up Existing Educational Materials
section Planning for Openness
Evaluating Existing Resources : Licencing
: Stakeholder Management
section Content
... : ...
section Launch and Implementation
... : ...
section Leveraging Benefits
... : ...