DEVELOP OER POLICY*

Develop a policy framework to support broadening use of OER at your institution. Identify where and how institutional policy can reinforce and sustain your success with open educational resources.

Note: Asterisk denotes this is a proven, high-impact play.

Even the most disorganized team can score an occasional touchdown, but to sustain the win with OER you’ll need to establish policies that ingrain the use and promotion of open educational resources within your institution’s culture. Here are key steps:

Understand what OER Policy is and why it’s important.

This “Free to Learn” guidebook, developed for higher education leaders, provides a helpful primer about open educational resources and the role of campus leadership in creating an environment that supports their use by faculty and students. This Policy Development Video Series from Open Washington provides video segments from OER experts along with and supporting materials to help you through the process of assessing, reviewing, formulating, and enacting an OER policy at your institution.

Use simple, best practices-based tools to start creating your own OER Policy.

The OER Policy Development Tool can help you quickly get started developing OER-friendly policy for your institution. This freely available, interactive policy-builder tool was developed by Amanda Coolidge (Senior Manager Open Education, BCcampus and Institute for Open Leadership Fellow) and Daniel DeMarte (Chief Academic Officer, Tidewater Community College and Institute for Open Leadership Fellow). Designed for college and university governance officials and those with responsibility for leading OER initiatives, it walks through various dimensions of OER-related policy and provides sample language institutions can use to define and implement these policies.

As you go through the tool, you may select policy positions and components relevant to your institution and your goals for promoting and scaling effective OER adoption. After you’ve selected the policies that apply to your context, the tool generates a policy document for you based on your selections. This process allows you to easily draft a policy framework that suits the needs of your institution, and get the ball of sustainability rolling.

See what others are doing with OER-friendly policy.

More and more institutions are finding ways to build OER-friendly policy into how they operate and support teaching and learning. Wikieducator provides a curated list of institutions with exemplary OER policies.

We also recommend looking through other helpful resources curated below.

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Photo by Jomar on Unsplash