Outreach Communication Planning
by Megan Simmons 9 months, 2 weeks agoBefore drafting your outreach communication, take some time to consider the following:
- Identify your audience and outreach goals - Who are you hoping to reach out to and what are you hoping to accomplish with your advocacy?
- Determine the content of your outreach – What do you want to share? Be sure to clearly communicate the value add for your intended audience, as well as any relevant links, images, resources, videos, etc.
- Select an outreach method(s) – How will you share? What communication channels would be most effective? (social media, blog, website, listservs, presentation, etc.)
- Call to Action: outcome and impact – What action do you hope others will take as a result of your outreach? What will you invite them to do? What outcomes and impact do you hope to see?
Refer to the Outreach and Advocacy Plan section of our OER Fellowship Planning Template for more information. Please share a draft of your outreach communication by replying below.
Upcoming Outreach Opportunities
OERizona February 28-March 1
Open Ed Week March 4-8, 2024
Faculty Working Sessions for English, Math, Biology, and Psychology Courses March 29 (reach out to Megan C for more information)
Open Ed Virtual Conference October 8-10, 2024
Open Ed Global Conference (dates TBD)
Fall 2024 OER Fundamentals Academy (dates TBD)
Spring 2025 OER Fellowship (dates TBD)
Audience: My audience is bifurcated with two different, but not dissimilar populations. I want to reach faculty and their student body. I have found that if you target administration it has minimal effects, top down management or directives are completed reluctantly if completed at all. Whereas, inspiring a bottom up movement has the greatest chance of success and broad girth of action. (Self is the best motivator)
Content: Templates for diagnostic and formative assessments that measure student understanding and growth. Growth mindsets with continual student improvement needs to be a larger focus than the current info dumps and regurgitation. (Mindfulness and Mastery over GPA and Time-Based)
Method: Provide faculty access to repositories of customized templates that meet their course competencies that are easily modified for their student needs. These templates should act as a directed guide that walks the faculty through OER production step-by-step along the way. Many faculty are off put by the idea of having to build everything from scratch after one or two sessions of how-to info dumps. Whereas a plug and play template with instructions for each step should allow the faculty to piecemeal the OER process without becoming lost or overcome. The student audience will then have tailored content allowing them to better interact with the material. Students disassociate from the content and the course if the material/assessments are not homogenous or cohesive. (Faculty build better, Students engage better)
Outcome: As with the audience the outcomes are bifurcated from the central idea of better OERs.
Faculty will have improved confidence in their abilities in OER creation and they will fortify their understanding that they, the faculty, are the course; not a textbook, not a test, not publisher or other entity but they themselves. We should not be trying to build a course that anyone or anything can teach, we should be building the skills of a qualified academic who then can create a unique experience for each individual student.
The students will have a better experience within the classroom allowing the continuity between lecture/discussion/assessment/etc to guide and build their enthusiasm and ownership of the course material, allowing them to internalize and understand the principles. Their grade won’t matter in five years, what they learned and were able to walk way with will serve them throughout their lives. (Faculty OER confidence, Student ownership)
Audience and Outreach goals: As an OER Instructional Design specialist, my audience is full-time and part-time faculty and administration. The goal is to increase awareness and use of OER resources among full-time and part-time faculty. As an adjunct faculty member, my audience is current and prospective students. The goal is to offer free or low-cost materials to current students and utilize the potential cost savings associated with OER to attract prospective students.
Outreach content: For faculty - Easy to understand training and resources that will encourage their adoption, adaptation, and/or remix of OER resources. By using the same OER material the faculty can provide consistent, quality, and relevant course content to their students, while also being able to customize the material the fits the personality and teaching style of the instructor. For students, receiving quality and consistent content material that is relevant to their environment and community.
Outreach method(s): For faculty – Monetary incentives to attend OER training programs, to participate in adapting, adopting, and/or remixing OER resources, and for their use of approved OER resources. The opportunity for these incentives will be presented at departmental meetings, through college wide communications, presidents’ meetings, newsletters, website, and other pertinent meetings and communications (to be discovered). For students – College website, listservs, and college clubs.
Call to Action: Participation and ownership among faculty members, administration, and students. An increased use of OER materials by faculty, as well as an increased expectation and request for OER resources among students.
Faculty who are reluctant OER adopters
Research about benefits, quality, etc. of OER
At our college's Faculty PD day
Create and utilize OER!
Audience and Outreach goals: Other faculty for sure, to help teach them how to find and adapt OER material. Dean would be fun to include to help share successes. I would also like to include students (thanks Megan and Tara for the breakout ideas) to share with them some vetted resources for my class.
Outreach content: I hope to find valuable textbooks and/or lab manuals that we can use for courses. I would also like to provide supplementary materials.
Outreach method(s): I think that by adding to the hub and sharing this across the audience I can work to narrow down the material to what is best to use for our campus.
Outcome: I plan to create/adopt/adapt enough material to fully offer all chemistry courses as OER and share this with other faculty, dean and students.
My audience is faculty at both YC and the consortium because I am the faculty lead for the grant and on YC's OER committee. Luckily, we have (almost) fully adopted OER resources at YC in the mathematics department, so I am hoping to be able to share what we built with other colleges across Arizona.
Outreach Content - sharing the courses and workbooks we have created at YC.
Outreach Method - I prefer personally communicating with people but sometimes email is neccessary. I am going to communicate through ATF, Statewide Math Meetings, and National Conferences.
Outcomes - I want to invite other college to use what YC built as a template to get started with OER. It is easier to use what others built as opposed to starting from scratch. We also would like to move more courses from Lumen to MyOpenMath to make them fully free.
The impact is more students paying zero for textbooks and homework systems.
Audience: fellow faculty
Content:I want to find useful STEM resources, and successfully implement them into one of my engineering courses so that other faculty can see that OER isn't only for English and Social Sciences.
Method: Once I have had a succesful experience, I would share my experience in our college's faculty forum.
Outcomes: Spread positive energy about OER among our faculty!
Audience
As an educational developer, my audience will be faculty (full-time and adjunct) at Mohave Community College. All faculty will be welcome to participate; however, faculty that have not yet adopted, adapted, or built OER material will be the focus.
Content
Faculty will be provided with resources and information sessions that support them in their adoption, adaption, and building of OER materials. For example, they will be shown how to navigate the OER Commons to find relevant resources for adopting and adapting. They may be given templates for building their own OER resources. They will also be informed of how OER relates to best practices in teaching and learning.
Method
I envision hosting a professional development series that will entail monthly live sessions. At a glance, I believe 4 sessions will be sufficient. The series can be run in Fall 2024, then repeat again in Spring 2025. I will also look to collaborate with others at my college to tap into their expertise, such as librarians and OER “super users”. Though the grant, there may still be monetary incentives for adopting, adapting, and building OER material. To confirm, I will reach out to our grant lead to determine the status of the grant.
Outcome and Impact
After engagin in the sessions, faculty will make progress towards
Audience and outreach goals - My audience is faculty at my institution who have yet to adopt OER with the intention of encouraging them to explore and consider adopting OER for their courses.
Content of outreach – First, I want to share my positive experience in adopting OER: not beholden to textbook publishers, incorporating culturally relevant content, customization of course content and assessments, student success, and positive student feedback). Second, I want to provide useful training and resources to faculty to facilitate and support their adoption of OER. Faculty want training, but it needs to be relevant, convenient, and in digestible amounts.
Outreach method(s) – Professional development workshops in collaboration with the Academic Library and one-on-one discussions.
Call to Action: outcome and impact – I would like to see faculty across the institution fully or partially adopt OER for their courses and more awareness in general about the institutional resources we have to support OER creation and adoption. We have a student experience statement at our college and #studentsfirst is often used to tout how much we support students. What better way to put #studentsfirst and support their learning than through the adoption of OER?!
My audience is twofold: The Arizona Articulation Task Force for Geology and the Articulation Task Force for Astronomy and Physics. These two groups meet annually to address topics of transfer, articulation, textbook selctions, class size, modes of instruction etc.
The content of my outreach will be sharing the successes I have had with OER materials, sharing the materials, comparing and contrasting the corporate textbook landscape with the OER universe and the impact this material has on our students.
We have an annual meeting and a listserv that we use year round. I will set the agenda for both meetings.
Unsure...perhaps tracking the changes in textbook selection through both of these groups. The outcome could be the measure of how many faculty in AZ physics, astronomy, and geosciences make the switch to OER.