We often hear that support for open educational resources (OER) from administration is finite, so it’s important to show results quickly. Imagine that your library received a grant to complete three OER creation projects in the next year. Your intention is for these projects to serve as the foundation of what you would like to become an on-campus OER publishing program. You want your program to continue existing after the grant period, but you need to make sure your first three projects are completed successfully before the deadline so that you can push for sustained funding from your institution. To help you fast-track your OER implementation in similar situations, we’ve put together a few ideas.

Get folks excited about your OER program

The open community is a vibrant one, but it’s still relatively small. Amidst the vast number of educators and faculty at higher education institutions, there are a fair few who aren’t aware of OER. You should reach out at your institution to ensure that people know what OER is. After all, getting people excited about the open community is the first step to the success of your OER program. This should be done in tandem with raising awareness about your OER program as even staunch OER advocates won’t know about your institution’s OER initiatives unless you tell them about it. That’s why it’s so important to talk about OER at your institution, both conceptually and about the opportunities associated with your OER program.

There are a number of things you can do to educate folks about OER and to get them excited about what you’re doing to support it:

• Start by talking about OER and open education with simple, straightforward language. Avoid jargon. People who aren’t overly familiar with OER and open education can identify with free, affordable, and easy-to-use, whereas terms like open, OER, and accessible pedagogy can be misunderstood by a reader in a rush. The end goal can absolutely be to make open education widespread and ubiquitous, but it’s important to make it easy for people to get involved before you expect them to get invested on a deeper level.
• Make sure that your program and any initiatives designed to support it are visible. You can’t get speedy results if you can’t get people to participate, and people can’t participate if they don’t know your program exists. Let your colleagues know about your OER program in email signatures, on your institution’s library site, on social media sites popular with the academic community (Twitter and LinkedIn), by word of mouth, and in any other way you can.
• Apply for grants to support your OER program. It may go without saying that additional funding enables you to better support your initiatives, but there are other benefits to participating in a grant program. The prestige of grant programs is a great way to attract instructors and faculty, so be sure to feature available grants when you circulate information about your program. Even if the funding you’re awarded is relatively insignificant, that prestige can be worthwhile. Grants can also encourage a higher degree of completion because participants are less likely to walk away from an incomplete project when there’s a grant involved, especially when a final report of outcomes is required.

Once people are aware of and interested in your OER program, you can bring them on board to start producing results. Even after your program gets rolling, make sure to continue amplifying it. You’re unlikely to reach all interested parties at once, so you should make sure there are plenty of chances for people to discover any opportunities that are available.

Make it easy to participate

To help creators produce timely results, you should try to eliminate any potential barriers to participation. Even hurdles that are seemingly small can cause a project to lose momentum, so it’s best to be proactive and make your institution’s process for onboarding contributors as streamlined as possible. There are also a variety of mechanisms already put in place by Pressbooks to ease contributors into the content creation process.

You can make it easier for OER creators to get started by doing the following:

• Use single sign-on (SSO) so that it’s effortless for content creators to access Pressbooks Create. This may seem overly simple, but having one less click between contributors and their starting point for OER creation can help drive engagement.
• Create a sandbox book and provide log-in credentials so that contributors can play around with Pressbooks Create. Pressbooks is WordPress-based, so it’s recognizable to many people, but starting any project with a blank slate can be daunting. Setting up a learning environment is not an insignificant piece of groundwork, and it’s easier for OER creators to get a quick start when that’s already out of the way. If you’d like to see an example of what this might look like, you can check out this sandbox book.
• Put together an onboarding activity that creators can try out in your sandbox book. This can look as simple as a checklist of tasks to complete. Instead of starting with nothing, this gives content creators a roadmap to guide them through the process of learning how to use Pressbooks Create.
• Clone content into your catalog to organize OER for potential collaborators at your institution to adapt. This lowers barriers to participation by making it easy for content creators to jump in and start editing right away. Faculty are often pressed for time, and giving them this clear starting point can help assuage fears they might have around time commitments. If you don’t plan on adapting existing content, you can still have a look at books that have been published within a discipline to get an idea of what’s been done and what you can do. A great place to start looking at curated collections of various disciplines is Pressbooks Collection Hub.

What’s important is to reduce deterrents to participation. The easier you make it for content creators to get started, the more likely they are to see their projects through. Showing participants that there are supports in place to help them get started also builds confidence in your program. Many of these supports are built-in to Pressbooks institutional networks, which means no added burden to program managers.

Foster an OER community

Creating a piece of OER on your own is an intimidating task, and it’s certainly not the way to do things if you want to generate results quickly. Instead, you should put together a community of support that helps creators stay motivated and keeps them on a timeline. It takes a village!

You can grow an OER community by providing your creators with various supports, and by helping them to support each other. Here are some steps you can take to do that important work:

• Start a learning group. Even if there’s a small turnout, it gives content creators the opportunity to bounce ideas off of one another and learn from each other. You can organize different groups for drafting content, editing, assessing accessibility, and more. It’s also a great way to get people together to learn how to use Pressbooks Create to produce OER. If you don’t have an expert on hand to lead your learning groups, don’t worry. These are spaces where program leads and participants can learn alongside each other with the shared goal of obtaining expertise.
• Appoint someone as your OER Lead. This person should be responsible for following up with OER creators at your institution, helping them to answer questions and locate resources. A designated lead for open education gives your OER program structure that signals to creators that they have support and that they’re accountable to someone.
• Hire a grad student through funding or stipends to help work on OER. Instead of having to tackle everything on their own or be responsible for recruiting their own support, content creators will have a go-to person to help draft and edit their books. There’s also the added bonus that a student gets paid and has something interesting to put on their resume.

Keep in mind that OER creators can only participate in these opportunities if they’re aware that they exist, so it’s important to make them visible. Make information available on appropriate web pages, post about opportunities on your institution’s social media channels, send out emails—you can even try putting up some good old-fashioned posters around campus. If you have an OER Lead they should be clearly identified, and they should be able to put content creators in touch with everything that’s going on at your institution to support them.

Showcase what you’ve done

Don’t downplay what you’ve accomplished thus far. Be proud of it. It might feel uncomfortable to toot your own horn, but how else will you get more funding? If you can’t be optimistic about what you’ve created, it’s unlikely that the administration will be. Celebrate what you have so that others can as well.

Get administration excited about the progress you’ve made by showing off your program’s results in the following ways:

• Feature content that wasn’t originally authored by folks at your institution but was adapted by them. It’s important to remember that one of the great boons of OER is the ability to revise, remix, and reuse resources. Not everything needs to be made from scratch. It’s valid to show off the work people have done to adapt existing content to suit the needs of their courses and students.
• Focus on what you do have, not on what you’re lacking. It takes time to create quality OER, so it’s to be expected that you won’t have an overflowing catalog of textbooks published by your institution right away. That doesn’t mean you can’t showcase what you have published, even if it’s only one or two books. If you have one book, market that book rather than shying away from the fact that it’s just one—it’s still proof of concept and a great accomplishment. If what you have feels underwhelming, remember that small wins are something to celebrate. Whether you’ve only managed to complete a few chapters or make a single adoption since you last shared an update, small wins demonstrate consistent progress, and an active program is something that’s hard for administration to shut down.
• Talk to student newspapers or other university publications about your work. This is not only a great way to feature what you’ve done so far, but also an excellent opportunity to catch the eye of potential participants. If you can get more folks interested in contributing, you can leverage that interest to elicit continued support from administration.
• Use the analytics feature in your book’s dashboard to summarize notable statistics about your book’s performance. You can report on the number of visitors, page views, and referrers (e.g., Google is a referrer when a reader accesses your book through a Google search) within a specified time period. All of this information can be used to help demonstrate the impact and reach of your book. You can find more information about using analytics in Pressbooks in the Pressbooks Network Manager’s Guide.

The bottom line is that you should promote the results of your program clearly and convincingly. If you discount your work and worry that it’s not substantial enough to showcase, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. What you have now might only be a stop on the way to your end goal, but it’s still progress. Don’t forget that.

All in all, keep talking OER

Visibility of your program and fostering a community around it is key to producing timely results. You can’t do this alone, so you need to keep creators connected to your program. Make sure they’re aware of your initiatives. Help them get started once they’ve expressed interest in what you’re doing. Continue to support them as they create OER, and keep up opportunities for them to support each other. Consistent support encourages consistent participation, and that leads to quality outcomes.

Once you have your hands on those quality outcomes you need to promote them. Showing off what you’ve accomplished gives administration a reason to continue to back up your program. That’s why you’re after speedy results in the first place! Showcasing what’s been done also validates the work of participants, and it makes it easier for educators and students to discover OER created through your program, benefiting the entire OER community.