One of my goals when coming on board to lead the Outreach College OER initiative was to put tools in the hands of faculty. The faculty we work with at UH come from all walks of life and bring unique experiences to the table when looking at adopting OER textbooks. Comfort levels and savvy with edtech tools will vary, but that shouldn’t keep anyone from understanding the workflow that collaborators use when creating OER.
Back in January I wrote about OER workflows that visually represented the steps in the production workflow, but none seemed to be a perfect fit. Using these OER-specific workflows alongside tradition online course and journal production workflows led me to what we have here.
This diagram is my attempt to provide a visual for understanding the major steps in the production of OER.
A draft of this workflow was sent out via mailing lists and social media channels with a request for feedback on its design. More than a dozen folks left comments on the Google Doc, and I’ve done my best to incorporate the feedback that adds overall value to the workflow.
There were some enquiries about our mention of an OER specialist and a librarian that would be part of the process supporting OER adoptions. In the UH system, we are identifying two representatives from each campus as points of contact, so that we can more easily share successes and support our colleagues at all campuses. Ideally, this would mean that each campus would have an instructional designer and a librarian, both familiar with OER. These two-person teams would support OER adoptions and creations at their campus and be able to signal if they needed additional support from other UH campuses. Having a common roadmap like this for our OER projects will mean that we can lend a hand in specific ways to help each other along.
Now while I can’t guarantee that everyone who works with us on OER will leave with a deep understanding of instructional theory or design, I do hope that shedding light on the process will encourage more faculty to open up their own processes and practices. Teaching is an art, and this workflow doesn’t include pedagogical questions or structures like I know it could. But there will be other versions of this down the line, and as we use this workflow with more and more faculty, we hope to see extensions of the tool elsewhere.
A big Mahalo to everyone who chimed in with feedback!
And if you found the workflow useful to you, drop us a line at oer@hawaii.edu and let us know.
PS The workflow will print nicely onto 11″x17″ paper for handouts
