Open Education 2017

As a university with a deep commitment to social justice, SF State is striving to reduce the cost of course materials to students by encouraging greater use of OER on our campus. One of the challenges we face as we seek to promote adoption of OER has been how best to reach and support faculty in this process.

Most OER projects implemented on our campus to date have been faculty driven. Based on the diversity of projects put forth by these early adopters, we realized that there would be no one size fits all model of support. We needed to find a way to empower these early adopting faculty, who best know the needs and challenges of OER adoption within their disciplines, to communicate the value of OER other faculty and to support in the OER process. Our OER faculty ambassador program attempts to fill this support gap.

Additionally, because choice of instructional materials is considered a crucial part of academic freedom at SF State, a key aspect of reaching faculty has been conveying the value of OER adoption: to students, to our campus and to the faculty themselves. By arming faculty ambassadors with data, support materials, best practices and more, they are able take ownership over OER advocacy and reach faculty who might otherwise not become part of the conversation.

This session explores the terrain of providing support for faculty in adopting OER, and describes how SF State's OER team developed an ambassador program that cultivated faculty ownership of advancement of OER on our campus. Presenters will describe the collaboration between faculty ambassadors and instructional designers in planning and customizing each ambassador's model of support. Presenters will also report progress of ambassador led projects that are currently underway, including successes, challenges and lessons learned.