Advocacy
Enabling access to freely available content, information, and data is an essential part of a supportive and accessible learning environment - for students, staff, and faculty. Learning about OER, participating in OER activities, and using OER are just some of the ways you can become an OER advocate. In addition, you might want to join the OER Stewards, a cross-divisional, inclusive group that promotes OER use.
Students
#textbookbroke
One of the best ways to mobilize student voices in support of open education is to appeal to the fact that students spend a lot of money on textbooks each term. You can demonstrate wide student support and inform students about the high cost of textbooks through a campaign like #textbookbroke, a social media campaign that can be adapted to any institution.
Engage students in programming during events like Open Education Day
Ontario Tech holds OER-themed programming, like panel discussions or workshops, as well as larger-scale events like Open Education Day. These are opportunities to involve students in programming that is normally only appealing to faculty and staff, ensuring that student opinions are heard. You might try to get students involved in event planning processes, ensure students participate in panels or presentations, or advertise events to your fellow students. This allows information to be shared with students that are involved, and student-centric messaging to be shared with those on your campus involved in OER promotion.
Ensure that your own resources and information is openly licensed and share with other student groups and societies.
It is great to talk the talk, but make sure to walk the walk as well. The open education community is very supportive, and we can only be successful if we work together and make our resources open. You can use open licenses for resources your student society creates and adapts, to ensure that you are supporting other student groups and societies in starting their own OER initiatives. An easy way to do this is using the Creative Commons Choose a License feature. Make sure to look for existing resources you could adapt before creating your own.
Attribution: Adapted from How to Advocate on Your Campus by BCcampus, licensed under a CC BY 4.0 International License.
Staff and Faculty
#OERThankU
The #OERThankU campaign recognizes the faculty at Ontario Tech who have committed to enhancing student success by adopting one or more OER for use in their classes, replacing traditional resources. This campaign seeks to raise awareness of OER adoption and to highlight these faculty members. Thank U!
