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Advocacy & Campus Leadership: Action Plan: Home

Overview

Action Plan
An OER and affordability ACTION PLAN outlines a strategic approach based on setting clear goals, identifying key stakeholders, and developing an implementation timeline. Being well-informed, confident, and strategically aligned with a clear plan ensures that you are prepared to act when opportunities arise, and that your messaging is tailor-made for the stakeholder group you are talking to. An action plan provides a roadmap for your initiatives, helping you stay focused on your goals, measure progress, and make adjustments as needed. It also helps in coordinating efforts with other stakeholders and gaining their support, ensuring that your advocacy is organized and effective.

Action Plan Topics

The goals in your action plan broadly serve a number of purposes: communication and engagement, monitoring and assessment, and orientation and guidance. 

Purpose of Action Plan Goals

Communicate & Engage

  • serve as a foundation for persuading different groups of stakeholders
  • signal alignment with strategic priorities at the institutional level
  • serve notice of the work you intend to do

Monitor & Assess

  • establish specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) objectives to facilitate assessment
  • serve as benchmarks for measuring progress and evaluating impact

Orient & Guide

  • serve as a beacon for when you get to zoomed in on particulars, and need to get re-centered and see the big picture
  • remind you of what you will do and what you won't do, should requests start pulling you further afield
  • effectively allocate resources

Further Reading & Viewing

Engagement strategies balance creativity and meticulous consideration of the motivations and constraints of your audience. Segmenting your audience and targeting the message to their needs, interests, and concerns is ideal. Avoid instructor turnoffs (e.g., perceived loss of academic freedom, overemphasis on cost savings, obliviousness to their time constraints) and emphasize support structures. Be sure to identify influential and powerful stakeholders, and engage them with your best foot forward, showing you have an awareness of their responsibilities, priorities and constraints. 

Engagement Ideas

  • Faculty Workshops and Training Sessions: These sessions can cover topics such as finding, adapting, and creating OER, integrating them into the curriculum, and understanding licensing and copyright issues.
  • Showcasing Success Stories and Case Studies: Highlighting the positive impacts on student engagement and learning outcomes can encourage more faculty to consider OER.
  • Incentive Programs for Faculty: Providing incentives, such as grants, stipends, or release time, can motivate faculty to develop or adopt OER. Recognizing and rewarding faculty efforts in institutional reviews or promotion processes can also encourage participation.
  • Student Awareness Campaigns: Engaging students through awareness campaigns about the benefits of OER, such as cost savings and access to high-quality resources, can build demand from the student body. This can include informational sessions, digital campaigns, or student ambassador programs where students advocate for OER.
  • Cross-Departmental Collaborations: Encouraging collaboration between departments, such as the library, instructional design teams, and academic departments, can help pool resources and expertise.
  • Creating an OER Champions Network: Developing a network of OER champions, comprising faculty, librarians, and instructional designers, help promote OER initiatives across campus, and champions can provide peer support and serve as role models.
  • Customized Support Services: Offering tailored support services, such as one-on-one consultations, instructional design assistance, and technical support, can help faculty and staff navigate the process of adopting or creating OER.
  • Integrating OER into Institutional Policies: To ensure long-term commitment and support, you might incorporate OER goals into departmental plans or create institutional mandates.

Dialing in your timeline means aligning your plan with academic calendar cycles, events, course development timeframes, and other schedules to maximize the likelihood of buy-in and participation. It also requires looking internally to carefully structure timelines according to the resources available to your program, scope of your goals, and work time needed to develop your deliverables.

External Considerations

Make a big effort at the beginning to find as many dates as possible. Scratch in the dates you know and continually monitor the environment for unknown dates. Give colleagues a heads up on dates you are seeking if they might hear the information before you do.

  • Academic Calendar Cycles
    • Semester Start and End Dates: Before semester start dates is when many instructors are preparing course materials, and students are enrolling in classes. Aim to have OER resources ready before the beginning of each term.
    • Summer Sessions: Summer sessions are great for piloting OER materials in a smaller, more controlled setting.
    • Breaks and Holidays: Utilize breaks (e.g., winter, mid-Semester, J-Term) for training sessions, workshops, and professional development activities.
  • Course Development Timeframes
    • Course Planning and Scheduling Periods: Instructors often begin planning their courses for the next term several months in advance. Coordinate with the academic affairs or registrar's office to align OER promotion and training with these planning cycles. 
    • Syllabus Submission Deadlines: Be aware of when syllabi are due for approval. The lead-up is a practical point for faculty to consider incorporating OER materials.
  • Key University Events and Meetings
    • Faculty Meetings and Departmental Retreats: These are excellent opportunities to present the OER Action Plan, highlight success stories, and discuss the benefits of OER.
    • Academic Senate or Governance Meetings: Schedule presentations or discussions about the OER initiative during academic senate meetings to engage decision-makers and policy influencers.
    • Orientation and Training Events: Incorporate OER training sessions into new faculty orientation and ongoing professional development programs. Engaging new faculty early can foster a culture of openness and innovation.
    • Student Government and Organization Meetings: Engage with student groups and organizations to build advocacy and support for OER initiatives.
  • Budget Planning and Review Cycles
    • Annual Budget Cycles: Align your OER funding requests and resource allocations with the university’s annual budget planning cycle. This typically involves submitting proposals months in advance, so plan to have your OER funding needs outlined well in advance of these deadlines.
    • Grant Application Deadlines: Identify internal and external grant opportunities to support OER initiatives and align your plan with their application deadlines.
  • Assessment and Evaluation Periods
    • End-of-Semester Evaluations: Collect data on the impact of OER materials through student and faculty evaluations at the end of each semester.
    • Annual Review Periods: Many departments conduct annual reviews of curriculum and teaching practices. Try to align OER assessment and reporting efforts with these reviews to integrate findings into broader academic planning.
  • Publishing and Curriculum Review Schedules
    • Textbook Adoption Cycles: Coordinate OER promotion with textbook adoption deadlines. Many universities have specific times when textbook orders for the upcoming semester are due. This is an ideal time to encourage the adoption of OER alternatives.
    • Curriculum Review and Updates: Align the OER Action Plan with the timeline for curriculum review and revision. Curriculum committees often review and approve course materials annually or bi-annually.
  • Accreditation and Program Review Cycles
    • Accreditation Review Periods: Align OER initiatives with upcoming accreditation reviews, as these reviews often focus on curriculum quality, innovation, and cost-effectiveness.

Internal Considerations

These ranges are just a recommendation of where to start if you are having trouble getting started. Timing depends on your local variables.

  • Initial Planning and Assessment (1-3 months):
    • Environmental Scan and Needs Assessment: Conduct surveys, focus groups, or interviews to understand the current use of OER, identify gaps, and assess the needs of faculty, students, and other stakeholders.
    • Goal Setting: Establish clear, measurable goals for the OER initiative based on the assessment findings.
    • Stakeholder Engagement: Begin initial outreach to key stakeholders, such as instructors, librarians, instructional designers, and administrators, to build support and identify champions.
  • Development Phase (3-6 months):
    • Training and Professional Development: Organize workshops, webinars, and training sessions to build faculty and staff capacity for finding, using, and creating OER.
    • Pilot Programs: Implement pilot programs in selected courses or departments to test OER materials and gather initial feedback.
    • Content Development and Curation: Begin development or adaptation of OER materials, curate existing resources, and ensure alignment with curriculum standards and accessibility requirements.
  • Implementation Phase (6-12 months):
    • Full-Scale Rollout: Expand the use of OER across additional courses and departments based on pilot program feedback.
    • Integration with Learning Management Systems (LMS): Ensure OER materials are integrated into the institution's LMS for easy access and use by faculty and students.
    • Ongoing Support and Consultation: Provide continuous support to faculty and staff, including technical assistance, instructional design support, and access to OER repositories.
  • Evaluation and Feedback (6-12 months, ongoing):
    • Monitor Usage and Impact: Regularly collect data on OER usage, such as the number of courses adopting OER, student and faculty feedback, and impact on learning outcomes.
    • Feedback Loops: Establish regular feedback mechanisms to gather input from all stakeholders.
    • Evaluation of Goals: Assess progress toward meeting the goals outlined in the initial plan. Adjust strategies as needed.
  • Sustainability and Continuous Improvement (Ongoing, beyond 12 months):
    • Long-Term Strategy Development: Develop a long-term strategy for sustaining and scaling the OER initiative, including securing funding, institutional support, and partnerships.
    • Policy Integration: Work toward integrating OER practices into institutional policies and strategic plans to ensure long-term commitment.
    • Ongoing Professional Development: Continue to offer training and professional development opportunities to keep faculty and staff updated on the latest OER practices and trends.
  • Flexible Milestones:
    • Review and Adjust (every 6-12 months): Set milestones to review progress, adjust timelines, and make necessary changes to the action plan based on evaluation data and feedback.
    • Annual Review: Conduct a comprehensive review of the OER initiative each year to evaluate overall impact, identify new opportunities, and update the action plan accordingly.