Use this play to:

Develop a policy framework to support broadening use of OER at your institution. Identify where and how institutional policy can reinforce and sustain your success with open educational resources.

Note: Asterisk denotes this is a proven, high-impact play.

See More Plays
Back to Playbook Home
Ask a Lumen Expert

Running the Play

Even the most disorganized team can score an occasional touchdown, but to sustain the win with OER you’ll need to establish policies that ingrain the use and promotion of open educational resources within your institution’s culture. Here are key steps:

Understand what OER Policy is and why it’s important.

This “Free to Learn” guidebook, developed for higher education leaders, provides a helpful primer about open educational resources and the role of campus leadership in creating an environment that supports their use by faculty and students. This Policy Development Video Series from Open Washington provides video segments from OER experts along with and supporting materials to help you through the process of assessing, reviewing, formulating, and enacting an OER policy at your institution.

Use simple, best practices-based tools to start creating your own OER Policy.

The OER Policy Development Tool can help you quickly get started developing OER-friendly policy for your institution. This freely available, interactive policy-builder tool was developed by Amanda Coolidge (Senior Manager Open Education, BCcampus and Institute for Open Leadership Fellow) and Daniel DeMarte (Chief Academic Officer, Tidewater Community College and Institute for Open Leadership Fellow). Designed for college and university governance officials and those with responsibility for leading OER initiatives, it walks through various dimensions of OER-related policy and provides sample language institutions can use to define and implement these policies.

As you go through the tool, you may select policy positions and components relevant to your institution and your goals for promoting and scaling effective OER adoption. After you’ve selected the policies that apply to your context, the tool generates a policy document for you based on your selections. This process allows you to easily draft a policy framework that suits the needs of your institution, and get the ball of sustainability rolling.

See what others are doing with OER-friendly policy.

More and more institutions are finding ways to build OER-friendly policy into how they operate and support teaching and learning. Wikieducator provides a curated list of institutions with exemplary OER policies.

We also recommend looking through other helpful resources curated below.

Helpful Resources

OER Policy Development Tool from the Institute for Open Leadership

A OER policy planning tool developed by two Fellows from the Institute for Open Leadership, Amanda Coolidge (Senior Manager Open Education, BCcampus) and Daniel DeMarte (Chief Academic Officer, Tidewater Community College).

Video series by Open Washington featuring leading experts on OER policy, how and what policies to implement at your institution to increase the success of your OER initiative.

List institutions with exemplary OER policy, curated by WikiEducator

A database of current and proposed open education policies from around the world.

An OER policy development guidebook for community college leaders developed by Hal Plotkin and Creative Commons

A toolkit designed for higher education guide for higher education stakeholders to help you review your own institutional policy environment and institute changes that facilitate collaboration and the promotion of OER

Attributions:

Photo by Jomar on Unsplash