As open education maintains its momentum deeper into the use of open educational resources (OER) and beyond it to open and OER-enabled pedagogy, it becomes increasingly important that our advocacy teams are well rounded and well supported. Does your team have the expertise and support it needs to be an effective advocacy team?
Since its inception, Affordable Learning Georgia (ALG) has maintained a team of specialists and advocates on each of the University System of Georgia (USG) institutions. At the start, there were two roles within each institution: an instructional Campus Champion and a Library Coordinator. In 2020, we looked at our advocacy team and our grants program and realized several things:
- Grant projects that involved a librarian usually resulted in more copyright-conscious materials and better use of institutional library resources such as LibGuides.
- Grant projects that involved an instructional designer usually resulted in better student success rates and more positive student feedback.
- Despite the request for one instructional Campus Champion and one Library Coordinator from each institution, the scales had tipped heavily toward library representation.
- We were ready to put more emphasis on the pedagogical strategies and benefits of open education—which meant we needed more instructional design input.
We restructured our advocacy team to be more well-rounded with three roles: Faculty Champions, now specifically selected from instructional faculty; Library Champions; and Design Champions, selected from instructional designers. The addition of a dedicated design role is one piece of our next step in moving open education and the use of affordable resources forward in the USG.
Combined with the recent jump-start of our professional development efforts, this restructuring prompted the development of a welcome training specifically designed to prepare newly appointed ALG Champions for the advocacy work they would be doing on their campuses in line with the strategic goals of ALG. The welcome training is just one of the ways we are supporting our system-wide advocacy team and improving the sustainability of our advocacy efforts.
In this presentation, participants will hear from the leaders of ALG on the prompting and process of rounding out the expertise of our system-wide team of advocates and the professional development and collaborative efforts in development to support it.
After attending this presentation, attendees will be able to:
- Examine their OER advocacy team and develop a plan for “rounding it out.”
- Develop a plan for supporting their advocacy team through professional development and collaboration.
