Instructors, administrators, and other personnel (such as university lawyers) all have different roles in adopting OERs. We will solicit input on the various messaging and methods that can be used to appeal to different university stakeholders to advocate for the use of OERs in language learning.
While Open Educational Resources (OERs) have gained in traction, they still have not gained widespread enough usage and recognition to assume that higher education stakeholders will automatically understand the terminology. As part of a grant project with an arm in OER development in three Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTLs), team members found that instructors, administrators, and university personnel (such as lawyers), required tailored messaging in order to understand OERs, and their roles in advancing OERs at the institutional level, but that there was not always a wealth of resources to help us provide explanations that made sense for each stakeholder.
We will solicit input on the various messaging and methods that can be used to appeal to different university stakeholders to advocate for the use of OERs in language learning. Ultimately, our group hopes to gather the information from this conference to create a repository of tips, tricks, resources, and scripts that can be used by anyone who needs to start a conversation about OERs with institutional stakeholders.