Stay tuned... Open Educational Leadership Program Capstone Project

If you create an open textbook, will it get used? How can we measure its usage? What’s the best way to get the word out about a new open educational resource?

These are some of the questions I hope to answer in the coming months with my capstone project for the SPARC Open Education Leadership project. When faculty spend the time and resources necessary to create an OER, the greatest reward is seeing it used in and outside of the classroom. As a librarian, working in library publishing, I believe that there are ways to promote open material, make them more discoverable, and measure the impact of an OER. Library publishers and faculty engaged in OER don’t have big marketing budgets or sales people. Success can’t be measured by number of sales. For these reasons, publishers and faculty need to think of creative new ways to market their work, for little money, and consider what success looks like for their OER.

In the spring of 2018, the Illinois Open Publishing Network (IOPN) will publish its first OER. I am working with a library faculty member to publish an LIS textbook on instruction and assessment using Pressbooks and we are designing a study to measure marketing and promotions around the book using different metrics tools such as Google Analytics. First, we will promote the book using social media such as Twitter. After a period, we will do a more targeted marketing by identifying key groups that might be interested in the textbook.

After completing the study, I will create a toolkit that includes methods for marketing and promotion of OER. The toolkit will be informed by the outcomes of the study, and will include reusable and adaptable material that other library publishers and faculty can pick up and use for their own projects, such as a press releases, and resources for identifying where to promote OER. The goal is to create a toolkit that is useful both to my institution and to the greater OER community and all of the resources will be licensed using a Creative Commons license. Stay tuned as this exciting project gets off the ground!

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