Session 3 Virtual participant breakout

OERu

Towards more affordable education for all students worldwide

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QUESTION 1: RECOMMENDATIONS FOR OERu PARTNER RECRUITMENT

• At this point, it would be good to grow organically. Active partners might be best placed to seek out like-minded institutions in their own networks.
• Perhaps it is being done, but a simple talking piece would help with both internal and external recruitment. CEO's are busy people.
• Or perhaps we should not only recruit institutional leaders, but people in our own personal networks that might be interested, share the excitement with them, and get them to recruit institutional leaders. I think it could go both ways.

QUESTION 2: RECOMMENDATIONS TO PROMOTE COMMUNITY SOURCE MODEL FOR OERu TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION

• Can check in with Open Policy Network team to see who's working in open source software spheres, university competitions among MIT, Stanford, other known open specialists?

QUESTION 3: RECOMMENDATIONS TO IMPROVE OERU PARTNER ENGAGEMENT, COMMUNITY BUILDING AND CAPABILITY DEVELOPMENT

• Storytelling from the perspective of learners that may benefit from all of this work. Who are they? What are their needs? What are their stories? What can they imagine and articulate?

QUESTION 4: RECOMMENDATIONS TO BUILD ACADEMIC VOLUNTEERS INTERNATIONAL

• Reward individual participation with karma points, patterned after successful crowd-sourced sites like StackOverflow and Quora. Provide a metric that offers a quick (if rough) estimate of the value a participant has contributed to the community. Ideally this would be aggregated across all of the platforms we use.
  • Great idea because many outside funding sources might like to have such "in kind" information for matching or at least to indicate level of support.
  • Would some kind of login timesheet work...a page for each volunteer with columns for what was done, for how many hours, with estimate of market charges.
    • I think that would be a good start, but allowing other members of a community to vote "up" (or possibly down) to reward individual contributions (ala stackoverflow) is good. It might strengthen the community aspect and it helps newcomers immediately recognize who "valued" members of the community are. Successfully completing a course might be one measure. Answering questions in a FAQ could be another. Taking part in peer discussion forums during a course offering would need recognition.
    • Some kind of record would be good for academics to use for credit toward the community service aspects of tenure.
      • Good point. This recognition might extend outside the OERu community as well.
      • We have some similar things already in Wikieducator, don't we. I wonder what we could learn from that.
• Question...have we defined an academic volunteer. I thought they were originally seen as recruiting and supporting students but perhaps they could also help with collaborative course creation. I like karma points...I need all the karma I can get.
  • I think the original idea [[1]] was community support for peer-to-peer learning, reducing the load on the facilitators of massive courses.
    • I thought it included both peer to peer learning and at least initially some help from non-student volunteers
    • I was under the impression it was not just students helping students in particular courses but also folks helping learners to create portfolios for transfer....but at any rate I thought it was learner based. It sounds like volunteers....partners helping partners on course development internal marketing etc. would be helpful too.
      • Yes, I think any sort of peer-to-peer help is included, including things like how to become a more "free range" scholar. Or how to make best use of materials or (online) techniques. I think the key point is how to incentivize and retain interested an valuable community participation in all aspects of the OERu.
      • Right....wonder how it would work structurally. Would this be a good place to seek outside funding. It would be a one shot deal....once the structures are built we would simply keep using them, but the initial building will take time, effort, and expertise. I think we have the expertise and some of the commitment....but many of us lack TIME.
      • Seems to me it would be a two step process...first a large general infrastructure for all volunteers and then specific tasks underneath...right now we need instructional design collaboration, later it would be student support.
• Seeking volunteer graduate students from participating institutions might be a good way to promote the fact that your institution is making this a priority

QUESTION 5: RECOMMENDATIONS FOR STRATEGIC PROJECTS TO DIVERSIFY EXTERNAL FUNDING

• A strategic project to build the infrastructure for the academic volunteers (a one time goal, not really operational in nature.