OER Storytelling Project

From OER Commons Wiki

Contents 1 Why Share Your Story? 2 Storytelling Template 2.1 Project Basics 2.2 Key Insights and Learnings 2.2.1 Creating Awareness and Support For Open Educational Resources 2.2.2 Collaborative Content Creation (Peer Production) 2.2.3 User Feedback and Testing 2.2.4 Use and User Engagement 2.2.5 Financial Sustainability

Why Share Your Story?

This storytelling framework seeks to assist OER projects in documenting and sharing key developments in the creation, use and reuse of open educational resources. By using the template to tell your story, you can help to build capacity for inquiry and information sharing across projects worldwide, which can in turn help your own as well as other projects to:

• Learn how other OER projects have overcome similar challenges and fulfilled similar needs;
• Improve networking so that relevant learnings and opportunities can be identified and leveraged;
• Use unique experiences and expertise to help other OER projects and to advance the field at large

Storytelling Template

Project Basics

1. What is the title of your project?
2. When was your project started (month/year)?
3. What is the URL/website address to your project?
4. Where is your project based?
5. Why was your project initiated? (What need was it trying to meet?)
6. What key goals have you set for your project?
7. How are you progressing towards those goals and how are you measuring the outcomes? (e.g. specific metrics, creating case studies, etc.)
8. How do you think your project fits into the collective goal for OER? (In other words, what do you see as the "grand idea" for OER and how does your project fit into that idea?)
9. What three keywords best describe your project?

Share your own project basics by answering the above questions on the Share Your Stories page.

Key Insights and Learnings

Creating Awareness and Support For Open Educational Resources

1. Please define your project's key stakeholders and partners. (e.g., teachers, institutions, funders, content partners, etc.)
2. What steps has your project taken to create awareness of and/or support for your project among key stakeholders or partners?
3. What challenges has your project faced, if any, in creating awareness of and/or support for your project?
4. What were the key success factors for your project in securing awareness and/or support from stakeholders and partners?

Collaborative Content Creation (Peer Production)

1. In your experience, what factors best facilitate the collaborative authorship of resources? (Division of labor structure for work groups, choice of online platform, iterative process of content creation, feedback and review, etc.)
2. Please describe the workflow process that your project uses for collaborative content creation.
3. What technology structures or solutions does your project use to support the collaborative content creation process?

User Feedback and Testing

1. How are your users defined?
2. How have you incorporated user feedback and testing into your content creation process? Please describe.

Use and User Engagement

1. What have you learned about how users are engaging around your site, its tools and/or its resources?
2. What factors help or hinder their engagement and use?
3. What steps has your project taken to ensure that content remains relevant, usable and/or adaptable to local teaching and learning needs?

Financial Sustainability

1. What have been the key funding-related challenges for your project?
2. What opportunities and challenges exist for sustaining your project going forward?
3. What factors impact the willingness of funders/partners to contribute to your project?