Open Education Resources (OERs)

You have put a lot of work into creating/adapting your OER. It's important to develop a marketing and promotion plan to share what you have done to ensure that it is used broadly. To promote your OER, you will need to develop a plan of activity. In traditional publishing models, marketing and promotion are completed for authors. For open education, however, you will need to get the word out there yourself about your resources. This page gives some tips on how to promote your OER.

Audience

• Identify your key audience. This is especially important for textbooks where those who select the book for course use may not be the one who uses the book during the course. Depending on the audience, you might have to develop separate marketing plans or different messages depending on the audience

Timelines

• Work backwards from your target release date to distribute workload and allocate time for tasks.

Message

• You do not have to wait until your OER is complete to send out messages about the upcoming resource. There are several different milestones you can share along the way to your final product. You can share content updates (e.g., completed chapters, sections, etc.); information about team members behind the work; aspects of inclusivity, accessibility, and diversity in your concept, content, and design; and engage with new ideas and opinions to connect with relevant, current discourse. The important part of your messaging is to tell your story honestly and transparently.

Promotional Spaces

• Once you have shared your OER in an online environment (e.g., open education repository, catalogue, etc.), you will need to promote it. Word of mouth is always a good place to begin as a grassroots method has the potential to gain authentic use of your resource. Additional promotional spaces, such as social media and listervs, can bring an international community to your work.

Ensuring your OER reaches the intended audience is a crucial part of the publishing process. Indeed, if TRU or a granting organization is funding your activity, they may want to see that their investment is justified via extensive usage of the resource by the intended audience. This section outlines potential open access distribution channels to support usage of your textbook.

Metadata

• Before distributing your OER, you will need to develop a standard metadata structure. Metadata is structured descriptive information that describes your information object. This information will be used when you uploaded and share your textbook in different platforms.
• Be sure to decide on the terms of use. Do you want to release your work under a Creative Commons licence or in the public domain?
  • Creative Commons Licence: You retain ownership while allowing others to use your work under the terms that you have selected based on the licence you choose. They still need to "attribute" you, but they don't need to ask your permission directly
  • Public Domain: You waive your copyright ownership because you are basically giving your work to the public as a gift. Users may still cite you when adopting your work, but they don't have to.

Projects, Organizations, and Catalogues

• Share the news about your resource with your discipline's various information channels. Think about presenting your project at conferences related to your field.
• Ask open textbook projects and OER organizations to spread the word about your resource. It is common practice for these groups to monitor communication channels for new open textbooks so they can let their networks know. Below are a number of OER organizations in Canada in the United States. In addition, you can reach out to open-education organizations in English-speaking countries outside of North America, such as the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
• Sharing your resource in a catalogue provides you with greater visibility for your work.  With traditional publication processes materials are entered into a database or catalogue by either publishers or libraries as a part of the process of making materials accessible. Making open texts and resources accessible is often dependent upon the creator of the material. Working with open textbook publishers and organizations (e.g. BCcampus, OpenStax) may provide you with an avenue for sharing your resources.

Canada

United States

OER Repositories

While there are several ways to share your OER once you have created and licensed them, posting them to an Open Educational Resource Repository is a great way to increase the accessibility and audience for your materials. Many repositories will also archive your materials to ensure they are available long-term. By submitting your work in multiple repositories, it increases the chances that it will be discovered by educators and researchers looking for openly licensed content in your field.

Many collections allow authors to submit requests for their work to be included. Some repositories require that the resource meet certain criteria, such as an evaluation by a subject-matter expert. Here are a few examples of where you can apply (depending on the type of OER that you have created):

Additional high quality OER Repositories can be found via the "Find Images, Videos, and More" tab of this guide.

TRUspace Institutional Repository

TRU Library has an institutional repository, TRUspace, which is TRU's open access digital repository for published and unpublished material created by the TRU community and its partners, including faculty, students, and staff. TRUspace is designed to showcase and preserve TRU's unique intellectual output by making the content freely available to anyone, anywhere via the web.

Sharing your work in TRUspace provides the following benefits:

• Support for submitting and indexing to make your content easily find-able.
• Indexing in high-profile search engines such as Google, as well as academically focused search engines and collections such as Google Scholar and OAIster, making it quick and easy for scholars and others to find your work.
• Archiving of your work for the long term.  TRUspace provides permanent URLs so the links to your materials will remain the same over time.

TRU Library Systems

If you've created an open textbook, one of the easiest ways to share your open textbook is to have it made available through library systems. TRU Library will work with you to get your textbook added to our Discover search tool.