Open Educational Resources Advocacy Toolkit

Your OER advocacy action plan provides you with a step-by-step structure to help you achieve your goals for promoting the use of OER within your institution and in higher education more broadly. With the goal of gaining support for greater OER use in educational institutions, you need an effective plan to communicate to key stakeholders the message that your OER activities have significance. An OER advocacy plan will keep you on track to convince those with influence to make the changes needed to promote the use of OER. Your plan can be a living document that you revisit as you review the results of your advocacy activities and refine your advocacy strategy.

'OER Advocacy – Create an Action Plan for OER Advocacy' in the CAUL OER Advocacy Toolkit by CAUL, licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence, adapted from OER Advocacy Plan Worksheet by SPARC, used under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

• What OER project, behaviours or actions do you want to inspire?

• What is the process for actualising these goals? Where are the critical steps in the process that will make or break your success? Key steps may include securing funding or permission for a project.

• Which decision-maker(s) have the power to advance your proposal at the critical step(s)? Write down who they are and why open education might be important to them.

• When do you intend to start your project or idea? How does this fit within the school year or institutional planning process?

• Who or what influences your decision-makers? Be creative in thinking about what arguments, information, people, stakeholder groups and relationships might help convince decision-makers to support your project.

• What is your approach to getting decision-makers to support your project? Strategies may include demonstrating support for the project from the campus community or actively getting leaders on campus to persuade decision-makers.

• What specific actions will you take to execute your strategy? It might help to make a process list, like setting up a recipe. Think about how your decision-makers can be reached and the many different types of influencers.

• Use this section to outline how you will talk about your initiative with people outside of your project group. You'll likely have multiple audiences and it's a great idea to develop a communication plan for each one.

Adapted from the SPARC OER Advocacy Plan Worksheet by SPARC, licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.