The OER Collective Communities of Practice are a key element of the OER Collective model. They are designed to support community and capability building related to open textbook publishing across CAUL Member institutions.
There are two Collective Communities of Practice.
| Community name | Intended for | Focus | Who can join | How to join | Convenors |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Library Staff Community of Practice | All library staff at participating CAUL Member institutions | Developing library staff capacity to collaborate with and support authors who are writing open textbooks | Any library staff member at participating CAUL Member institutions | Sign up for the email list |
Kate Davis |
| Academic Authors Community of Practice | Authors at participating CAUL Member institutions who are writing textbooks for the Collective Pressbooks platform, or who are actively involved in developing open textbooks for publication on a participating institution's own local Pressbooks instance | Supporting authors to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to produce an open textbook | Up to four 'book teams' (ie teams of authors who are writing or contributing to a textbook) per participating institution | View the procedures |
|
Each Community of Practice is convened by a Member of the Open Educational Resources Collective Pilot Project Team with support from CAUL's Director, Strategy & Analytics, Kate Davis.
Each year, the Communities of Practice will have a theme schedule including approximately six key themes related to open textbook publishing. Themes will generally operate for approximately six to eight weeks (five to six weeks in 2022 to accomodate the March start to operation of the Communities of Practice). During each theme
Themes are facilitated by one or more members of the Open Educational Resources Collective Pilot Project Team.
The schedule of themes for 2022 is below.
| Theme | Dates |
|---|---|
| Onboarding | 21 March 2022 to 10 April 2022 |
| Getting Started | 11 April 2022 to 22 May 2022 |
| Copyright and Licensing | 23 May 2022 to 3 July 2022 |
| Accessibility and Inclusion | 4 July 2022 to 21 August 2022 |
| Doing the Work | 22 August 2022 to 9 October 2022 |
| Quality Assurance | 10 October 2022 to 4 November 2022 |
| Celebrating Our Progress | 5 December 2022 to 18 December 2022 |
Each Community of Practice will meet six times this year, approximately every 5 to 6 weeks. Each meeting will have a topic related to the theme and may include a short presentation or training in addition to open discussion related to the topic. The first five meetings for each group will be separate, with a final combined meeting.
Meetings are listed on the CAUL events listing. The topic for each meeting and a link to register is provided for each meeting.
Community of Practice members should register to attend the meetings. For planning purposes, members are encouraged to register only if they plan to attend.
The training or presentation component of each meeting will be recorded and the recordings will be distributed via the relevant Community of Practice email list. To encourage participation and open sharing, the discussion component of the meetings will not be recorded.
In addition to the Community of Practice meetings, discussions will all take place via the email lists and in Slack. Weekly emails and Slack posts related to the current theme will be made by the theme facilitator to help promote discussion in these spaces.
Community members are also welcome to post on any topic related to open textbooks at any stage.
Each Community of Practice operates according to a charter. The charters will be reviewed by the Governance Group in April and will then be finalised.
