One thing that came up in my OE Global 2020 workshop on Drawing Eyes and Building Awareness Around OERs was that some people thought the sharing and marketing of the open educational resources we create is the responsibility of the institutions we work for. While this is a nice idea, if you work for an institution, it is flawed for a number of reasons:
you know your end users better than the institution
just because you work for a big institution with a marketing department, does not mean the marketing department understands how to digitally share your open educational resources with your intended audience
the institutionâs marketing department may not be aware of your open educational resources or have any interest in spending time sharing them
For these reasons and more, it behooves you as a content creator to learn how to share your open educational resources in a way that will draw attention to them, so that they might reach your desired end users.
With this is mind, I invite people to share their strategies in drawing eyes to the OERs that they create in this discussion thread.
I also ask if there is a hashtag that we might wish to start in helping each other share our OERs and educate about what OERs are? One hashtag that was suggested in the OE Global 2020 workshop was #openfirst.
In getting started, here is a webinar on reaching your desired audience through search engine optimization: Open Education Week
And here is a list of open educational repositories for sharing and finding open educational content:
Thanks for launching this discussion topic here, Erica.
I agree I not leaving this to an institution or another department, that you as creator and the person closest to the OER can represent it best. Thatâs not to say they canât help amplify.
But I also wonder too if âgetting eyesâ is really the goal we want to pursue? We create OERs first to meet our needs, we use it. Sharing it as an OER creates the potential for reuse, but to me thatâs always a secondary side benefit. Otherwise I think thereâs a tendency to slip into what might look as self-promotion.
And I think also there might be a factor of the size, granularity of what we are talking about an OER, should be be thinking about them universally from an image to a full course as the same? This gets to Wileyâs Reusability Paradox (back when what they were talking about were âlearning objectsâ. My openly licensed flickr photo get the most reuse of anything I have created, because they are smaller and specific itâs much easier to reuse.
But that is not the ask.
I think thereâs more to sharing by putting into a place where it can be discovered, thatâs almost like a Field of [Sharing] Dreams dilemma. My own suggestions of whatâs important (and my experiences likely do not map to everyoneâs).
Be visible as reusing other peopleâs content in your own work.
Be active in communities, networks related to your topic. Not just to share your part, but contribute by sharing ideas, giving feedback.
Share it only the thing, but how/where you use it. Itâs easier to understand reuse when you see it in context.
Write and share about the ideas behind your content, how it was made. Okay for many people blogging is dead, but the most valuable practice for me in getting my work found has been writing back stories in my own site. Telling the stories behind our work is as important, to me, than the works themselves. And it helps me think more deeply about it. My dead media metaphor is DVDs. Yes, I enjoyed watching the feature, but my favorite part were the extras- the behind the scenes, rewatching with director commentary, outtakes, location notes.
Iâve learned not to expect the reuse, or that eyes on it will happen, but the more I actively share and be part of different communities, with time it can happen. I am creating the potential energy for it, But itâs not guaranteed, just a rewarding bonus, not the reason I âmake and share stuffâ I create because it fulfils and energizes me.
The âgetting eyes to itâ has nothing to do with ego or self-promotion, Alan, but rather everything to do with getting the content we create in the hands of others who can make use of it. I spend a lot of time helping and seeing others create wonderful stories and educational pieces that often never reach their desired end user, as they donât know how to share their content and make it easy for that desired audience to find it. That is my goal here, is in starting a conversation to change that, and help each other find our own paths forward with that.
Erica, apologies for that poorly worded statement. Nothing in your description suggested self-promotion, that is more of a reflection of how I would hate to be seen that way myself. My Freudian slip slipped!
I thought of another compelling reason to have more eyes (and hands) on your OERs â when others apply, reuse your works, often they use it ways or add ideas you never thought of when creating for your own purpose. You get ideas, feedback that can help you improve the original work. I find this happens a lot for my coding projects, but can see it could work the same for OERs.
No worries, Alan. It actually represents a bit of a problem that a lot of people need to overcome in sharing their OERs - re not knowing how to share the content they create and fear of doing so, as theyâve tied it up in their head as being self-promotional. Helping teach other people how to share their content and working with a team has helped me disassociate the notion of self-promotion from our work, as if I am not able to get our work to our desired end users, then I am letting my team down.
In my observations, this is a bit of a problem in the OER community as a whole. People are creating useful things that others could be utilizing and remixing, if only they knew they existed. But often they are just shared with a small subset of people and no further beyond that. This is where the idea of a hashtag campaign would be useful in mobilizing people to share each others content in a broader way.
This is one of the things Iâve been really enjoying about my experiments as of late in the web monetization and Grant for the Web Community. The community recognizes that if they are going to educate the broader web on web monetization, they need to collectively come together and amplify each otherâs voices and content around. As a result it is turning out to be a lovely supportive community in which we are all learning about each otherâs work.
Now that I donât have busy work day and meetings looming over me, I am diving deeper into all that you have shared here, Alan.
Having a chuckle that it is those flickr images of yours that get repurposed the most. Yeah, Iâve found the same thing. In part, I suspect that is because those items require the smallest amount of engagement, but images are also things that people regularly look up, and flicker has made it easy for people to find those images through a Creative Commons search.
Awesome suggestions. They echo what I share with my students in our niche community building unit. Something that a lot of people seem to struggle with though until they find those vibrant communities that make those concepts click, like what I am finding at present in the web monetization / Grant for the Web community.
As for âblogging being deadâ in my humble opinion that is just blow hards trying to sound cutting edge and futuristic. Books arenât dead, radio is not dead, TV is not dead - rather we just might all access these things in slightly different ways with slightly different names from podcasts to streaming sites.
Love your analogy on the behind the scenes content and directorâs cut on DVDs in terms of your writing and blogging on the process and the how. Creating content like that is not going to die, as it is useful and helps others through their creative processes.
Yeah, you are hitting on one of the beauties in sharing educational pieces there, Alan. Back in my natural and cultural history interpreter days, that is exactly what I loved about the Interpscan Conferences. Weâd share, build, and alter each otherâs ideas in interesting and creative ways. While that community predates Creative Commons licenses and they donât use the term âopen educationâ, what they were doing is still the pinnacle example of open education for me.
I just discovered a comment on one of our mini open ed courses that really demonstrates why it is so important that we share and help spread OERs. Simply put, if we share them, they can help other people.
