Before you begin to design your training, it is important to research who your audience is, and understand their needs, priorities, timeline and content gap areas.
Example:
My training audience is 15 faculty and three library staff who are working together to integrate open textbooks for an Introduction to Biology course next Fall. They want to engage students with digital content and help meet some of their accessibility needs.
Once you have an understanding of your audience’s needs, you can start to identify what your learning goals and outcomes are.
Example:
My goals are to ensure the participants have a basic understanding of OER and open educational practice, and to support them in finding, evaluating and curating at least five OER for their courses.
Consider the following elements as you determine your training approach:
Example:
Training will consist of a three hour face-to-face event in computer lab, and a one hour virtual follow up meeting. There will be a mix of presentation and collaborative group work to practice using the tools for OER search, evaluation and curation.
Now you are ready to create your training agenda. It should include all of the activities that will take place, with descriptions and time needed. Use the OER Training Design Template to get started in creating your agenda.
Consider ways to provide participants with support to plan and implement their OER work.
Example:
Participants will be given a planning document to help them organize what next steps they need to take to adopt OER for their courses. A virtual follow up meeting will be offered three months after the training to share updates on everyone's OER work, and to discuss their successes and any challenges they have encountered.
Inspire your training participants by showing examples of what high quality OER looks like.
As part of your training, try to identify examples of successful OER use cases, and show how they connect to the needs of your audience.
In this video, faculty discuss how their adoption of open textbooks in their courses impacted their freedom to innovate, and their ability to meet student learning outcomes through iterative refinements to core materials.
Video from Lumen Learning. licensed under CC BY.
You can also download the Faculty Members' Experiences Using Open Educational Resources video transcript.