A "community of practice", as it was first envisioned by Etienne Wenger, is a group of people who share an interest or passion and who come together to explore that interest, extend their knowledge of it and potentially solve problems collaboratively. Originating in the corporate world, communities of practice were quickly adopted in k-12 and higher education contexts.
Particularly in higher education, teaching can be a very isolating profession, and it is easy to become siloed in one's own department or discipline. Experiences like the community of practice have been shown to be an effective way to pursue faculty development in a cross-disciplinary, cross-curricular fashion.
Open educational resources and practices are an excellent example of concepts that can be explored effectively through a community of practice. Although the emphasis is often on the ability of open educational resources to ease the financial burden of college for disadvantaged students, these resources can also improve student classroom performance by ensuring all students have equal access to educational materials, something all faculty can appreciate. Open educational practices provide a means of improvement of teaching and learning that is relevant to faculty in any discipline. Open education is a field with complexities that need to be explored in a focused way over time to be mastered, and also one which can feature an almost infinite variety in application. Thus the community of practice approach which, unlike a workshop, lasts over a number of weeks and also features built-in interdisciplinarity seems to lend itself to professional development in this area.
The terms "community of practice" and "learning community" are somewhat conflated these days. While there are distinctions that can be made between the two terms, I have seen both used to describe the same thing: faculty coming together to advance their understanding about or improve their performance in teaching. Also, when doing literature searching, I have had success with both terms. I am using "community of practice" because that is what we call these faculty development experiences at my institution.
A community of practice can be helpful in addressing some of the barriers which exist to involving faculty in an OER initiative. These barriers may include a lack of understanding of core OER concepts, the benefits of OER for both students and faculty, and/or copyright and open licensing. Also, traditional textbook publishers market heavily to faculty, and this model may be the only one faculty have ever known. They may need to see how a class can be done differently, and investigate this new territory along with their colleagues, to begin to feel safe in exploring this space. You may run into faculty skepticism or outright hostility which may never be completely dispelled but which might be countered by making faculty work in open educational resources more visible.
There are several ways a community of practice can help:
1. Faculty learn from each other and benefit from being in conversation together. They also love learning, and can be attracted to a co-learning opportunity like a community of practice.
2. Faculty need help maintaining momentum on a learning project. Just like their students, faculty can benefit from being held to account by a structured learning opportunity.
3. Faculty are busy. The community of practice leader can help them learn something new by removing some of the logistical elements to the learning process.
4. Faculty benefit from opportunities to see pedagogical issues through an interdisciplinary lens. A community of practice can provide that, and can broaden faculty perspectives on OER by showing the application of these resources in other instructional contexts.
5. Assuming that you can offer a stipend to faculty for participating in the community of practice, the stipend becomes an incentive to counter one of the common concerns of faculty which is spending time and effort on OER with no additional reward for their efforts.
6. Once faculty have been induced to interact with open educational resources in your community of practice, they may well decide to adopt OER or at least question the traditional textbook model they have followed in the past. At the very least, even if they cannot adopt OER themselves, they will know more about OER and can point to successful examples of its use from among their colleagues.