I have had the good fortune of conducting two communities of practice over the last two years on the topic of open education. As you read through the content, you'll see that in some places I've inserted comments about my experiences with these two very different CoPs. I hope that sharing this information will be helpful as you contemplate offering a similar program on your campus.
It's possible that communities of practice or learning communities for faculty are already being offered on your campus. Communities of practice are often organized by whatever unit is responsible for faculty professional development, which might be a Center for Teaching and Learning, a Center for Faculty Excellence, etc. Even if this office does not currently offer communities of practice, they might be willing to help sponsor one.
If communities of practice are already being run on your campus, and you want to work within that structure, then some of your design decisions may have already have been made for you because of the way that program is run. Questions about length, stipend, the nature of the deliverables, etc. may be pre-determined or may need to be made within certain parameters. So this is an important question to answer early on.
At TAMU-CC, our faculty professional development unit is called the Center for Faculty Excellence (CFE), and this center has been a co-sponsor for both of the communities of practice that we have done on open educational resources. This has been a great partnership for us, because the CFE has handled many logistics, allowing the facilitators to focus on the content and running of the community of practice experience.
But what if communities of practice or learning communities are not "a thing" on your campus?
One idea might be to do a few workshops on open educational resources for faculty, and at those workshops ask them if they would be interested in a longer-term, more in-depth engagement with the topic. Approach OER adopters on your faculty and ask if they would want to share what they know about OER with colleagues. Reach out to your faculty professional development office and ask whether they've considered offering communities of practice. They might be happy to get on board. Just because there's no pre-existing structure for offering a collaborative learning experience like this doesn't mean you shouldn't start one!
You'll need to develop learning outcomes for the community of practice. You could go about this in several different ways.
1. You could develop learning outcomes on your own, based on your knowledge of OER and your goals for the experience.
2. If you require that faculty submit an application or proposal to join the community, you could develop learning outcomes based on some of the comments the faculty share in their proposals. In the second community of practice that we did, I added an additional outcome relating to creating OER because several faculty mentioned in their proposals that they were interested in that aspect.
3. You could spend part of the first community of practice meeting hammering out learning outcomes together. This approach can be empowering for faculty, but also means that you will be designing some of the community of practice content and activities after the program has already begun, which could be a logistical issue.
If you don't have experience crafting learning outcomes, you can get a lot of good suggestions from various online sources, or maybe seek support from your campus's Teaching and Learning Center.
What do you want to ask faculty to produce to document the learning they experienced while participating in the community of practice? You have many options. Here are a few suggestions:
- Nothing: being there was enough (probably not workable if there is a stipend)
- Self-reflection: What did you learn? What difference does it make to your teaching practice?
- Course redesign: one unit or whole course
- White paper / report (collaboratively authored): What are OER? What would be the argument for incorporating OER at your campus? What would be the challenges? etc.
As with the CoP goals, you could also let the faculty decide the deliverable at the first meeting, but you might need to provide options to choose from, particularly if you are paying a stipend and want to be sure the activities suit the remuneration.
One of the decisions you will need to make when offering a community of practice is what medium you want to use for your meetings. Do you want to meet face-to-face, online or some combination of both?
Unsurprisingly, there are advantages and disadvantages to each approach.
Face-to-face meetings may initially seem the approach with the lowest barriers, but do require the organizer to find locations, find a time that works for all participants, and arrange other logistics. On the other hand, it is perhaps easier for participants to form social cohesion as a group and in-person meetings also allow conversation, brainstorming and other interactions to happen naturally.
Online communities of practice have their own strengths, such as being potentially more convenient and more flexible. An online community can sometimes level the playing field among participants, allowing everyone to have a say in discussions, even those who might be less likely in engage in person. However, an online community of practice will have its own logistical concerns: you will spend more time designing the online content and activities carefully to facilitate an online learning experience. You'll also need to determine which communication channels you will use, whether you want to try to hold synchronous online meetings, and what form the final deliverable will need to take to serve its purposes in an online context.
Finally, a community of practice can be both online and in person. You might have some faculty participating face-to-face and others online. This approach can allow the social bonding of the in-person community of practice for those attending face-to-face while offering the flexibility of online. Speaking personally, I did this the first time I led a community of practice and it almost felt like two different communities. Feedback from the faculty participating online suggested that they felt isolated and disengaged compared to those who met in person.
Another hybrid model would be to have a couple of initial face-to-face meetings with the rest of the CoP happening online. To be effective for everyone, the online and face-to-face experiences have to both be fully-featured and delivered successfully in both contexts.
Should you offer your community of practice for a semester, or for a full year or even longer?
This decision is partly determined by your goals. If you are expecting faculty to redesign a course or even a component of a course, you might want to run the community of practice for a full year. We ran our first community of practice for a year; this gave faculty time to redesign a course unit, deliver the material and assess the outcome before reporting back to the group at the end of the year.
On the other hand, you may just want to have faculty get together for some co-learning without requiring a redesign project. In this case, a semester-long community of practice might be preferred. Our second CoP focused solely on learning about OER, without the extra work required to actually implement OER in the classroom, so this was a one-semester experience.
In short, to answer this question, look at your learning outcomes and ask what length of time would be appropriate to achieve your goals.
Deciding who will facilitate may be based on whether your institution has a community of practice program and what the norms are for that program.
In both of the CoPs that I've participated in, I (a librarian) have served as a facilitator in conjunction with a teaching faculty member. In the second CoP, the faculty member had been in the previous CoP and was a strong participant in that cohort so they were well-prepared to assume a leadership role in the next one. In our case, the facilitators reviewed applications, developed a CoP syllabus, managed each of the meetings and performed other coordinating tasks. The facilitators received the same stipend as participants.
Other institutions may use different models, in which, for example, the CoP participants themselves handle facilitation as a group, or use no facilitator at all. I would, however, recommend that any CoP on OER involve at least one person who is already conversant with OER who can advise on content and potentially participate as a discussant, even if they are not facilitating.
Stipends
The ability to offer a stipend to faculty to participate in your community of practice is an important recruitment strategy. It also signals to faculty that the experience and the topic are important, and encourages faculty to remain engaged with the community of practice so that they can receive the funding. Funding for stipends might come from your faculty development office or it might come from Academic Affairs or some other campus unit.
Application Process
Depending on your CoP goals, you may or may not need to have an application process. An application can help faculty focus their thoughts on what they will be expected to do for the CoP and hopefully result in a pool of faculty who are genuinely interested in learning more about OER (at least) and maybe even be prepared to tackle some course redesign as a result of the CoP experience. If you are working with your faculty development office they may have an application process in place that you will need to follow.
If you are planning to have faculty do a course redesign project, the application becomes more important, because some courses will be more easily redesigned to incorporate OER than others. If upon reading the proposal you suspect that there might not be much OER material for the course, then you have an opportunity to contact that faculty member and discuss potential obstacles.The application can also suggest topics that could be addressed in the curriculum for the CoP.
Marketing
You will have to market your CoP to get faculty to apply.
What kinds of marketing materials should you create?
Marketing materials could include posters, flyers, postcards or emails. You could also try to get your community of practice included in appropriate newsletters or announced at important meetings.
How do you communicate with faculty?
You probably have some channel through which you can email all faculty, but email can be an unreliable way to connect with some. You can also target specific faculty that you think might be interested and ask them for recommendations of others to contact, or ask them to share with colleagues. You may already know of a core group of people who are interested in OER; hopefully you've created a mailing list of the attendees at all of your open education events! Make sure they hear about the CoP.
Take advantage of your faculty professional development department.
They will probably have really good insight into what works with marketing opportunities like this to faculty. If they are helping to sponsor it, they may just handle all of the marketing themselves but you can still consider whether you have some leads you can use to get the word out as well.