Faculty Communities of Practice on Open Educational Resources - a Toolkit

Keeping the CoP moving forward requires frequent communication to keep everyone on track. For example:

- Regular emails with reminders of meetings, deadlines, deliverables

- Announcements in the online platform (if you are using one)

- Use of Outlook Calendar invites

- Possible individual meetings to help faculty as needed

I also like sharing news and tidbits about developments in the field of open education with my CoP participants, usually via email. By doing this, I'm not just sharing information. I'm sending the message that I consider them my colleagues in the open education space, which they have entered by virtue of joining the CoP.

Even if you are planning to do a face-to-face CoP, you might still want to consider using your university's course management system or some other online platform to facilitate information sharing.

The online platform can be used to communicate important announcements, provide a platform for discussion, gather resources together and organize them in such a way that they are most useful for the participants, and allow faculty to showcase their work for their colleagues in the course.

At my institution we use Canvas, and here is a quick video walking you through the layout of our online course for the most recent CoP that we offered.

You should give some thought as to how you are going to run whatever meetings you might be planning for your community of practice, whether you will be meeting in person or online.

Some questions to consider are meeting content, activities, technology needs, and facilitation.

In terms of meeting content and activities, here are some thoughts and questions to consider:

• Will faculty have "homework", or will you cover all material in your meetings? In my experience, having the faculty engage with material outside of the meetings contributes to more robust discussion and question-asking.
• If you're having faculty cover material on their own, then you'll want to possibly plan a couple of questions based on that material for conversation starters.
• Plan plenty of time for questions and discussion in every meeting. The more time faculty spend talking with each other, the better.
• Consider involving the faculty in presentation of material. We did this in the second CoP that I facilitated and I really liked the result. Faculty are intellectually curious and self-motivated learners. They are accustomed to responsibility. Having them teach each other puts them in a mode they are comfortable with and gives them an opportunity to take on the presenter role rather than just being presented to.

Technology needs include presentation capabilities as well as possibly the ability to stream a meeting to offsite attendees or record for watching later. There will be times when faculty might be traveling to conferences or out sick; think about whether you can provide some way for them to experience the meeting even if they can't attend in person.

Facilitation considerations would include: who will run the meetings, particularly if you have co-facilitators. It might be good to define roles or responsibilities, even if it's only casually in the minutes before the meeting starts, just so everyone knows who is doing what. As the facilitator, you might also have to respond to skeptical or confused faculty during the course of the meeting or afterward if that seems more appropriate. If it helps, remember that the purpose of the CoP is for faculty to learn more about OER, not for you to successfully proselytize them into OER champions (although that would be nice). So some skepticism is okay and can add spice to the conversation. The facilitator's role is not to argue necessarily for OER as much as it is to help the participants to learn about OER and make a space in which they can discuss the concepts as well as pros and cons with each other.

How will you know if your community of practice achieved your goals? You'll need to do some assessment.

It's a good idea to have your assessments figured out in advance. The final deliverable is one opportunity for assessment and should be designed carefully for that purpose. Can you determine from the final product of the community of practice whether the faculty learned the key points that you were trying to share? What else can you learn from their deliverables?

For example, after the first community of practice that I helped facilitate, I could tell from the final projects that the faculty had not learned how to reliably identify an open educational resource. But from their final presentations, I did learn that three of them had come to realize, after exposure to OER and open pedagogical approaches, that the textbook which they had always assigned was superfluous and could be eliminated altogether. So while my learning activities failed to teach the 5Rs effectively, the CoP experience did open some of the participants' eyes to assumptions they had been making about the necessity of an expensive textbook in their courses. Another possibility for assessment could be incorporating formative assessments like quizzes into an online CoP via the course shell in your LMS.

A satisfaction survey at the end of the CoP is another example of an assessment that you should consider. You can use this survey to find out how the participants felt about aspects of the community of practice such as:

• quality of the content
• design of the community of practice experience
• use of technology
• whether the outcomes were useful

I've provided a link to a Google Doc which is a copy of the assessment I used for the two CoPs I've done. It is the standard assessment form used by the Center for Faculty Excellence at TAMU-CC.