The application form for this program will be accessible only to UNM employees.
Before you submit your documents, consider meeting with the OER Librarian for a consultation or attend an informational session.
You can also receive program updates by sharing your email address and joining our mailing list. We'll keep you informed of OER initiatives and events at UNM!
Scoping and Workflow
As with any project, OER projects are subject to scope creep — meaning that the goals of the project can grow or become blurred by the excitement of what we can do with OER. For this reason, it is recommended that a project manager or a project lead keep track of progress and not be afraid to push new features or extensions of the original project into a second development cycle. We can do many things with OER, but we need to accomplish the original goals first. First build the foundational content for your book or course, then take off and fly.
The chart below aims to simplify the process of a large-scale OER project. Consult this chart to help determine the length of your OER project timeline.
(Click on image to expand.)
Priming
This is the first phase of identifying a timeline and workload for your OER project. Here you can ask key questions about your potential adoption, adaptation, or creation. Once you have completed a basic training or consultation and have performed a cursory search of content that may work for you, you can move onto the next phase.
Pre-production
Before any direct work on content is done, we need to get organized. This means defining the project goals and creating the planning documents you’ll need to manage the process. The linked Timeline Template is a good start for you to organize the work of your project.
The more attention you give toward planning your project the better, and you should use management documents and tools you and your collaborators are familiar with. It is at this point that a call for volunteers (contributors, copyeditors, reviewers) can be sent out if your project would need such support to be successful. Continue in this phase until the necessary resources are secured and commitments have been gathered from collaborators.
Scoping
This phase is the last step before you get our hands dirty with OER. It is here that we flesh out any outlines for the content and confirm major planned revisions of existing OER you have found for the project. If media development (image/video editing, visual design) is a planned need, scoping this work is done here. During this phase you should also determine where you would like your finished OER project to live. Before leaving this phase, you should have a clear idea of both what you are building and how it will get done.
Development
This phase is the real meat of the OER production process — and the most time consuming. It is here that we take existing OER (if applicable) and move it into a shared editing environment to ease the collaborative development of it. The content will go through a feedback loop where new content is added, comments and clarifications are made, and the changes are revised by the collaborators. Commenting, track changes, and annotation can facilitate this process well, depending on the software used to develop content. As an example, UNM uses Microsoft Sharepoint and Teams for collaborating in the cloud.
Publishing
This is the final step in the process of adapting or creating OER. It is at this point that we select the final publishing platform to be used, which for bookish OER would likely be the New Mexico Open Educational Resources Consortium (NMOER) Pressbooks platform but maybe something as simple as a website or course inside the LMS. If print-on-demand and advanced typesetting are needed to complete the project, they are done in this step.
UNM has developed it's own Faculty Guide to support your learning about OER, where you will find information about Adopting, Adapting, & Creating OER Materials.
OER Adaptation and Creation: Scoping and Workflow by Jennifer Jordan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Based on a work by William Meinke at Benchmark: Scope an OER Adoption or Creation.