Stronger Together: Building Cross-Campus Partnerships

Encouraging an OER partnership to begin as and ultimately remain a grassroots effort is critical to its continued success. Programs and partnerships at Millersville University that are led by faculty and staff initiatives and not administrative directives gain more recognition and active participation than an optional participation program. At Millersville we have been highly successful in our partnership efforts to collaborate with administration on OER adoption. Our OER implementation started out with a group of faculty and staff representing a variety of content areas and roles joining together to support their own efforts at OER adoption. That initial group eventually expanded their work to recruit additional teaching faculty to adopt or create OER materials for their courses (or both). The administrative team at Millersville has been vocally and financially supportive of this OER adoption movement and at the same time recognizes the need to remain as hands-off as possible. Their encouragement comes in the form of financial and administrative support to provide professional development funds for faculty to adopt OER texts and participate in the Open Textbook Initiative (OTI) program.