Marketing Plan Considerations

Marketing Plan Considerations

  • Audience: Identify your key audience. This is especially important for textbooks where those who select the book for course use may not be the one who uses the book during the course.
  • Timelines: Work backwards from your target release date to distribute workload and allocate time for tasks.
  • Message: You do not have to wait until your OER is complete to send out messages about the upcoming resource. There are several different milestones you can share along the way to your final product. You can share content updates (e.g., completed chapters, sections, etc.); information about team members behind the work; aspects of inclusivity, accessibility, and diversity in your concept, content, and design; and engage with new ideas and opinions to connect with relevant, current discourse. The important part of your messaging is to tell your story honestly and transparently.
  • Promotional Spaces: Once you have shared your OER in an online environment such as open education repository, catalogue, and so on, you will have to promote it. Word of mouth is always a good place to begin as a grassroots method has the potential to gain authentic use of your resource. Additional promotional spaces, such as social media and listervs, can bring an international community to your work.

Spaces to share your OER

  • Use communications support in your institutions
  • Provide accessible feedback tools (e.g. survey, contact form, etc.), so that communication can be two-way
  • Notify your professional association and related organizations
  • Get the word out early and often, using different channels:
    • blog posts
    • social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.)
    • listservs (in your discipline and across communities)
    • email signature
    • conferences
    • webinars

Distribution Channel

Ensuring your OER reaches the intended audience is a crucial part of the publishing process. Indeed, if a granting organization is funding your activity, they may want to see that their investment is justified via extensive usage of the resource by the intended audience. This section outlines potential open access distribution channels to support usage of your textbook.

Metadata

  • Before distributing your OER, you will need to develop a standard metadata structure. Metadata is structured descriptive information that describes your information object. This information will be used when you uploaded and share your textbook in different platforms.
  • Be sure to decide on the terms of use. Do you want to release your work under a Creative Commons license or in the public domain?
    • Creative Commons License: You retain ownership while allowing others to use your work under the terms that you have selected based on the license you choose. They still need to "attribute" you, but they don't need to ask your permission directly
    • Public Domain: You waive your copyright ownership because you are basically giving your work to the public as a gift. Users may still cite you when adopting your work, but they don't have to.

Projects, Organizations, and Catalogues

  • Share the news about your resource with your discipline's various information channels. Think about presenting your project at conferences related to your field.
  • Ask open textbook projects and OER organizations to spread the word about your resource. It is common practice for these groups to monitor communication channels for new open textbooks so they can let their networks know.
  • Sharing your resource in a catalogue provides you with greater visibility for your work.  With traditional publication processes, materials are entered into a database or catalogue by either publishers or libraries as a part of the process of making materials accessible. Making open texts and resources accessible is often dependent upon the creator of the material. Working with open textbook publishers and organizations (e.g. BCcampus, OpenStax) may provide you with an avenue for sharing your resources.

3.7.1.6: OER Repositories

While there are several ways to share your OER once you have created and licensed them, posting them to an Open Educational Resource Repository is a great way to increase the accessibility and audience for your materials. Many repositories will also archive your materials to ensure they are available long-term. By submitting your work in multiple repositories, it increases the chances that it will be discovered by educators and researchers looking for openly licensed content in your field.

Some repositories require that the resource meet certain criteria, such as an evaluation by a subject-matter expert. Here are a few examples of where you can apply (depending on the type of OER that you have created):

3.8: Making OER Accessible

Making your OER accessible, this means making sure that people of all abilities can access your content. The time to think about accessibility is when you are starting an OER project. Will the tool or platform you choose to create your OER help you to create an accessible resource? What actions can you take to serve users with all types of abilities?​



آخر تعديل: Tuesday، 3 May 2022، 8:29 AM