Engaging Public Interest Stakeholders in Open Education | Camille Thomas | SPARC

"For many of us, the primary stakeholders that come to mind for open education include students, faculty, librarians, bookstores and textbook publishers. It might even be easy to think of additional stakeholders at the campus level—distance learning, registrar’s office, etc. When my library is working on OER initiatives, these are the stakeholders we think of too.

However, we don’t often enough think about open education stakeholders beyond the academic community. There are actually many more potential stakeholders that work on public interest issues. For example, when I talk to friends in the nonprofit, community organizing, media and labor fields, they see open educational resources as relevant to their interests and concerns. However, they don’t always know that libraries, universities and information organizations like SPARC (as well as Wikimedia, Creative Commons, etc.) have been working on these initiatives for years. Nor do they know that open education is an international movement. There is much more we can do to engage these potential allies.

During my fellowship at SPARC, the focus of my work is to build and strengthen SPARC’s relationships with public interest and social justice organizations in order to expand the open education movement outside the primary academic stakeholders. A major goal of this project is to keep librarians at the forefront of these initiatives as conduits who are organized, knowledgeable and collaborative. My work will focus on engaging four main stakeholder groups: Labor ...Media....Community Groups ....Student Groups..."