7 Training
One thing you shouldn’t assume when running an OER creation sprint is that everyone will know what an OER is, or how copyright works, or what author’s rights are! This means that training is in everyone’s best interest, in part to ensure that you’re all working from a common understanding of a definition, and that you mitigate potential for a final product that is uneditable, or worse, at risk of copyright infringement.
We’ve found that running training at the beginning of day 2 does work to provide a very brief overview, but have recently opted to begin sending our training asynchronously, using a “flipped classroom” approach. This allows our participants and experts to take their own time to go through the training materials and to formulate any questions or concerns they may have prior to the commencement of the sprint. These can then be answered through email or in a brief Q&A period at the start of Day 1. These training materials are also then reusable and can be adapted to fit a variety of contexts. If you notice that your entire sprint participant group is made up of librarians, maybe you can spend less time on copyright. If you’ve got a host of folx who are OER experts, maybe less time can be spent on the slides explaining what an OER is.
This is also a great opportunity to leverage existing content and workshops. If you’re part of a consortium or organization, it’s entirely possible that someone out there has created an introductory set of materials that are available for free (we certainly have, and you’re welcome to adapt, consult and use our resources).
Our introductory training session covers, very briefly, OER basics, copyright, and open licenses. When running a fully bilingual sprint, we’ve created two breakout rooms that participants can self select, titled with languages, and let participants select which section they’d like to join in to. One facilitator can run the session in English, with the other running it simultaneously in French. The sessions then came back together for a bilingual Q&A. Questions can then be translated and answered as needed, to ensure a common understanding.
If you’re sending the training portion before the session, it may be useful to compile a quick FAQ doc, if you notice that your participants are always asking the same questions. Or, better yet, update those training materials based on that user feedback!
Our bilingual training document will be added here shortly!