 Hello, welcome to OER at the Museum. This presentation provides a broad toolbox for involving a local cultural institution in an open educational project based on our experiences at Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum from April 2021 to the present. I'm Chris Given, the Digital Education Coordinator for JPPM presenting on behalf of myself and my colleague Noah Boone, the Digital Education Content Developer. For the last 18 months, we have been implementing an OER initiative at Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum, including surveying practitioners and users, developing content and training others. The process itself, as indicated, is very broad. It's designed to be filled in with your own content along the way. So the bulk of the presentation is about defining these steps and then providing some details about concerns that your museum partner might have based on this experience. We believe that museums and OER go together. Our experience as JPPM got started publishing OER, though, is that museums are underrepresented in the OER community. We know there is an interest in using resources from museums, often at the local level, but sometimes more widely as well. Educators often use visits to cultural institutions to highlight concepts, add engaging components, see real-world examples, or just rely on staff expertise. Since educators and related OER practitioners have the greater experience and more targeted resources at getting started publishing OER, we advocate the use of partnerships as a way to support museums within the OER community. Alternatively, if you are not knowledgeable about OER and are interested in partnering with a museum that is not knowledgeable either, our observations should still help. Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum, or JPPM, is a state-operated park, historic site, and museum in Southern Maryland. The park is open to the public, serves local schools from K through 12, hosts secondary students, and even provides professional education. And it attracts visitors with its green spaces, historic sites, and cultural activities. Our OER initiative began in the spring of 2021 thanks to funding received through a grant from the IMLS CARES Act grants for museums and libraries. For the bulk of our presentation, we'll be covering a relatively simple process that has worked well for us here at JPPM. However, the process is intentionally broad, so you can integrate it with your preferred tools for planning. Rather than giving a full-fledged tool kit, we're providing a tool box with drawers or areas for your preferred tools that you might already be using or for new ones for you to discover. Those areas or drawers are ideation, dialogue, brainstorming, revisiting your schedule, deciding responsibilities, creation, publication, and evaluation. The first step in our process is ideation. This is the time where you consider what resources might result from a partnership or what partners you should recruit to create a given resource. Think about information to give your museum partner. Multiple contacts helped us determine what the classroom setups were like, what technology and devices were being used, what sites were available and which were not. In our tool box, after ideation about the type of OER to result from the partnership and your potential partners, dialogue comes next. In this case, dialogue means the initial conversations with a potential museum partner, outlining the broad goals, probably providing a broad definition of OER and inviting further discussion. Dialogue can easily start with a cold contact or go through previous contacts. Some considerations you may want to include in your initial contact are the overall goal, the time you expect will be needed, and possible expenses or specialized resources. We've used a structure where we conducted the initial ideation, then launched dialogue through email before meeting in person to brainstorm the next step in our toolbox, followed by working periods. The key is to find a balance that works for you between having all the details and providing flexibility. You may have to start thinking about how to justify the value of OER throughout your partnership with a museum. One of the most important things that you will engage with is justifying open educational resources. Here, we've gathered some of the topics that will probably come up at some point. We've grouped them with dialogue even though they're probably a little too in-depth for you to cover all of them. But you do want to start thinking about how you will lay the groundwork to justify to your museum partner that open educational resources are worth engaging in. Some things to specifically cover that we have considered are concerns from the museum, that they already make content free and available online. So how is OER different? You may want to talk about how OER can provide natural avenues for an institution to collect feedback on its efforts. You may highlight that accessibility is not just extra work, including the accessibility facilitated by having proper digital licensing. That museums have a high level of social trust and OER can help maintain that. And finally, that open or free won't necessarily mean cost the museum money. So the first of these is answering the question, don't we already do this? Museums might assume that because they publish content for free online, it's the same thing as open educational resources. As part of our grant, we conducted an informal review of 123 institutions that we took to be similar. The main finding from all this was that an enormous number of institutions, 96 of the 123, published materials without any clear license. Copyrighted materials could also be found in some cases, which were clearly intended to be used, but there were no terms or conditions for their use. Additionally, file formats considered relatively closed were especially common, especially PDFs. To us, this made it clear that museums which are making their content available for free online, with the goal of widespread distribution isn't necessarily engaged in the process of making open resources. There is still a difference, right? Copyright or closed formats like PDFs make the five Rs of OER technically or legally difficult or even impossible. We observed that licensing ambiguity, such as cases where no license is indicated, or where materials are openly available but are indicated as having a copyright without corresponding conditions for use, can be a form of natural deterrent for lawful users, right? For the ones who are unaware of the finer details of licensing who wish to remain lawful or set a good example for students, it could just be less daunting to not use a resource rather than figure out if they can use it. So just because a museum is engaged in publishing content online for free doesn't mean that they're already engaged in creating OER. There are some important differences in the openness revolving around especially the licensing. As the following slides will illustrate, there's also positive reasons for a museum partner to create OER. So first, OER can provide some natural feedback. Your museum partner could specifically benefit from creating OER resources because OER has several natural ways to provide feedback. First, remixing is a form of feedback. While remixes may be done for reasons that are unique to each author, the ability to see how your material has been remixed as is found in some repositories offers the chance to review what instructors are looking for and generalize that for other resources. A clear benefit for a museum partner. Second, analytics of some kind are often available for content published in repositories. So your museum partner might find these analytics more appealing than trying to implement say the full suite of Google analytics to understand how their resources are being used currently. They could allow your partner to see at least how many people have viewed a resource, are saving it or downloading it, just depending on the repository. Plus, the ability to go to a group of existing repository users where there is already a setup and audience that is commenting and rating content is probably more productive for your partner than trying to implement the ability to collect comments on their own website. Just the process of engaging in a partnership with you provides passive feedback for the museum. It can be beneficial in that way. Working closely will allow them to see how full-time educators and formal settings plan content, design it, think about it in general, what it is they're interested in, and so on. While simultaneously creating a resource that the partner can continue to use afterward, while accessibility and licensing best practices can look overwhelming at first, it's important for your museum partner to know that they don't have to be an expert to get started. For your museum partner, these best practices may feel like an extra step or extra work, right? From our experience, the appearance of extra work is only true at first. After becoming familiar with these best practices, you shift from making inaccessible or unlicensable materials that need fixed in a separate step before publishing to creating materials that just naturally incorporate accessible and licensable materials. It's really a shift in thinking rather than some sort of extra step that will always have to be done. There are also good reasons, besides the fact that it's the right thing to do, for a museum partner to make inclusive resources. More inclusive resources help increase the diversity of people who can use and remix the materials, and these may be diverse voices the museum is lacking. In the right repository, any remixes of content are automatically visible and linked, so museums can observe where they can diversify, improvements to make, what folks are interested in, different interpretation of events, and so on. Next, OER can help maintain social trust. So this is a more theoretical benefit to a museum partner. The American Alliance of Museums surveys find that museums are considered almost as trustworthy as family members. They're considered more trustworthy than the local news, national news, and often even more than the government. Now, this trust is distributed along lines of race. Museums have more work to do in that regard, but as a generally trusted institution, museum partners are both out there setting examples for others and are being policed by their potential critics. Learning accessibility and licensing best practices within your partnership will help them continue to set positive examples of both. Alternatives like releasing materials into a public domain lack protections that your museum partner may wish for. On the other hand, copywriting materials is naturally restrictive and as we argue can discourage lawful users even when the copyrighted materials are freely available. The use of licensing schemes like Creative Commons with OER provide some guardrails, encouraging lawful users and providing some protection compared to the public domain and it models good digital citizenship for people watching the museum's activities. Lastly, a bit of personal experience. OER can also provide a friendly introduction to concerns about democratizing educational content. This is a growing area of dialogue for museums so it offers some tangential benefits to your partner in addition to OER's contribution to their social trust. The last specific concern that you may think about justifying to your partner is the worry that publishing materials for free such as OER really means that the materials are costing the museum money because of lost revenue. Obviously this mostly applies to materials that are usually provided to paying educators but we founded a concern even within our institution since OER's purpose isn't to generate revenue, it may have to be part of a larger stable of content to satisfy a museum partner that's worried about this but it could result in increased visits to the museum partner or it fits with a long-term strategy perhaps that could allay concerns about giving away content. Unfortunately these may be solutions that are outside the area of your partnership. Of practical benefit to your partner, content produced in the partnership naturally includes that insight that we mentioned, this allows them to gain more experience with what educators are looking for. OER produced in the course of the partnership might be valuable for that insight alone. Ultimately it's worth distilling the other justifications here as sort of a cumulative case to invest in OER even if there's not a clear immediate financial gain. First that freely publishing materials is often not enough to ensure that they are openly usable and that copywriting them is often too strict. Next that OER will include built-in opportunities for your partner to collect feedback, that accessibility and licensing are not just extra work. Finally that OER will help museums work within the social trust that they've earned. After initiating that dialogue remotely or in person we moved on to brainstorming. This is gonna be a more substantive process that might be where you actually cover some of those previous concerns. We did conduct brainstorming in person after the initial dialogue was conducted via email. Something to think about as you approach brainstorming especially with a partner is that most museums display only a small fraction of their total collection. Items that may not be good for public display may be perfect for open resources. One possibility to try and get a handle on what resources the museum has during brainstorming is to see their collection's space. This is where museums store their artifacts that aren't on display or to try and go through a tour of some space with the potential partner and get some of the trivia of items that are already on display, but stories that may not typically get told can come out, things that make staff personally appreciate an artifact or weird stories which have not been confirmed would all be excellent areas to explore for creating a resource if you don't already have an idea. Given the depth of collections at most museums, the depth of institutional knowledge about those collections, the possibility of discovering hidden curiosities, special access for students in the work resulting from the partnership or the hopefully contagious enthusiasm for museum staff, the museum in a partnership can serve as an educational force multiplier to make content even more engaging, exciting or real. Revisiting the schedule at this point will help you and your partner set a joint timeline and manage your expectations. The next step is related, deciding responsibilities. Our approach is intended to be co-creative. At some point it may become necessary to formally divide responsibilities and assign roles for practical reasons such as scheduling or just to help keep things moving forward without overwhelming one part of the partnership. There are also some natural roles in a partnership that are worth highlighting in particular. If one partner is already well-versed in licensing or accessibility or other areas of inclusion, great. They can help educate other partners by offering constructive feedback during the creation phase. If no partner is knowledgeable, then we suggest having someone take on the role of say licensing czar and this person doesn't need to be an expert or quickly become one, they just need to get a head start in learning about licensing, which they can then use to help guide the other members of this partnership. We especially like this method because any czar's at our museum staff embed that experience in the museum's institutional knowledge after the partnership ends. This is a possible benefit to the museum partner and can help address that concern about free content costing the museum money and lost opportunities. And of course, each partner can learn the details of licensing on their own if that's preferred. Our emphasis is always on organically reaching a working flow, so whatever it needs or whatever it takes to balance your partnership. Creating awareness of your partnership's resources and or advertising its existence are processes that might naturally rest with certain partners. From JPPM's experience in a partnership between an educator or similar OER practitioner and a museum, it's probably natural for the educator to spread word of mouth about the resource to their colleagues. On the flip side, the museum probably has well developed advertising channels such as social media. After deciding responsibilities and setting up roles, the process moves into the creation phase. Creation is the fun part, working together to create the resource. We have a very rough process or a very broad process that we use, but we encourage whatever works naturally. And this process started with identifying a need, something that might already occur as you engage in dialogue with your museum partner during your ideation phase or which may have already been decided during your brainstorming. After identifying a need, our research would look into similar resources further, collecting new information as needed and collecting existing park resources. Planning took various forms depending on the format intended for the final resource. Production was a fairly straightforward process. It's easy to see how this process can be abstracted to fit with our museum partnership toolbox as well. A lot of it might happen just naturally for example, the reviews that we did were necessary because we were converting other staff's work. But in a partnership, the review is probably going to be a natural impulse as things wrap up to compare each partner's contributions and make sure that they align with each other, that they work well, even that the formatting is the same. After creating the resource, you are going to move into publication and evaluation. While publishing can be a simple task, there are some considerations that are probably worth making in advance. So naturally you'll want to decide where you're going to publish this resource. However, you may want to think about who will be doing the publishing? Does one partner have an institutional account that you can use? Would it be strange if each partner published separately? How will you evaluate the resulting resource? Will those evaluations result in edits, in new versions? Or will they just be incorporated into future projects? If they result in edits or new versions and each partner published separately, will you try and reconcile the differences between each copy? Finally, will evaluations be shared between all partners? Because these questions and the decision where to publish are ones that are going to rely on the chosen repository, the sites that are available, for the institution to use, and so on. We really don't have a lot of detail that we can provide here. And we know that local conditions vary. So here we've provided a very basic toolbox to guide your partnership from this very first step of ideation into dialogue, then brainstorming, revisiting your schedule, creation, and finally publishing and evaluation. That you can fill in with the tools you prefer or which evolve naturally as needed. After 18 months of creating OER at our museum, we see that there's a real potential in these partnerships. This is beneficial for educators and practitioners to bring new members into the OER community. It helps gain useful resources and it engages with these local educational multipliers. Museums benefit themselves. They're going to get insight into what you are seeking and what local educators want. They're going to find an environment that's hopefully providing a gentle introduction to some important topics. I wanna thank you for joining me today. I know I have compressed a lot of information into a short period of time. So I am available to answer questions both in the chat on the side here or I am reachable until the end of my grant at least at the email address chris.given at Marilyn.gov. Once again, thank you.