Developing discipline-specific and Collaborative OER communities AKA “An OER Community for my Discipline”

Abstract

Collaboration is a key feature of open educational resources, but it requires a lot of coordination to develop discipline-specific communities to collaboratively author, create ancillaries, and meet up to discuss practices that are working well. This summary was created in the context of multiple round table discussions hosted by the author at the Open Textbook Network Summer Institute (OTNSI) 2019 in Minneapolis, MN. The moderator was aiming to answer the questions: Are OTN folks interested in developing discipline-specific and collaborative OER communities, and if so, what have OTN people already done in this area, what barriers are there, and how could we build on existing communities? The summary includes a description of the proposed roundtable discussions, a link to the invitation video, guiding questions utilized in the discussion, a description of the brainstorming process (definitions and "sticky note" prompts), two levels of findings: by question and overall, and questions for further discussion. Public release of this summary information was approved by Virginia Tech's IRB #23-366 in March 2023.