3 Stakeholders

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the chapter, learners will:

• Explain why it is important to identify stakeholder groups
• Identify different stakeholder groups at your institution and determine what kind of data would be most meaningful to share with each group

Introduction

Stakeholders are individuals and/or groups who have an interest or investment in OER at your institution. Along with setting goals for data collection, identifying stakeholders can help with flagging data likely to be of interest.

Identifying Stakeholders

The more a stakeholder group will be materially affected by the proposed project, the more important it is for them to be identified, properly informed, and encouraged to participate in the consultation process. It is therefore critical to determine who the various stakeholders are, as well as their level of interest in the project, the potential impact it will have on them, and power they have to shape the process and outcome. You might start by brainstorming or mind-mapping all the stakeholders you can think of. Likely stakeholders for a campus OER project include:

• Students and student associations
• Instructors and academic departments
• Faculty senate, staff associations, or unions, if relevant
• Teaching and learning centres or instructional designers
• Executive administrators
• Campus bookstore
• Librarians and library staff
• Administrative staff such as financial aid or accessibility office

Identifying Topics of Interest to Stakeholders

Because the needs of your stakeholders should drive your decision-making in an OER program, start with these needs when determining what type of data you want to collect. You can do this by looking at each stakeholder group for the program and determining a list of critical questions that your key stakeholders will ask, based on your knowledge of these stakeholders’ interest or in direct consultation with them as appropriate.

Stakeholder Example: Executive Administration

• How much in textbook cost avoidance have you saved students over the past academic year?
• How many students has this program affected?
• What are the savings numbers for last semester?
• Has the implementation of OER affected student retention at a course level? A degree program level?
• Has the implementation of OER affected student success? Is this effect larger for first-generation students?
• How long should we expect savings to continue due to one award? Do instructors turn to commercial resources after a certain period of time? Why do they, if so?
• How do instructors feel about OER? Does that differ by department or if they’re teaching introductory / advanced courses?
• Do students think that the cost of materials is an important thing for our institution to address?

Stakeholder Example: Instructors, Instructional Designers

• Has the implementation of OER affected student success? Is this a same-instructor comparison, or an aggregate of all instructors?
• Has the implementation of OER affected student success in the College of Arts and Sciences?
• Has the implementation of OER affected student success in our IT degree programs?
• Which textbook is used most for Concepts of Biology?
• How do students feel about the OER materials they’ve used?
• Do enough of us know about OER to get started with implementation? How do faculty feel about OER once they get to know it?

Stakeholder Example: Students and Student Government Associations

• We are looking to support the implementation of OER campus-wide. Which faculty already are adopting OER?
• If all of our World History I sections had no-cost OER instead of commercial textbooks, how much would this save students over the next academic year?
• Is a student who takes an OER course in Electrical Engineering at our technical college more or less likely to be hired directly after graduation?
• What’s keeping our instructors from adopting OER? How can we help with any barriers they’re facing?
• How do students feel about OER once they’ve used it?

Stakeholder Example: Campus Stores

• What percentage of students on campus are interested in a print-on-demand program for OER?
• Do bookstore employees know about OER? What do they think about it?
• What do students think about our new low-cost mathematics platform?
• How are students performing due to our new low-cost psychology adaptive platform?
• If we do a print service for open textbooks, what percentage of students in the course would want a printed textbook?

Stakeholders may be involved in contributing data. For example, instructors may self-report adoptions, or the bookstore can request that open textbooks be included when instructors inform the bookstore of what textbooks are assigned to a course.