How to get everyone on board: Open Education policy, practice, and support

In this session, we explore the individual building blocks that devise an applied Open Education strategy at a Higher Education Institution. We aim to show that singular efforts such as a policy paper alone are not enough to anchor Open Education at a university. Instead, multiple building blocks, such as policies, workflows, support measures, technical infrastructure, staff qualification, and promotion are required to implement a comprehensive Open Education strategy that advances the use of Open Educational Resources (OER). Many target groups, such as teachers, administrative staff, or IT departments, have to be included in this process. Using the University of Graz (Austria) as an example, we demonstrate how the successful development of all these building blocks can look like and present our steps taken and lessons learned during our process of implementing an all-encompassing Open Education strategy. This includes a new central OER contact point with new roles such as Open Education Manager and new infrastructure like an OER repository. To offer the participants the most valuable take-home messages, we want to put an emphasis on two building blocks, namely OER workflows and OER trainings. For the former, we will present step-by-step processes and guidelines that can help with the development of one’s own OER workflow. For the latter, we present our Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) “OER nutzen und erstellen” that can be used freely by everyone and our pedagogical concept for an enriching blended learning staff training programme that supplements the MOOC. By showing the deliberate emphasis that the University of Graz is putting on Open Education, we hope to be an inspiration for other institutions to follow the vision of providing quality education that is equitable, inclusive, open, and participatory for all.