Stephanie Robertson is an Information Literacy & Faculty Outreach Librarian as well as an Assistant Professor at BYU-Hawaii, and Emily Bradshaw has been teaching in the English department at BYUH for fifteen years. Together, they presented at Open Ed 2021 a ten-minute recorded session entitled “Faculty Adoption of OER through Compatibility and Relative Advantage Training.” They are both adjunct faculty and were interested in learning more about overcoming barriers to the adoption of OER. They cited Rogers 2003 and relative advantage & compatibility as factors affecting change. Bradshaw spoke about the 5R training designs from Kimmons 2016: day one focused on retain; day 2 was revise, r remix, and re-use; and day 3 was redistribute. This research was on training K-12 teachers. Kimmons identified persistent barriers to the adoption of OER. Robertson and Bradshaw used the Coup Framework from the Open Education Group to backward design their training. They aimed for 10-15 participants and a Saturday workshop. They organized their training on the relative advantages and compatibility and addressed cost, outcomes, use, and perception. Following the workshop, they will provide one-on-one workshops. Robertson described some of the details of the intervention and the iWork program at BYU-Hawaii. In the iWork program, students are employed in the Polynesian Cultural Center. Robertson also mentioned using EdTech Books that I learned about today. Robertson and Bradshaw explained how they would assess the workshop. The diverse international student body at BYU-Hawaii will benefit from the instructor training. Robertson explained that they will provide support for participants. I am learning about how workshops and professional development opportunities are implemented and assessed. I thought it was really interesting that they used two different frameworks to design their study and workshop experience, including 5R and Compatibility/Relative advantage.
