Office Hours: Tenure and Promotion in OER
Channel: Rebus Community
Date: 2019-11-26

The special guests at this month's session of the Rebus Community and Open Textbook Network Office Hours were Mark Poepsel (Associate Professor, Department of Mass Communications, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), Jaclyn Stewart (Senior Instructor, Department of Chemistry; Deputy Academic Director of the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver), and Jonathan Poritz (Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics and Physics; Director and Data Analyst, Center for Teaching and Learning, Colorado State University – Pueblo; Chair Emeritus, Colorado OER Council, Colorado Department of Higher Education).

Incentives play a big role in academic work, and adequately rewarding OER creation can sometimes mean leveraging existing incentive structures. This month, we continued our exploration of compensation models by looking at tenure and promotion, one of the most significant incentive structures at many institutions. In this session we explored how OER could be integrated into tenure and promotion guidelines, how it could feature in an individual faculty member’s application, and why, perhaps, we shouldn’t worry too much about it at all. Our guests shared their experiences as OER advocates navigating a system designed with other priorities in mind, and helped inspire their peers to consider how OER work might combine (or not!) with the pursuit of tenure at their institutions.

The audio transcript of this session is available on the Rebus Community website: https://about.rebus.community/2019/11/26/november-office-hours-tenure-promotion/

Looking for resources to help OER creators and contributors have their work recognized as part of a tenure and promotion review? Keep an eye on the Rebus Community platform: https://www.rebus.community/t/office-hours-tenure-and-promotion-in-oer-21-november-2019-2pm-et-6pm-utc/1848