Communication & Evaluation

Key Points

Communication

• Plan for a significant level of effort around communication – internal and external, proactive and reactive.
• Expect much initial misunderstanding of the OpenCourseWare concept among faculty and among external constituencies.
• Engage senior leadership who can make an important contribution by championing OpenCourseWare.

Evaluation

• Start with a clear conception of what you want to measure, and why. This will crystallize your evaluation strategy and methodology.
• Measure Access (who is visiting, from where, and their profiles), Use (what they are using it for, and how), and Impact (what difference is makes).
• Internally, measure process efficiency and faculty satisfaction.

OpenCourseWare is a new concept and will require a strong focus on communication and outreach from the outset.

Internal communications will most likely need to focus on building understanding of and support for the OpenCourseWare concept, while external communications will need to focus on building awareness among target audiences and groups.

A large part of the communications effort is dealing with user feedback and questions.

Evaluation is important for two essential reasons:

• Tracking the usefulness and usability of OpenCourseWare, and the efficiency of your publication process, will help you to identify and implement improvements to features and services, and will inform longer-term direction to keep your OpenCourseWare relevant over time.
• Measuring the use and demonstrating the impact of an OpenCourseWare helps ensure continued engagement of key stakeholders.

We recommend early planning for evaluation and measurement, including determining the appropriate metrics to measure, and tools and processes to implement, so that these can be built into your OpenCourseWare design from the start.