Why adopt an institutional policy? As Green et. al., (2018) says, “Well-crafted policies that reflect institutional priorities while providing support for faculty will increase the acceptance and use of OER and will help scale OEP.”^[1]. We have found this to be true at SAIT.

The SAIT Policy

As was mentioned in the previous section, SAIT adopted one of the first institutional OER policies in 2018. The creation of the policy was seen as essential to the wide-spread use of OER at the institution.  At SAIT, the institution has ownership of and rights to most works created by its employees within the scope of their work. Therefore, it was necessary for the SAIT Board of Governors to adopt a policy that allowed assignment of an alternative open license, as well as provided guidance for OER creation.

The current SAIT OER policy addresses:

• Licensing
• Intellectual property
• Responsible parties
• Selection and evaluation
• Technology such as hosting and authoring tools

The policy, procedure, and evaluation rubric can be found on SAIT’s public website.  Some highlights from the current policy include:

• OER use is not mandatory but is preferred whenever possible.
• OER use is appropriate where materials are of equal quality to commercial products. Evaluation of OER can be completed using the rubric included in the policy.
• OER can be adopted verbatim, adapted and modified, or created from scratch.
• The SAIT Intellectual Property policy (AC.2.11) still applies, so OER creation is determined by the Academic Chair and/or Dean in consultation with the author.
• The author/subject matter expert is responsible for applying the correct Creative Commons licence to OER based on the previous licences.
• The CC-BY licence is the preferred licence for OER at SAIT, unless exceptional circumstances are identified.
• OER may need to be posted back to repositories, based on the open licence assigned.
• OER best practices should include accessibility & technology considerations.
• CADI, the Library, and the Copyright Officer can provide training and support for authors and Academic Chairs who are working with OER content.