About these OER materials – READ FIRST!

Edited by R. Borasi & D.E.Miller

 
This e-book is part of a larger set of OER materials entitled, “Becoming a More Effective Education Change Agent: Learning from Entrepreneurial Educators’ Stories”, accessible through the e-book companion website.  These materials have been designed to increase the success of educational innovations by empowering educators to learn from stories of successful change agents.  The OER format is intended to not only offer free access to these materials, but also to enable users to further contribute to the initial collection as well as adapt selected documents within the collection.

Why stories of “entrepreneurial educators” are important

Being an effective change agent in education takes more than learning specific strategies and skills – it also involves taking on a new identity as an “entrepreneurial educator”. Education and entrepreneurship are often perceived as two very distinct fields, yet being able to initiate and carry out successful innovations is key to the success of entrepreneurs in any field and educators who want to promote change to improve education.

Appreciating the value-added of educational innovations is a critical first step, as to learn how to be a successful entrepreneurial educator you need first to want to become one.  The next step is understanding how successful entrepreneurial educators think and approach situations – what we will refer to as “entrepreneurial practices” throughout these materials.  Examining “lived stories” is a powerful tool to advance both goals, as we can attest based on our experience teaching a semester-long course entitled Entrepreneurial Skills for Educators to over 400 students to date in our institution.

What you will find in this OER resource

This e-book includes:

• An overview followed by a brief introduction to key entrepreneurial concepts of most relevance to educators (Chapters 1-2).
• Reports of the research-based individual case studies of eight entrepreneurial educators, representing a variety of roles and subfields within education (Chapters 3-10). Each chapter includes two components: (a) a “story” section, providing background information about the subject as well as the detailed reconstruction of 3-5 of his/her major innovations, and (b) an “analysis” section, where we examine how that subject dealt with vision, opportunities, risk, resources, and growth – as the most critical elements of entrepreneurial activity.
• The identification and discussion of key entrepreneurial practices, personal characteristics, contextual factors, and types of innovations that could be useful for education change agents to consider, as derived from a rigorous cross-case analysis of the eight case studies (Chapters 11-13).
• The link to a detailed report of the research design and process that we followed to conduct the case studies and their cross-case analysis, for users interested in conducting their own case studies of entrepreneurial educators (Appendix A).
• A selection of additional stories of educational innovations, contributed by students and other users over time, to expand our shared images of entrepreneurial activity within education (Appendix B).
• The “Opportunity Evaluation Tool” we developed to support the systematic analysis of an opportunity for educational innovation, to decide whether and how it may be worth to pursue it (Appendix C).

On the e-book companion website you will also be able to find:

• A complete set of stories of educational innovations contributed by users, together with the stories of featured innovations included in our case studies, with the option to also display an annotated version of these stories that identifies the entrepreneurial practices used at specific stages of the process.
• An annotated list of other resources – books, articles, videos, websites, and other relevant documents that can complement the e-book contents and may be used for specific learning tasks. Links to the actual documents are provided for any of the open-access items within this list.
• A set of learning tasks that can be used to leverage stories of entrepreneurial educators and educational innovations.  All these learning tasks can be adapted as needed, as well as new ones added on by users, in the full spirit of OER.

These additional materials have been intended primarily for instructors and/or mentors who support the development of other entrepreneurial educators, by providing them with resources and insights they could use to design valuable learning experiences for the educators they serve.  However, these online materials can also be used by any educator interested in learning more about the topic, beyond what is included in the e-book.

NOTE: Case studies and stories are open-access but can be used only in non-derivative ways, given their sensitive content. Readers are instead welcomed to modify any of the learning tasks as well as selected complementary resources (as explicitly indicated).

How you can contribute to this OER resource

In the spirit of the “open education” approach we have assumed, we welcome users’ contributions to this e-book and the accompanying website, so that everyone can benefit from this additional work.  Possible contributions may involve:

1. A commentary to any case study or innovation story, that will be linked at the end of the relevant case study/story.
2. An additional resource to be used in conjunction with our e-book and stories, for inclusion in the Other Resources section of the website.
3. A new learning task created to leverage any of the case studies or innovation stories (either by modifying one of the learning tasks already in the collection, or by designing a brand new one), to be included in the Learning Tasks section.
4. An additional educational innovation story, to be included in the website’s Stories section and potentially also in the e-book as part of Appendix B.

To ensure consistency across the collection, we are asking interested contributors to follow the directions and provide all the information detailed in the “Guidelines for Contributions” for the type of item they want to offer.  Any contribution received will be reviewed by the collection editors to decide if and how it can be included.  Authors may be asked to make revisions and/or approve suggested edits before a contribution is included in these OER materials.

How these materials can be used

These materials may be used in different ways depending on your context, audience, and purposes. Feel free to use them as you would for any resource. If, however, you wish for more specific suggestions, click on the scenario that best meets your situation from those listed below:

• Suggestions if you are teaching a higher education course
• Suggestions if you are leading a study-group with peers
• Suggestions if you want to learn about this topic on your own

We also encourage users to take advantage of free tech tools like Hypothes.is and similar annotation apps, to add observations and analysis to our text.  These annotations can remain private and/or be shared among students and/or colleagues in the spirit of open education.

Who created this OER resource

This OER resource has been gathered and edited by Dave Miller and Raffaella Borasi, the designers and instructors of Entrepreneurial Skills for Educators, a course that has been offered at the Warner School of Education at the University of Rochester since 2006.  The publicly available materials included in this resource have been contributed by several Warner faculty and students/graduates as well as other users, over time, as explicitly indicated for each included document.  Short bios for each of the contributors can be found in the Contributors section of the companion website.  

The case studies reported in this e-book were conducted with the support of a grant from the Kauffman Foundation. This project was also supported by a RCL Open Education grant from the River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester.