Thank you for serving on the Workforce Advisory Board for the Open Curriculum Project! This board advises authors and instructors about current workforce needs to improve our openly licensed textbooks and courses. Please read Unit 0 for an introduction to the entire project.

Workforce Advisory Board members receive a stipend of $500 per year, for two years, for completing this training and the reviews described in this unit.

This module is intended to supplement synchronous training sessions that take place once per year of the project and introduce the review activities to be completed by the Workforce Advisory Board. The sessions will include time for questions and group discussion. They will be recorded for Workforce Advisory Board members who need to catch up afterwards.

Purpose of the Workforce Advisory Board

The Workforce Advisory Board is made up of individuals with an interest in the training and employability of others in your field. In particular, we hope that you’ll increase the relevance of our open curriculum to current workforce standards and needs. A major contribution of the Workforce Advisory Board is to advise on practical scenarios or contexts to include in the curriculum. With your input, real workplace stories can be developed into chapter spotlights or course assignments. This will enable students to practice with scenarios that they might encounter when working in this field. Your relationships with co-workers, clients, and organizations, as well as your methods of problem-solving and addressing challenges or failures, can all inform your feedback.

Wherever possible, we invite Workforce Advisory Board members who are underrepresented in their field, including self-identified people of color, people who identify as LGBTQIA+, and people with disabilities. This helps us develop a curriculum that is representative of the workforce communities that students will join. We invite you to reflect on how power and identity function in your field. If you are comfortable disclosing stories or examples about how your own field or workplace has succeeded or failed at ensuring inclusion and belonging, please feel welcome to share in your review comments.

Review Process

Your role is to help authors and instructors identify connections or gaps between the curriculum and your current workforce landscape. Unlike performance reviews, this feedback isn’t about evaluating individuals – it’s about improving curriculum quality. Since these textbooks and courses are still in development, you are contributing to meaningful revisions before publication.

During Year 1 of the project, Workforce Advisory Board Members review one textbook planning document. During Year 2 of the project, Workforce Advisory Board Members review two course assessment packages. We ask that you take no more than 4 hours per review. We will share these materials as Google Docs so that you can read them online or print them out. We can print out the materials and mail them to you if you don’t have a printer.

We will send you a Google Form with questions that will help you to summarize and focus your overall feedback. Authors and instructors don’t receive your form responses directly. Instead, the Developmental Editor and Instructional Designer will compile your feedback into a report that will guide their revisions.

Optionally, you can also use the comment tool in Google Docs to leave additional feedback directly in the documents you review. Your name will be connected with your comments in the documents. Multiple reviewers, and the author team, will access this document, and we invite a conversation in this space.

The most effective review feedback will be both direct and specific about where the material is incomplete or unclear. For example, in a previous review, one Workforce Advisory Board member asked why students were required to use social media for a final project. They pointed out that navigating social media was not a requirement for most jobs in their field. In response, the instructor added an explanation about how the use of social media in the assignment met critical thinking and collaborative problem-solving learning outcomes. This made the purpose of the project more transparent to students and helped them relate their coursework to the professional field.

In addition to being direct and specific, keep in mind that comments that are wholly negative or wholly positive don’t give our team members much to work with. Instead, use constructive feedback (sometimes called the “sandwich” method):

1. What works well
2. What could be improved
3. A specific suggestion for improvement

Community Guidelines

Workforce Advisory Board members are expected to follow the Open Oregon Educational Resources Community Guidelines [Website] when participating in the review process. Please read the guidelines below carefully.

Open Oregon Educational Resources provides a supportive environment in which to learn about open education. This community values equity, fairness, accessibility, empathy, and thoughtfulness. All community members are expected to exercise consideration and respect in speech and actions, which may look like…

• Use welcoming and inclusive language.
• Hold your opinions with humility.
• Use “I” statements to speak from your own experiences.
• Ask before sharing someone else’s story or comment.
• Make space, take space: if you speak a lot, let others speak; if you haven’t spoken up, try to contribute.
• Remember that it may not be possible to maintain confidentiality in an online environment.
• If you overhear or observe language or or action that expresses, reinforces, upholds or sympathizes with any form of systemic social domination, please consider interrupting. Suggested wording for “calling out” and “calling in”: Interrupting Bias: Calling Out vs. Calling In [Website].

If you have questions, comments, or suggestions regarding these guidelines, or need to report a community guideline violation, please contact the Project Manager.

Licenses and Attributions for Workforce Advisory Board Role and Responsibilities

Open content, original

“Workforce Advisory Board Role and Responsibilities” by Open Oregon Educational Resources is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Open content, shared previously

“Community Guidelines” by Open Oregon Educational Resources is licensed under CC BY 4.0. This statement was adapted with permission from Guidelines for Respectful GSA Spaces by GLSEN.