Mapping the European OER Ecosystem

A key part of the ENCORE+ project lies in taking up and sharing different stakeholder perspectives. Perhaps there is no single correct way to think about these groups as there are many ways to divide up a large base of stakeholders (and potential stakeholders). But I think it might be of interest to share how our models have shifted in response to interactions with ENCORE+ communities and elements of the wider OER ecosystem.

Our original stakeholder models were written as part of our grant application. Stakeholder engagement is an essential part of many education projects (Rogers et al., 2022) and our stakeholders have always been foregrounded in the vision for the project: for outreach, piloting ideas and testing technologies but also as the ultimate recipient of our efforts. One of the central assumptions of ENCORE+ is that these stakeholder communities are in a fragmented state and would benefit from better coordination and integration. The ENCORE+ Circles concept is based around identifying, sharing and coordinating between already existing communities of practice, with our original Circles reflecting communities organised around technologies, quality, policy/strategy and innovation & business models. Various intregration events, white papers and position papers that will be produced by ENCORE+ are intended to create artifacts that reflect the distinctive interests of these groups.

Earlier in the year we blogged about the activities that can be included in ENCORE+ face-to-face workshops and stakeholder mapping is a part of this. One activity we have used with success is to show our division of stakeholder types to audiences and invite them to tell us if they think a type is missing. Suggestions then get added to the list and incorporated into the taxonomy.

Below is the latest version of this list of stakeholder types which is the one we are currently using for this activity and to inform our overall understanding of relevant stakeholders. The categories that we apply to this schema come from the way that this is presented in our original scoping.

Education HEI leaders, decision makers Learners (formal/informal) Educators Libraries / Collections / Repositories Instructional Designers / Technologists Copyright / Data Officers

Business Course providers Ed Tech companies Service providers Workers Infrastructure providers Publishers

Policymakers Educational authorities Ministries Public bodies Quality assurance agencies Charities / NGOs (macro/micro) Funders / Philanthropy

While iteratively expanding and enriching this stakeholder list is a valueable activity, there is also a need for our stakeholder models to be manageable and applicable for different tasks and activities within the project. As more stakeholder types are identified it becomes necessary to select subsets or simplify the categories so that they can be applied.

For instance, in the Innovation and Business Models work package we are currently collecting data for a collection of case studies detailing innovation with and through OER. One of the questions asks about the impact of a case on different stakeholder types, and it isn’t really practical to ask about all of these types individually. So a more streamlined version of our stakeholder model is useful in a range of circumstances: data collection; analysis; dissemination and feedback.

When it comes to simple, universal stakeholder models there aren’t that many to choose from. At one level this might be thought surprising since stakeholder analyses are so commonplace. But then again, the value of mapping stakeholders is usually to capture the specificity of a set of groups or communities. A further complication here is that the ENCORE+ ecosystem is comprised of many overlapping and indiscrete communities (rather than the more clearly defined stakeholder groups that might be relevant to a particular business or sector.)

Getting the balance right here can be a challenge. Miles (2017) for instance offers a generalised list of 15 abstract types but this is hardly fewer than our original mapping (and the categories are also too complex to be easily conveyed). As we simplify our model(s) we risk losing granularity and meaning.

One option for a universal, simple stakeholder account is known as the ‘UPIG’ model – where the acronym stands for users, providers, influencers and governance. The provenance of this approach is not super clear since it seems to originate with the defunct Office of Government Commerce and a lot of the original materials are no longer online. However, it is widely used as an approach to stakeholder analysis nonetheless, and presents a concise set of universal categories.

The UPIG model is used in our current OER Innovation Study as a way to capture data about the impact of projects and OER implementations on different groups.

We can cross reference our stakeholder mapping with the UPIG categories, as shown in the table below.

Users	Providers	Influencers	Governance
Learners (formal/informal) Educators Instructional Designers / Technologists Workers	Libraries / Collections / Repositories Course providers Ed Tech companies Service providers Infrastructure providers Publishers	Funders/Philanthropy Charities / NGOs (macro/micro) Lobbyists Leaders	HEI leaders, decision makers Copyright/Data Officers Educational authorities Ministries Quality assurance agencies

This kind of meta-categorisation allows us to use something simple like the UPIG categories but still draw on the richness of the full mapping. There is always going to be a trade off between pragmatism and completeness in this kind of categorisation exercise, and we trust that we will continue to calibrate our understanding of the ENCORE+ stakeholders as we move into the consolidation phase of the project.