Scaling in the Open [O-092] Members : OER20

Group Admins

Public Group Active 4 years, 7 months ago

Thu, Apr 2 2020, 2:00pm – 3:00pm

Authors: Meredith Fierro

Room: Ultra 2 (Webinar)

Theme: Criticality and care in open education

Type: Reflective practice presentations – 20mins

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Description

Session Description

Web hosting is one way to facilitate Digital Literacy growth. Owning your own space online offers users a wide range of tools, like WordPress, Omeka, Scalar to name a few. Reclaim Hosting is one web hosting company that offers students and educators an easy way to build a space online.

Through traditional means of learning in the classroom, often users are stuck within platform constraints. Reclaim Hosting works to break these barriers by offering an easy to use platform, where users can break the restraints through these programs students and educators, are able to begin exploring the web through their own lense.

But like learning a new tool, it can be daunting. This is where Reclaim Hosting differs from other web hosting companies. We strive to “teach a man to fish” when it comes to web tools and web hosting by supporting our customers and community first and foremost. Through programs like Domain of One’s Own and our Shared Hosting offerings, the support team is able to support a community of more than 8000 Shared Hosting users, and over 150 institutions in the open.

Using tools like Discourse for a community forum (Reclaim Hosting Community, 2019), we provide a space for users to be able to learn with their peers and foster learning. The forum offers the standard forum environment for users to discuss and help troubleshoot issues collaboratively, how-to guides that Reclaim manages, as well as in-depth guides curated by community members like Paul Hibbits, Alan Levine, and Tom Woodward on topics from Using Github and Grav to SPLOTs and WordPress Multisite .

Through Domain of One’s Own, these communities continue to grow and collaborate, amongst different institutions. For example, John Stewart, from the University of Oklahoma uses the community forums to be able to create a documentation site that’s easily shared amongst other administrators, further supporting the DoOO community. Other DoOO schools have taken our initial documentation (Stateu.org, 2019), rebranded and expanded it to fit their needs (Domains.byu.edu, 2019), then expanded the reach of our support by sharing it with other schools.

In addition to the support from the community, Reclaim’s support agents and sales team are on the front lines to building a relationship with users that focus on teaching first rather than a transactional relationship. This is accomplished with support agents, working with the user to fix any issues, then walking them through the process towards the solution. Within the sales team, through onboarding videos (Brumfield, 2019), landing pages (Landing Page, 2019), and in person workshops, help reinforce the ‘teach a man to fish metaphor.’

These are just a few examples of where Reclaim Hosting is able to create and foster an open community that’s centered around empowerment and learning and continue to scale the community in the open. In this 15 minute presentation along with a short discussion (about 5-10 minutes), Reclaim will continue to define how users can start to build these communities themselves and maintain them to continue to grow naturally.

References

Brumfield, L. (2019). Onboarding for DoOO. [online] Labrumfield.com. Available at: https://labrumfield.com/onboarding-for-dooo/ [Accessed 7 Dec. 2019].
Domains.byu.edu. (2019). BYU Domains Help. [online] Available at: https://domains.byu.edu/help/doku.php [Accessed 7 Dec. 2019].
Unomaha.community. (2019). Domain of One’s Own Landing Page – For unomaha.community Admins. [online] Available at: http://unomaha.community/dooo-admin/ [Accessed 7 Dec. 2019].
Stateu.org. (2019). DoOO Community Docs. [online] Available at: https://stateu.org/docs/ [Accessed 7 Dec. 2019].
Landing Page, D. (2019). Domain of One’s Own Landing Page – For State U Admins. [online] Stateu.org. Available at: https://stateu.org/dooo-admin/ [Accessed 7 Dec. 2019].
Reclaim Hosting Community. (2019). Reclaim Hosting Community. [online] Available at: https://community.reclaimhosting.com/ [Accessed 7 Dec. 2019].

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