Distance Learning Campus Outreach: Bringing Scholarly Commons to Residential and Online Campuses Across the Globe

Abstract

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU) is an institution with 2 residential campuses: 1 in Daytona Beach, Florida and one in Prescott, Arizona. ERAU also has a Worldwide presence through 125 campuses located on military bases and within the private business sector. The ERAU Worldwide Campus doesn’t stop with physical locations, however. It encompasses an online campus with virtual learning opportunities. The degrees offered through all of our campuses range from certificate programs through doctoral studies. The Scholarly Communication Team is located on the Daytona Beach campus. One of our challenges is to bring the intellectual output of all of our talented faculty from around the world into the ERAU institutional repository, called Scholarly Commons. In order to do this, we need an outreach plan which will capture the attention of our faculty members on our distance learning campuses and explain the benefits of participating in Scholarly Commons. To this end, we’ve begun to promote Scholarly Commons using a multi-format outreach strategy. We seek partners from within the distance learning faculty communities to help us show why faculty should participate in Scholarly Commons. This presentation will describe the processes we have tried and others we will be putting into place to educate our faculty on how they can use Scholarly Commons to organize and pursue research, tenure, and promotional activities.