OEGlobal 2024

Most Australian universities are in the nascent stages of developing open educational practices (OEP). A wave of progress has been made in recent years due to a national push to develop the foundations for open educational resource (OER) publishing. It has been useful for Australian open advocates to draw initial lessons from the U.S. and Canada who have made significant advances. However, as OEP takes root in Australia, it is becoming increasingly urgent to consolidate the insights gained from our region to support locally specific strategies and solutions.

Accordingly, our presentation provides a longer term retrospective from the rearview mirror. We share insights from La Trobe University’s mature open education model that can be applied to further advance the whole Australasian OEP community, recognising that open is everyone’s business. We focus on ‘big picture’ lessons from our early adopter investment into OER initiatives a decade ago (Salisbury, Julien & Loch, 2023). We discuss strategies for resolving “Gordian Knot” challenges (seemingly unsolvable problems) faced by all institutions establishing the foundations for OEP in Australia.

We propose that these ‘wicked problems’ and our evolving solutions for them are best understood through five interrelated themes:

1) Open education poses a uniquely amorphous challenge precisely because of its essential feature: openness. The fuzzy nature of open is its greatest strength, but it creates problems like staff burnout, lack of sustainable funding, conceptual confusion, and nebulous project boundaries. We illustrate how clear vision can minimise these problems, and how it is best gained *through* OEP rather than ahead of it.

2) The Australasian open education movement faces a paradox. We need to quickly develop more localised OER to build a strong and relevant resource base to drive adoption. However, if we do this hastily, we risk normalising a mechanistic ‘factory line’ approach to generating OER as objects abstracted from practice. This would deprive us of the rich OEP that are key to unlocking the power of OER in the first place. We argue that resolving this paradox requires us to strongly prioritise ‘process as pedagogy’ and reflexive open practices, drawing from both our experiences and the 8 Aboriginal Ways of Learning (Kalantzis & Cope, 2006).

3) These reflexive open practices are embodied by educators who see themselves as active open practitioners. We argue that making this sustainable means enabling practitioners via purposeful institutional support, such as integrated academic capability development programs that scaffold reflexive practices in a foundational way.

4) Open practitioners, when they engage in reflexive open education, generate open artefacts that support academic reward and recognition.

5) The Australian higher education environment disincentivises open educational practices through many barriers. However, the combination of #3 (developing open reflexive practitioners in a scaffolded way) and #4 (practice-based generation of open artefacts) creates a powerful force that realigns OEP with academic incentive systems.

We conclude by integrating these five themes into actionable recommendations for institutions and teams relevant to all countries and situations where ‘wicked’ barriers exist to advancing OEP.



Included in [Session 7C]: Open Publishing - the Australian Experience

References
Kalantzis, M., Cope, Bill, & Cambridge books online. (120AD). Literacies. Port Melbourne, Vic.: Cambridge University Press. Salisbury, F., Julien, B., Loch, B., Chang, S., & Lexis, L. (2023). From Knowledge Curator to Knowledge Creator: Academic Libraries and Open Access Textbook Publishing. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 11(1). Whitchurch, C. (2012). Reconstructing Identities in Higher Education: The rise of 'Third Space' professionals (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203098301

Author Keywords
Open access publishing, Open educational practices, Open education policies and strategies, Open textbooks, Open practitioners, Culturally responsive OEP, Scholarship of learning and teaching, Academic reward and recognition, Third Spaces and Third Space professionals, OEP sustainability

As academic librarians we recognise that open is everyone’s business. Academic librarians are essentially open education practitioners, well positioned to represent staff and students in their academic journeys and mindful of the cruciality of equable access to knowledge.

As members of educational organisations and academia we are not the only consumers of educational research and outcomes. Open education ensures that those outside our institutions, including those responsible for policy and information provision, have access to timely research. It also supports collaborative research without restrictions on a global scale.

In 2024 Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Library launched its new Open Press. QUT Open Press offers support and guidance to QUT staff and students to publish open textbooks, open journals and other open educational resources. This initiative brings together the diverse knowledge and skills QUT librarians and research staff offer to improve access to educational resources. We posit open scholarship and open access in terms of maximising the sharing of knowledge across the entire research lifecycle, encompassing open access to research publications, open data, open educational resources, sharing of code, protocols, and other relevant research outputs.

But how did we get here? QUT has operated comprehensively in the open access space for several decades now. An institutional open access policy, believed to be the earliest university-wide open access policy in the world, was endorsed in 2003. QUT’s institutional open repository (QUT ePrints) was launched in the same year mandating the provision of author accepted manuscript versions for all peer reviewed articles published by staff. In 2004 QUT committed to the Creative Commons Project and in 2010 utilised open-source publishing software to host a number of open access academic journals. In 2016 the first institutional OER policy was approved. QUT Library continues to support a range of national and international open access advocacy activities with active membership in national organisations like Open Access Australasia and Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). QUT also supports a range of other open access initiatives including a research data and software repository and a suite of OER. Most recently, in 2023, QUT’s open access policy was updated to incorporate a ‘Rights Retention’ element based on the Plan-S initiative.

QUT Open Press represents more than a shop front for Library services in relation to open scholarship and open education. It is representative and inclusive of a long-term and broader body of activity, practice and advocacy developed with whole-of-institution support. QUT Open Press is open for business.



Included in [Session 7C]: Open Publishing - the Australian Experience

References
Open Access for QUT Research Outputs (Including Theses) Policy / Document / MOPP. (n.d.). Retrieved May 16, 2024, from https://mopp.qut.edu.au/document/view.php?id=177

Open Educational Resources Policy / Document / MOPP. (n.d.). Retrieved May 16, 2024, from https://mopp.qut.edu.au/document/view.php?id=148

Author Keywords
open access publishing, open repositories, open textbooks, open scholarship, open access

The CAUL Open Educational Resources (OER) Collective, an initiative led by the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL), has been leveraging the power of networks within university libraries in Australia and Aotearoa / New Zealand to advance open publishing and open educational practices at a regional level. The goals of the CAUL OER Collective are three-fold, with the aim of building capacity and capability across the network:

1. Build infrastructure, capacity and achieve tangible outcomes to move the OER agenda forward at a national level.
2. Facilitate collaborative authoring and publishing of open textbooks in targeted priority disciplines, with a preference for the inclusion of local and/or Indigenous content.
3. Allow Member institutions to publish their own textbooks in disciplines of their choosing.

A central driver behind this capacity and capability building is the annual grants program which has awarded close to $100,000 to support the development of open textbooks in member institutions. The textbooks cover a diverse range of disciplines, including psychology, law, Indigenous studies, and health – telemedicine, pharmacy, nursing and midwifery.

As the peak leadership organisation for university libraries in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, CAUL recognises that institutional members are at various stages of maturity in their capacity to support OER. CAUL is uniquely positioned to bolster the variety of service models in practice, to adapt the communities of practice, the development of guides and events and the focus of the grants program to provide a strong basis for broader advocacy efforts.

This presentation will reveal the results of three years’ worth of grants programming, drawing on qualitative and quantitative data and interviews with academic authors and supporting library staff. We will share our own successes and challenges and practical strategies to sustainably continue the work of the CAUL OER Collective as a service to our members. We will provide a collective model others may benefit from, as we have learned from the maturing open communities around the globe, in and outside of the tertiary education sector. Open is everyone’s business. 



Included in [Session 7C]: Open Publishing - the Australian Experience

Author Keywords
Open access publishing, Open educational practices, Open textbooks

As a strategy to introduce open educational practices at an institution, a grant program can provide a vehicle for organizational awareness raising and practice development. At Deakin University, an Open Educational Resources (OER) grant program was introduced in 2021 to foster the development of Open practice. Over 3 rounds of grants, the program has iterated from a fixed level of grants to a tiered structure and as an internally recognized program, it contributes to establishing and fostering open practice at the university.

This presentation aims to summarize 3 years of practice learnings from an OER grant program from the initial establishment through to the current program progressing towards institutional maturity. Over this time, the infrastructure to publish resources has been developed, processes to support open educational practices have been established and channels for communication created. The presentation will discuss the challenges of commencing a program at an institution where open educational practice was not organizationally prevalent. From a point of institutional immaturity in open education, library processes, expertise, and infrastructure has developed alongside the open practice of the grant recipients as needs occurred. As the grant projects develop a range of OER from textbooks to videos and other learning object types and formats, a range of solutions and practices needed to be established adding complexity to the program challenges.

Additional to the challenges, this presentation will also cover the wins and positive outcomes of implementing a grant program to strategically increase open practice. Supporting the projects requires collaboration across areas of the university including the library, learning designers and academics from across the faculties. These interactions between staff from different divisions make open the business of everyone right across the institutional environment. From establishing touchpoint of contact to managing relationships with contacts, the library coordinates the program to achieve strategic goals. Over time, not only has the grant program developed but also the aims of the program are moving towards a maturity of practice: from learning about OER towards Open Educational Practice, renewable assessment and creative, interactive OER development.



Included in [Session 7C]: Open Publishing - the Australian Experience

Author Keywords
OER programs, Open educational practice, OER publishing, Open education strategies