Collaboration is pivotal to expanding the reach and adoption of open educational practices, especially when growing the Open movement throughout a region from grassroots. The ASCILITE Australasian Open Educational Practice Special Interest Group (OEP SIG) is a community hub for Open practitioners throughout the Australasian region. One of the OEP SIG’s key activities is the production of the monthly OEP Digest, collaboratively curated by a dedicated team of open education practitioners geographically distributed across Australia.
Since its inception in 2018, inspired by SPARC’s OER Digest, the Australasian OEP Digest has been raising awareness of open education principles and practices in Australasia, providing a vehicle to highlight professional development resources, project opportunities, local learnings and the achievements of pioneering open education practitioners. Published through the OEP SIG website, the Digest takes its cues from the OEP SIG community, continuously evolving to curate resources and updates relevant to the Australasian open education landscape and delivering an easily accessible summary of OEP content straight to the inbox of approximately 200 subscribers.
In this session, join the OEP Digest curators for a reflection on: - The origins, philosophy and development of this community-centric newsletter - Navigating the process, challenges and unanticipated benefits of working as a cross-institutional team of academic librarians from four Australian higher education institutions, each with open education programs at varying levels of maturity - Strategies for using a publication such as the Digest to advance open education in your institution
The Digest team makes Open everyone’s business by providing a platform that invites, elevates and celebrates community voices, curates a diverse range of readings, resources and professional development opportunities, and promotes the latest open textbooks relevant to Australasian educational institutions.
While the Digest has an Australasian focus, highlighting locally developed resources, many international resources and opportunities are included to ensure readers understand and remain connected with the global nature of open education. In a field where practitioners can often feel isolated and unsure of how to move forward, the OEP Digest brings us together, celebrates us, and reminds us we’re not doing this alone. Because Open is everyone’s business.
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[Session 6A]: Practice and Policy in OEAuthor KeywordsOpen access publishing, Open educational practices, Open education policies and strategies, Open practitioners, Open textbooks
