The rise of generative AI has called into question many cornerstones of teaching, including the need for textbooks. Students increasingly use AI tools to efficiently find and collate information in lieu of both traditional and open textbooks. One argument for responding to this has been to embed AI within open educational resources (OER) or train AI using OER (Bozkurt, 2023).
Our presentation, by contrast, presents evidence of major advantages that OER have over both traditional textbooks and AI-centric retrieval and collation of information. This is based on our experiences of generating Third Spaces (Whitchurch, 2012) to co-create open textbooks through collaborative projects between STEM academics, the La Trobe eBureau (open publisher), and more recently students themselves.
Our open pedagogy journey led us from OER development towards open educational practices (OEP) that cultivate authentic assessment, peer-assisted learning, and enhanced teacher presence. We started by developing two open textbooks targeted at early undergraduate students of biology and/or biomedical science: • Foundations of Biomedical Science: Quantitative Literacy • Threshold Concepts in Biochemistry
The initial aim of these resources was to improve quantitative literacy and focus on key threshold concepts in biochemistry to support La Trobe students. A key challenge was navigating the tension between a resource useful for a broad audience but also serving specific cohort needs. However, in doing so we have surpassed our initial focus by enabling new practices that are uniquely possible through OER and have implications for the future design of OEP and open pedagogy.
It is widely understood that engagement in the learning experience requires more than just acquisition of new knowledge, full engagement is facilitated by connection with both peers and instructors (Stone and Springer, 2019). This teacher presence supports student engagement, increased retention, and learning outcomes using content developed by their face-to-face instructors and in which the instructor themselves is present (Mandernach et al., 2018). The modular nature of our texts coupled with permissive open licensing allows local personalisation and reuse to expand this teacher presence.
We will demonstrate how OER include both educators and learners as active agents, making open everyone’s business. A large body of work emphasises the importance of peer assisted learning in higher education, particularly for learning key skills (Stigmar et al. 2016). Embedding student created content in our open educational text has improved engagement and the quality of work while decoupling accreditation from being the sole motivating factor and also allowing us to showcase students as role models.
Finally, we have extended the content and increased its relevance to students by building in aspects of professional identity and representation which is known to influence retention and influences career trajectories (Huffmyer et al., 2022). To this end we have embedded videos of professionals representing a range of career aspirations of students demonstrating how the content is relevant to their work and offering authentic advice to study. We were also able to specifically showcase Australian and New Zealand contributions as well as the contribution of women to modern biology.
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[Session 2E]: OER in Higher EducationReferencesBozkurt, A. (2023) ‘Generative AI, Synthetic Contents, Open Educational Resources (OER), and Open Educational Practices (OEP): A New Front in the Openness Landscape’, Open Praxis, 15(3), p. 178–184. Available at:
https://doi.org/10.55982/openpraxis.15.3.579.
Huffmyer, A. S., O'Neill, T., & Lemus, J. D. (2022). Evidence for Professional Conceptualization in Science as an Important Component of Science Identity. CBE life sciences education, 21(4), ar76.
https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.20-12-0280 Mandernach, B. J., Robertson, S. N., & Steele, J. P. (2018). Beyond Content: The Value of Instructor-Student Connections in the Online Classroom. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 18(4).
https://doi.org/10.14434/josotl.v18i4.23430 Stigmar, M. (2016). Peer-to-peer Teaching in Higher Education: A Critical Literature Review. Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning, 24(2), 124–136.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13611267.2016.1178963 Stone, C., & Springer, M. (2019). Interactivity, connectedness and 'teacher-presence': Engaging and retaining students online. Australian Journal of Adult Learning, 59(2), 146–169.
Whitchurch, C. (2012). Reconstructing Identities in Higher Education: The rise of 'Third Space' professionals (1st ed.). Routledge.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203098301Author Keywordsopen textbooks, open educational practices, open practitioner development, open pedagogy, STEM, sciences, biochemistry, biology, teacher presence, students as authors, authentic assessment
