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 ExperienceReferencesKalantzis, 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 KeywordsOpen 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
