Many universities are in the nascent stages of developing open education programs. From the outset, open advocates face a key dilemma:
How do we align OER projects with academic practitioner priorities when our institutional environments don't reward open educational practices (OEP)?
Our presentation provides a long-term retrospective from the rearview mirror. We share insights from La Trobe University’s mature open education model and our experiences tackling this common dilemma. We focus on ‘big picture’ lessons from our early adopter investment into OER initiatives a decade ago (Salisbury, Julien & Loch, 2023).
We present strategies for resolving “Gordian Knot” challenges (seemingly unsolvable problems) faced by all institutions establishing the foundations for OEP in Australia and beyond. We propose that these problems and solutions 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 such as:
difficulty articulating concrete benefits, 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 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.
4) Open practitioners create potent projects that generate both 'primary OER' and 'secondary' open artefacts. These two outputs can actively spotlight ephemeral learning & teaching practices that usually go unrecognised. This supports both academic reward and recognition and the scholarship of learning and teaching.
5) Aligning OEP projects with academic reward is crucial, but the Australian higher education environment often disincentivises open educational practices. The combination of #3 (developing open practitioners in a scaffolded reflexive way) and #4 (practice-based generation of open artefacts) creates a powerful force that realigns OEP with academic reward and recognition.
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.
RESOURCES FROM OUR PROJECT:Reflective practice tools for open education projects: our project's open artefact collection
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/10.4324/9780203098301Author 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
