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:
- Build infrastructure, capacity and achieve tangible outcomes to move the OER agenda forward at a national level.
- Facilitate collaborative authoring and publishing of open textbooks in targeted priority disciplines, with a preference for the inclusion of local and/or Indigenous content.
- 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.
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[Session 7C]: Open Publishing - the Australian ExperienceAuthor KeywordsOpen access publishing, Open educational practices, Open textbooks
