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 over $93,000 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. The Collective and its grant program have been designed to support the development of capacity and capability for institutions at varying stages on their OER journey. As a peak body, CAUL is uniquely positioned to work collaboratively and at scale to drive both practical and strategic outcomes. The grant program is a key component in our capacity and capability building approach.
This presentation will draw on the presenters' experiences of designing, administering and iterating a transnational grant program over three years of operation. We will explore the program's objectives and how our focus has shifted over the years, discuss the lessons we've learned about administering a grant program and the happy surprises we've encountered along the way, and distil key learnings that others can learn from. We'll also explore the future of the OER Collective as a whole and the grant program in particular. We hope the insights we share will benefit other organisations that would like to implement capacity and capability building grant programs.
Included in
[Session 7C]: Open Publishing - the Australian ExperienceAuthor KeywordsOpen access publishing, Open educational practices, Open textbooks, Grants
