OEGlobal 2024

In the rapidly evolving landscape of education, Open Educational Resources (OER) have emerged as a pivotal tool in promoting accessibility, inclusivity, and innovation in learning. Recognising the potential difficulties of OER creation and the need for effective planning and preparation, we propose a comprehensive workshop designed to equip participants with the necessary skills and knowledge to create their own OER. Participants will be guided through the process of developing a project outline and plan for their next OER. This will include identifying learning objectives, selecting appropriate content formats, and considering the pedagogical implications of their resource. The workshop will foster a collaborative environment where participants can share their ideas and experiences, learn from their peers, and receive constructive feedback on their project plans.

This interactive approach will not only enhance the learning experience but also facilitate the exchange of innovative ideas and best practices in OER development. By the end of the workshop, participants will have a clear roadmap for their next OER project, equipped with the knowledge and confidence to navigate the complexities of OER development. They will be empowered to create high-quality, accessible, and impactful educational resources that can transform the learning experience for their students.

The necessity for OER development to address equity, accessibility, and affordability concerns in education cannot be overstated. OERs have the potential to democratize education by making high-quality educational resources available to all, regardless of their socio-economic status. They can help bridge the digital divide, provide access to education for learners in remote areas, and reduce the cost of education by eliminating the need for expensive textbooks and other learning materials. By equipping educators with the skills to create their own OERs, we can further enhance the reach and impact of these resources, contributing to a more equitable and inclusive educational landscape.

This workshop is a step towards realizing this vision. The workshop will be approximately 90 minutes long, providing a concise yet comprehensive overview of OER development. Participants are encouraged to bring their own devices and/or notebooks to create their own plan. This hands-on approach will allow participants to directly apply the knowledge and skills gained during the workshop. However, if needed, tools will be provided on the day to ensure that all participants have the necessary resources to fully participate in the workshop activities.

To ensure equitable accessibility, a basic form of excel spreadsheets will be used during the workshop. This choice of tool is based on its widespread use and familiarity among educators and content creators. However, the workshop will also promote numerous other tools that can be used for OER development, providing participants with a broad understanding of the various resources available to them. By empowering educators to plan and prepare their own resources, we can contribute to a more inclusive, accessible, and innovative educational landscape. We invite all educators and content creators to join us in this exciting journey of learning and discovery.



Included in [Session 2A]: Open Publishing (Workshop and lightning talks)

Author Keywords
Inclusion diversity equity and access, Open educational practices, Open access publishing, Sustainability, Open textbooks

In this lightning talk, the Open Education Librarian from the University of Canterbury (UC) in New Zealand will outline some key milestones to date on the UC Library’s ongoing journey towards establishing an Open Educational Resources (OER) publication support service for academic staff. This narrative highlights the strategic steps, challenges, successes and progress so far in the journey toward an environment where OER adoption and creation thrive. By sharing experiences, the Open Education Librarian will provide insights and ideas for other institutions seeking to enhance their educational offerings through OER, who may be in the initial stages, or wondering where to start.

This session aims to spark ideas about possible ways to get started by sharing some of the steps UC took to get to their current position (currently around 2-3 on the OER maturity model https://pressbooks.com/news/maturity-model-for-open-education/) and their plans for the future. What will be covered:

• initial advocacy and outreach work
• open publishing via the university’s institutional repository
• working together with the University Press to publish open texts
• setting up a grant program to support authors to publish open texts
• establishing a dedicated OER librarian position
• participation in the CAUL collective and publishing via Pressbooks
• where UC are now, and what’s coming up

Alongside this, participants will also hear about an individual librarian’s learning journey into Open publishing, and the experience of building and developing knowledge and skills in an unfamiliar field and navigating a new role while advancing an Open text publishing support service.



Included in [Session 2A]: Open Publishing (Workshop and lightning talks)

References
Growing Up: A Maturity Model for Open Education | Pressbooks https://pressbooks.com/news/maturity-model-for-open-education/

Author Keywords
library publishing, open education resources (OER), open textbook publishing

In 2022 the University of Newcastle Library joined CAUL’s OER Collective as a member institution. Members of our team participated in the OER Foundations training. We were ready to support our academic staff create open textbooks!

While we had some interested academic staff, their content was either non-existent, or needed a lot of work which they had no resources to supply. Institutional workload and IP policies were also barriers. We were stuck.

Our solution grew from activities already being undertaken within the Academic Engagement Team, and aligned with our Library Indigenous Strategic Plan. We would forge ahead and create our own open guide to Indigenising Teaching, Learning and the Student Experience. We knew that content existed or was being written. That content would align perfectly with the values of open educational resources – social justice, equity, continuous sharing of knowledge.

We found that creators from across the university were keen to contribute. One aspect they really appreciated was that they didn’t have to contribute an entire chapter. We asked for case studies and examples of the use of Indigenous pedagogies within classes and courses. We also asked students to describe their experiences engaging with Western and Indigenous pedagogies.

Library staff supported academic authors and created content about the work the library has done to implement yarning circles within an international student program, the creation of a guide to the Voice Referendum in 2023, Indigenised spaces (digital and physical) within the library, introducing services such as yarning kits for loan, and more.

Contributors were excited to learn about the OER Collective’s use of Pressbooks, an open platform which protects their authorship but allows redistribution, remixing and reuse of content. They wanted their content to be published, not just to share but to adapt and contextualise to specific situations while protected by Creative Commons licensing. By thinking beyond the traditional idea of a textbook, we were able to gather high-quality content to fulfill our commitment to publish six chapters of the guide. As with all open textbooks, the guide is open to feedback and evaluation. As far as the project team is aware, this is the first Australian guide to Indigenising teaching, learning and the student experience in higher education.

The contributors and project team hope that this guide will inform the Indigenisation of curricula across higher education in Australia providing a template for introducing different pedagogical methods to improve engagement and retention of a larger, more diverse cohort of students, while improving the cultural capability of institutions for their students and staff.

We are also using the guide as a pilot to demonstrate the value and impact of open textbooks, to encourage our teaching community to develop their own.



Included in [Session 2A]: Open Publishing (Workshop and lightning talks)

Author Keywords
First Nations perspectives, Inclusion diversity equity and access, Local Indigenous cultures and ways of knowing, Open textbooks

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 Experience

References
Kalantzis, 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 Keywords
Open 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

As academic librarians we recognise that open is everyone’s business. Academic librarians are essentially open education practitioners, well positioned to represent staff and students in their academic journeys and mindful of the cruciality of equable access to knowledge.

As members of educational organisations and academia we are not the only consumers of educational research and outcomes. Open education ensures that those outside our institutions, including those responsible for policy and information provision, have access to timely research. It also supports collaborative research without restrictions on a global scale.

In 2024 Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Library launched its new Open Press. QUT Open Press offers support and guidance to QUT staff and students to publish open textbooks, open journals and other open educational resources. This initiative brings together the diverse knowledge and skills QUT librarians and research staff offer to improve access to educational resources. We posit open scholarship and open access in terms of maximising the sharing of knowledge across the entire research lifecycle, encompassing open access to research publications, open data, open educational resources, sharing of code, protocols, and other relevant research outputs.

But how did we get here? QUT has operated comprehensively in the open access space for several decades now. An institutional open access policy, believed to be the earliest university-wide open access policy in the world, was endorsed in 2003. QUT’s institutional open repository (QUT ePrints) was launched in the same year mandating the provision of author accepted manuscript versions for all peer reviewed articles published by staff. In 2004 QUT committed to the Creative Commons Project and in 2010 utilised open-source publishing software to host a number of open access academic journals. In 2016 the first institutional OER policy was approved. QUT Library continues to support a range of national and international open access advocacy activities with active membership in national organisations like Open Access Australasia and Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). QUT also supports a range of other open access initiatives including a research data and software repository and a suite of OER. Most recently, in 2023, QUT’s open access policy was updated to incorporate a ‘Rights Retention’ element based on the Plan-S initiative.

QUT Open Press represents more than a shop front for Library services in relation to open scholarship and open education. It is representative and inclusive of a long-term and broader body of activity, practice and advocacy developed with whole-of-institution support. QUT Open Press is open for business.



Included in [Session 7C]: Open Publishing - the Australian Experience

References
Open Access for QUT Research Outputs (Including Theses) Policy / Document / MOPP. (n.d.). Retrieved May 16, 2024, from https://mopp.qut.edu.au/document/view.php?id=177

Open Educational Resources Policy / Document / MOPP. (n.d.). Retrieved May 16, 2024, from https://mopp.qut.edu.au/document/view.php?id=148

Author Keywords
open access publishing, open repositories, open textbooks, open scholarship, open access

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 Experience

Author Keywords
Open access publishing, Open educational practices, Open textbooks, Grants

As a strategy to introduce open educational practices at an institution, a grant program can provide a vehicle for organizational awareness raising and practice development. At Deakin University, an Open Educational Resources (OER) grant program was introduced in 2021 to foster the development of Open practice. Over 3 rounds of grants, the program has iterated from a fixed level of grants to a tiered structure and as an internally recognized program, it contributes to establishing and fostering open practice at the university.

This presentation aims to summarize 3 years of practice learnings from an OER grant program from the initial establishment through to the current program progressing towards institutional maturity. Over this time, the infrastructure to publish resources has been developed, processes to support open educational practices have been established and channels for communication created. The presentation will discuss the challenges of commencing a program at an institution where open educational practice was not organizationally prevalent. From a point of institutional immaturity in open education, library processes, expertise, and infrastructure has developed alongside the open practice of the grant recipients as needs occurred. As the grant projects develop a range of OER from textbooks to videos and other learning object types and formats, a range of solutions and practices needed to be established adding complexity to the program challenges.

Additional to the challenges, this presentation will also cover the wins and positive outcomes of implementing a grant program to strategically increase open practice. Supporting the projects requires collaboration across areas of the university including the library, learning designers and academics from across the faculties. These interactions between staff from different divisions make open the business of everyone right across the institutional environment. From establishing touchpoint of contact to managing relationships with contacts, the library coordinates the program to achieve strategic goals. Over time, not only has the grant program developed but also the aims of the program are moving towards a maturity of practice: from learning about OER towards Open Educational Practice, renewable assessment and creative, interactive OER development.



Included in [Session 7C]: Open Publishing - the Australian Experience

Author Keywords
OER programs, Open educational practice, OER publishing, Open education strategies

One of the biggest challenges in getting some faculty members to adopt OER is a lack of supplemental resources. In some disciplines, this can be the difference between using a resource that students struggle to pay for and resources that are free. Artificial Intelligence can help solve this challenge as AI tools create flashcards, quizzes, graphics and even course objectives and key takeaways to pair with OER textbooks and additional materials.

This session will look at the AI tools and best practices that Open Educational textbook authors can use to help create supplemental materials for their textbooks quickly and easily. We will use and explain resources for faculty members and others who want to adopt or use Open Educational Resources, but they miss the ease of publisher provided flashcards, notes, presentations, quizzes and tests.



Included in [Session 10D]: Open Texts (Workshops)

Author Keywords
Artificial Intelligence, Supplemental Materials, Open Education Publishing, Open Textbooks

Our recent publication, an innovative open book, “Communication across Cultures”, designed to enhance intercultural competence, leverages culture as content and language as a medium to aim at facilitating effective communication in a context that may present cultural challenges.

This presentation will showcase how the book integrates interactive and collaborative tasks, employing H5P and reflective activities to create an engaging learning experience. This open book is structured in three modules to provide students with opportunities to immerse themselves in various cultural contexts through dynamic and various multimedia materials. By using videos, interactive quizzes, and discussions, this book addresses different learning styles, ensuring that individual students can connect with the content in a meaningful way.

The interactive tasks are not only informative but also encourage students to engage in critical thinking and self-reflection about their cultural assumptions and biases. These tasks in the modules are designed to be flexible and adaptable, allowing educators to tailor the content to their specific classroom needs. Moreover, this book serves as a prime example of how supplementary educational resources can be created using open educational resources (OERs). By maximising the use of OERs, we have curated a wealth of high-quality materials that educators can access and apply. This approach not only reduces the cost of educational resources but also fosters a culture of sharing and collaboration in the educational community.

Before introducing this book in the classroom, using an adapted usability testing framework, data were collected from the researcher’s notes, during participant interactions with the book during the workshop, six individual participants written comments and interviews with two participants, and feedback from three educators. The data were analysed using a usability matrix (Kessler & Plakans, 2001, p.8) with a focus on three aspects: design, navigation, and content.



Included in [Session 10D]: Open Texts (Workshops)

References
Kessler, G., & Plakans, L. (2001). Incorporating ESOL learners' feedback and usability testing in instructor-developed CALL materials. TESOL Journal, 10(1), 15-20. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1949-3533.2001.tb00012.x

Author Keywords
Roles of technology, Open educational resources, Culture and language learning