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Authored in collaboration with Lucy Blakemore

Our 3-part blog series on Open Education Resources (OER) explores learnings from three leading experts who shared their experience and research in OER at our March Learning Design meetup. David Wiley (USA) started the session with some key principles of OER and why these matter, whilst our second speaker David Porter (Canada) shared examples of OER in practice around the world and the collegial approaches which support open practices. 

Our third and final speaker was Adrian Stagg, Manager (Open Educational Practice) at the University of Southern Queensland. In his presentation, Adrian brought the focus back to Australia and our own approaches to OER, from Higher Education policy and process to the need for better connections between silos and a ‘continuum of good practice’.  

Open Educational Resources lift everybody

Adrian stressed through his talk that openness should be infused into the entire higher educational institutions. Open educational practice should also be adopted as an approach for improving quality of life for students, where the responsibility is shared among several stakeholders. For example, libraries need to play a leading role in supporting the OER movement in higher education, teaching and learning teams to take part in embedding the notation of knowledge sharing into the curriculum, and the senior management in implementing new policies to ensure adoption and continuity of open educational practices.

The role of the university in open education

Open education features the concepts of shared ownership and shared value. However, the idea that any information could be copied freely, stored and made accessible to people is not new. Adrian shared an example of the Library of Alexandria where all ships coming into the port of Alexandria would be required to hand over all of their written materials, and copies would be taken and added to the library as the storehouse of human knowledge. 

Nowadays, academics and librarians at universities are playing significant roles in generating and disseminating knowledge. However, Adrian suggested universities need to adopt more open practices and prepare students to embrace those practices at different stages. Three important considerations for universities that Adriane highlighted in his talk are:

  • Normalising the practices of knowledge sharing, and that the idea of engaging students across the course of their learning at the university shapes them as a future member of society.
  • Flexibility of learning is embedded into universities policies, which require universities to provide access not only for students who can’t afford the learning materials but for all students who are mostly working 20 hours per week and require flexible options. 
  • Cutting costs for students who are struggling and living on allowances and had to withdraw from university due to increased life expenses (see Starved of opportunity report 2019).

Challenges of open education in Australia

Even though OER and OEP have gained considerable attention in higher education in other parts of the world such as Canada and the US, in Australia we still have disconnected silos of good practice. This is due to: 

  • Low level of awareness of what is going on across open education sector at a national level
  • Complete lack of policy in the area 
  • Federal government 2019 has no mention of the possibility of open education
  • There are limited ways for share practice 
  • Discoverability of resources
  • Sustainability of OER projects

Why Open should be everyone’s business

Access Australian universities, Adrian shared some of his research findings from interviews with leaders in Australian higher education institutions around their experiences of running open educational practice projects. Almost all participants said that the projects were going well, until one team member left, and when they left, there was no sustainability, therefore all the efforts were wasted. 

So instead of having teams that are led by an individual, Adrian suggested that in order for open education projects to succeed all team members need to work with shared and open responsibilities. Image # shows the continuum of open practice, which suggests the need for providing evidence of what people would be doing at the various stages of the continuum, and highlights the support that is available for them.

Above image: ‘A continuum of open practice’. Stagg, A. (2014). OER adoption: a continuum for practice. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 11(3), 151-165.

Each stage in the continuum has two segments (Stagg, 2014): 

  1. Description, which provides an overview of the types of activities and objectives sought at that stage. 
  2. Practitioner Behaviours, which act as ‘evidence’ that a practitioner is engaging with OEP at this stage.

Opportunities to raise awareness of OER and OEP in higher education

There’s a big role for the university to look at support roles and offering grants to programmes to push the open education wheel. Adrian shared projects from the University of Southern Queensland that can inspire stakeholders at UTS to address the challenges of adopting OER in teaching and learning. 

  • The Open grants programme that enabled the development of hands-on GIS learning resources using free and open source software ($80,560 in student savings) – something to do with this https://qgis.org/en/site/   
  • Developing Open textbooks that has saved students in Science education close to $317,000 in the first semester of 2021.
  • Design and development of open source software such as A-Skills program, which is an online support program developed for students with autism. A-skills aims to provide students with the tools and skills to help them through the different stages of university. USQ opened the program source code and had nine other universities adopt A-Skills online, and were able to change it for local contexts.

Integrating students as producers in assessment design to develop resources that have unique context (e.g. Pressbooks.com in developing “Gems and nuggets”) and providing reviews of open book articles using collaboration annotation tools (e.g. Hypothes.is in reviewing ‘Wellbeing in Educational contexts’).

Finally, Adrian shared examples of OEP from other Australian universities: 

  1. Open textbook heroes – RMIT
  2. Open assessment – Nic Suzor/Jessica Thiel – QUT
  3. Pressbooks Pilot – QUT (https://qut.pressbooks.pub/) 
  4. Australian open textbook project #diversifycontent – Deakin University
  5. Creative Commons Chapter
  6. Australasian Open Educational Practice Special Interest Group

Watch Adrian’s presentation in full

You can also follow Adrian Stagg on Twitter (@OpenKuroko) or contact him by email: Adrian.stagg [at] usq.edu.au

Image from Pixabay 

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