Open Educational Practices in Australia: A First-phase National Audit of Higher Education

Abstract

For fifteen years, Australian Higher Education has engaged with the openness agenda primarily through the lens of open-access research. Open educational practice (OEP), by contrast, has not been explicitly supported by federal government initiatives, funding, or policy. This has led to an environment that is disconnected, with isolated examples of good practice that have not been transferred beyond local contexts.This paper represents first-phase research in identifying the current state of OEP in Australian Higher Education. A structured desktop audit of all Australian universities was conducted, based on a range of indicators and criteria established by a review of the literature. The audit collected evidence of engagement with OEP using publicly accessible information via institutional websites. The criteria investigated were strategies and policies, open educational resources (OER), infrastructure tools/platforms, professional development and support, collaboration/partnerships, and funding.Initial findings suggest that the experience of OEP across the sector is diverse, but the underlying infrastructure to support the creation, (re)use, and dissemination of resources is present. Many Australian universities have experimented with, and continue to refine, massive open online course (MOOC) offerings, and there is increasing evidence that institutions now employ specialist positions to support OEP, and MOOCs. Professional development and staff initiatives require further work to build staff capacity sector-wide.This paper provides a contemporary view of sector-wide OEP engagement in Australia—a macro-view that is not well-represented in open research to date. It identifies core areas of capacity that could be further leveraged by a national OEP initiative or by national policy on OEP.

Online Infrastructures for Open Educational Resources

“…In the case of Australia, various universities have now launched institutional OER initiatives, mainly MOOCs and ROER, despite the lack of support from the federal government in terms of funding or policy aimed at fostering OER infrastructures and practice (Stagg et al 2018). For instance, the University of Tasmania has a MOOC thematic platform on dementia [https://mooc.utas.edu.au/], and the Swinburne University of Technology has its ROER for digital media and also hosts the Swinburne History and Art Collections [https://commons.swinburne.edu.au/].…”

Supporting educators’ professional learning for equity pedagogy: the promise of open educational practices

“…Currently OEP encompasses open pedagogies, open learning, open practices or praxis and open education (Wiley, 2013; Stagg et al , 2018) but multiple and conflicting definitions of openness (McNally and Christiansen, 2019) and the positioning of open in opposition to closed (Cronin and MacLaren, 2018) has led to OEP meaning a range of different ideas. As examples, OEP may or may not include Open Educational Resources (OER) (Cronin and MacLaren, 2018), they may focus on process or content (Koseoglu and Bozkurt, 2018), they may operate from formal definitions of OEP, frameworks and within highly supportive policy environments (Hegarty, 2015; McAndrew and Farrow, 2013) or they may not (Stagg et al , 2018; Andrade et al , 2011). McNally and Christiansen (2019) argued that ambiguities around the term “open” and unclear relationships between OER, OEP and open pedagogy have clouded the main priority of OER which should be pedagogy.…”

Open Educational Practice and Workforce Competence in Cultural Studies

“…This OEP aims to be equitable practice, engaging in student co-creation in a 'peer-based working relationship' so that student 'voices and lived experiences are embedded' (Kukulska-Hulme et al 2021:27-36). This study's OEP is process-and critical pedagogy-based, beyond technology-driven content access (Geser 2007;Stagg et al 2018). The shifts required are increased student participation and empowerment (Arinto, Hodgkinson-Williams &Trotter 2017), reliant on non-automatable human agency, adaptability, collaboration, creativity, and problem solving.…”