Collaborating on the Future of Open Education in Australasia

All right. Hello everybody. Thank you for joining our session on collaborating on the future of open education in Australasia. Um I'm Ash Barber, an academic librarian and senior coordinator of the OAR collective at the Council of Australasian University Librarians. Um I'm also a co-convener of the Ascalite Australasian Open Educational Practice Special Interest Group or the OEP for short because it's a very long name. Um so I sit on both sides of this collaboration between the uh OEP SIG and the O collective. Um a quick visual description for of me for accessibility. I'm a Caucasian woman with blonde hair wearing glasses. Um, and my background is the uh open education colorful rainbow background with the eyes on the horizon script um in the corner. Hello everyone. Uh this is Mace Fatire. Um I'm the learning learner experience design manager at the University of Technology Sydney. Uh joining you here uh from um UTS campus in Sydney City. Um to help with accessibility as well, I'd like to describe my appearance on the screen. I'm a middle-aged woman wearing headscarf and also wearing glasses. Uh my background is actually a virtual background of the business school here at UTS, a unique architecture that is designed as scrunched up uh paperback. Now um we also co-lead um uh the editorial team uh for the book and uh which we'll be discussing with you today um open education down and done. So, uh, I'm going to start with a quick housekeeping and, [sighs and gasps] um, like to see thumbs up if you're happy with that. Um, you will be able to access all the resources I'll be talking about today. There's a big QR code at the end of the presentation where you can download all the resources that we'll be mentioning. For people joining via Zoom, uh, can you please keep your mic muted to minimize any distraction as possible and uh, during our presentation, you are most welcome to ask questions in the chat. uh if we have people in the room also we'll have enough time at the end. Now give me a thumbs up if you're happy with this can use uh uh the zoom uh thumb up and uh just also reminding you be able to use the captions uh for today for accessibility. Now um for today um our session uh will uh cover um things that we hope that will go away with uh some practical tools and strategies for effective and sustainable collaboration on larger scale um open textbooks publishing projects. Um we also hope that we'll be able to understand the importance of regionally relevant and contextualized stories putting together into u an open education um um storytelling um or collection and uh that shows the practices and how uh this has been happen happening in our uh community. The last one that we also would like to show you some of the examples um of open education work here in Australia. Now um what comes to mind when you hear Australia? Now uh [sighs] I don't know about you but for me it was before coming to Australia in 2010 it was the beaches. Now when I talk about Australia I also would like people to think about the power of the community that I've also seen here in this region particularly in higher education institutions and today we'll show you a good example um of of that. Now before we go into the example and the work that we have done, we would like to present to you the problem that we have addressed here. One of the things uh that we have noticed from our experience as open education advocates is that open education case studies in Australian region are great. There are many of them but they are actually fragmented. Um the the the well-known examples actually saturated in the North American context. If you do a quick Google search uh of open pedigogy examples for example uh the results will come up all North American centric and um this is uh something we would like to change um not that we want to uh we want to join that these results in in other words open education practitioner also here are disconnected and this is something that we have also noticed and even though there is a great um potential for crowdsourcing these efforts uh we also noticed that people don't get the opportunity to know each other >> and so to combat this problem we created open education down on do uh we love a good pun um Australian case studies and so it was actually the brainchild of a couple of our colleagues in the OEC Angie Williamson and Alice Leford um you'll see they're also on the editorial team for the book as well um you can check it out via the QR code on the screen or the URL there um But this OAR is the result of a collaboration between the um OEP that I mentioned at the start which is a grassroots community organization um of people interested in open ed. We're currently around 280 members um and also in collaboration with the call o collective which is a peak professional body for university libraries in Australia and aloe in New Zealand. So we've got the the grassroots community with the um professional organization um collaborating to create this text. And so the book is a peer-reviewed openly licensed cur curation of case studies comprising scholarly contributions from professionals um including librarians, researchers, learning and teaching teams and engaged open education practitioners across a Australia. Um and the work really provides practical examples of open educational practices um which can be adapted by readers for use in their own context. Um, the book is really a community-led solution to make our communities and our work more visible by unifying in a structured format that retains the broad diversity of voices. We really lent into the strengths of OAR for the text and um that's because it can provide both that structure and flexibility of form. So, we have a consistent layout across all the chapters, but we also include um embedded podcasts where relevant and we'll talk a bit more about that later. Um and obviously the licensing means that it's reusable and adaptable which feeds our goals as well. Um and our community uh brought broad expertise to the project as well as um included people at multiple levels of institutional seniority. That was really useful. Um so people from senior managers to non-managers. It gave us diverse perspectives on the practical and strategic direction of the text because they could see into different pockets of institutions. Um so this project was massive. We had contri uh contributions from all mainland states and territories in Australia wrangling 56 authors on a rather ambitious timeline. Um from ideiation to completion. I think we had about a year as we were adamant to launch the book at the 2024 OE global conference um as it was in Australia for the first time and we were absolutely not about to let that opportunity for visibility pass us by. Um but we did it and we're continuing to do it. Um and we're going to share the strategies and tools that we used um to do that with you. So um as I mentioned it was completely community-led solution and we'll expand on what that looks like in practice in a bit. Um but the other part of this that was key was our collaboration with the core o collective as while we in the OAP seek developed the concepts for the book Paul really gave us the infrastructure to get our idea off the ground. Um so things like access to a publishing platform which in this case is press books um and essential documentation like a memorandum of understanding um for all those 56 authors and workflow spreadsheets um but also a great list of contacts as the collective taps into um 95% of universities across Australia and alto New Zealand. So there's a huge rolodex um that we can um contact for authors, peer reviewers um that kind of thing. So without that early support, it would have been a much slower process to see this idea to fruition. And the second um strategy that uh we'd like to share with you is around um the diversity of the um expertise. I'm going to talk about editorial team, distributed leadership and the broad authorship. So as one of the real strength of the community is that you have that diversity of expertise to draw on actually our editorial team has evolved over time and has always had a broad diversity of expertise because everyone comes from a different production background for example I'm a learning designer Ash's a librarian also had a copyright experts and copy editor on that team distributed leadership is another strong one here with community-led projects comes the double edge of sustainability on the one hand due to the voluntary nature of the work the project saw a lot of uh staff turnover. However, on the other hand uh ensuring everyone was involved in decision making and stewardship of the work meant progress was maintained regardless of the turnover or who was specifically leading. The last one is around that broad authorship that we have. Ash mentioned that we have more than 56 authors and that number brings a breadth of authors from different specialties. Um the interesting thing here is that we have so many chapters brought a wonderful blend of further space professionals and academics working together on authoring the case studies. This also brings the important elements uh to the design of the case studies where professional staff could contribute with not only the content but also the design presentation um for example uh developing interactive elements modalization of the content and ensuring case studies actually meet the objectives um that are listed. Um the the next one, the third one in this um uh group of strategies we have for you today is the visible communities. Another strategy we used to bring this book together quickly was to make the uh vis to make visible communities uh we knew existed but weren't yet aware of each other. So we worked on that. One of our main goals was to create a space where all these voices could come together and actually hear each other. So we reach out through uh our existing networks to engage as many people as we could and uh to to grow of course uh the networks further. And what's been even great is that this uh reach continues to help us even after publication because now we have at least 56 people or the the authors here uh who are just as invested in promoting um the book as as we are. And on a slightly more technical note, um we made the strategic choice to design the text with a unified structure to unear the clear themes or topics um and to provide our readership with a smooth experience when navigating the case studies. So that is the book is presented in a consistent format from chapter to chapter through the layout, the general heading structure and key components. Um and you can see some of those popping up on the screen. um while also retaining that diversity of voices by allowing authors to interpret chapter templates and and use them primarily as a guide rather than a rule. Um and as an aside, we've included many of these templates in the appendix of the published book. So feel free to go and reuse those in your own projects and let us know if there are any other um templates or things you want us to add into that section of the book. Um so we invited our community to participate in the peerreview process. Um we offered support in several ways. Um so we created a reviewer toolkit which included reviewer guidelines and a template and this was a really a structured guide that outlines the key criteria for feedback. It um enabled an expansion on feedback as well. People could add comments directly to the um the document themselves via Google Docs. Um and uh and we provided elbow support as well if there are any technical issues there. Um we also ensure that the incentives are really clear and explicitly mentioned. So um because you know when we're asking someone to peer review a text often the first thought is who needs more work to do especially when it's unpaid um work to do. And so we framed this really as a great opportunity to connect with like-minded peers from the Australasian region to exchange ideas about open ed um gain insights into how it's evolving and learn in the learning and teaching space and we also provided the extrinsic motivation of acknowledging reviewers in the chapters um themselves. So we we uh engaged in open peer review um which also just is one of our our principles. So it's one of our values. Um but we listed the peer reviewers in the chapter of each um in each chapter as well as uh a section in the book as well that just lists everybody. Um and once you have the slides um you'll be able to click on this link so you can actually go and see the LinkedIn post um to see the the call for peer reviewers that we created. Um moving on to tools. Every giant multi-pronged project needs robust tools underpinning it. Um, and before I started co-leading this project with Mace, we were lucky enough to have Ronnie McClennon from Queensland University of Technology um, co-leading the project. And we were lucky because she set us up with several awesome project documents using the Google suite. Um, and projects at this scale require close attention to a multitude of details, moving parts, overlapping priorities, and timelines. And we had a super firm deadline of global. Um, and so we used uh we used Google Sheets to track the project uh the the progress of the overall project. Um, we used it again to keep track of the peerreview process. And um, Google Sheets, if you've never used it, it has all these awesome um, little tools in there like adding tokens, tagging people, um, conditional formatting is a dream. Um, you can really do a lot of cool stuff to your heart's content. Um, we use Google Docs to create and share the memorandum of understanding, peerreview guide, other templates. Um, and for us, just keeping it simple like that was great. These are these are tools that are really easy to use and keeping it all in the one ecosystem. Um, in this case, Google was very helpful because it meant that everything integrated into itself. Um, it was institution agnostic as well. So, it didn't matter where somebody came from cuz we're all from different institutions. um everybody could access the documents as required. Um and when we created the original documents, we were mindful um of future use and so we've been able to reuse a lot of these materials in the latest submission rounds um for the book and we've we've just completed another um chapter submission round now um where we've been able to reuse a lot. It's been very helpful and saved us a lot of time. Okay, so this slide is really to summarize what we have been talking about in terms of the strategies. We talked about community-led collaboration. We talked about diversity of expertise, unified structure, visible communities and peer review and I lastly mentioned the project management tools that we have used. Hope you're following up to this point. Now what I'm going to share with you is a slide that sorry that one that has some stats, some numbers. Um the first one I'm going to focus on the active users. It shows approximately 2,000 act active users. But I just want to mention that this is a six months um uh data uh from the launch of the book until July 20 this um this year basically 2025. So we're talking about 2,000 active users here which was an indic a strong actually indication that the resource is being reached uh is reaching broad um audience across Australian high education sectors and beyond which is great uh page reviews is the second indicator there which is 7,300 page views showing consistent engagement over time. Uh you can see there is like a burst at the launch and there's another burst around April. This is when we um hosted another session. Uh so of course people will be more interested to see that but you can also see that consistency across the the timeline. Uh the resource downloads is another interesting one in in the six months period after the launch was 150 uh six downloads which is great. Uh tells us that people actually um not only browsing online but also reusing and referencing which is something good to to see. Now the other thing that I would like to share with you today is the um the the feedback that we've received. Uh it's nice to see that um impacted early on. Um so I've got a couple of comments here from the first one from a student who she said that uh her that book has actually helped her in her studies. Um which is which is something something great to hear. Uh that the the other um the the other comment that I have here for you is uh from an academic. Now one of the things that we wanted to make sure that we achieve in in in this project is to boosting the academics voice. Now in Australia most people talk about open educational practices are uh professional staff um promoting advocating etc. Academics doing great work in open education. However there is no unified platform to showcase their adoption of open education um and and open education practices. So boosting academics voice as you can see here Sarah Stein from Deacon University um it's actually started to advocate for open education similar to the work that we're doing um so um when she said that when she's passionately sharing the chapter when people actually ask her for advice about open education which was something really nice nice to see um I think uh there is another feedback from um James Cook University cla said that that book has actually contributed to the awareness of her team. So that impact that we could see and um uh realize uh in in in in library teams was also very um fulfilling. Um I think that's these are the two uh slides I wanted to share with you about the feedback. >> Um yeah and our our latest chapters in this collection have been recently published. recently, meaning literally last week. So, they're hot off the press. Um, we're very proud of continuing to grow this work and expand on important areas such as authentic assessment and artificial intelligence. Um, so you can see the uh little screenshots of the um the titles there. Um, and there'll be further promotion of those um chapters soon, but if you go to the book, you'll be able to see them right now. Um, and soon to come as well, you'll notice that the uh the title of the book was um Australasian case studies. We've only been talking about Australian case studies. There was always the intention to expand into alto New Zealand as well. And um and we will be next year. So very excited to see some chapters coming in from there as well. Um, and the the last key point really that I want to cover is um around halfway through this year, Mason and I um decided to start a podcast um to maintain the momentum of this work because again our goal has always been to increase the visibility of the work happening in our region. So taking it crossplatform and multimedia was a good step to reach another audience. Um we wanted the case studies to continue to live in a different format and provide further authentic experience to our readers. So for this work, we invited chapter authors to be our podcast guests um empowering them with a further boost to their voice and their work. Um things have been going really well though a bit slow u because we are doing a million things. Um however a really exciting part of this podcast is that only two and a half episodes in and we're already seeing the impact. Um we had a colleague share with us that our first podcast guest um Julie Pai as a direct result of being featured on our podcast has been invited to keynote and education conference in Australia. So it's another strategy to consider. Don't let the OAR be the final work. Consider how it can be adapted or built upon or transformed to find new audiences and further achieve your goals of impact. And at every stage collaboration has been key to success. So look around, who can you work with, who can you exchange ideas with, lean on each other to build success. Um, and so with that, we've wrapped up our little whirlwind of strategies and tools for a successful living massive OE project. >> Wonderful. And um as we promised you at the start um you'll be able to access all the you have access to the slides uh the links that we talked about in the um the resources that we talked about the tools and um the book itself and the podcast and um you are most welcome to get in touch with us ash at ash the librarian all things um and may you be able to find me in LinkedIn. Thank you very much and we would love to hear if you your comments, questions. I can see um Cat put a comment that this resource has been so useful in her institution. Um and she refers to it frequently. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Um yeah, we do have a couple minutes available if there are any questions or anything. Thank you for the for the love. Thank you Maggie and uh Kaywin. Um anyone in your institutions um or wherever you're working have uh done something similar? It would be nice to um if you share a link uh to your work. I know it's the end of the day uh in uh Denova, so that's not pressure, but we really appreciate your time and listening to us. >> We're on both we're on both ends of the day. We got the end of the day here. The beginning of the day there no matter what time it is. [laughter] >> All right. Well, I think we'll we'll end the recording there.