Search

Addressing the gap between global open educational resource (OER) proliferation and the slow adoption of OER and open educational practices (OEP) in Australian higher education, this paper focuses on a capacity-building project targeting academics, academic support staff and educational developers. The conception, design, development, piloting and evaluation of an open, online professional development micro course are detailed, highlighting key aspects of the open design and considerations for sharing and reuse across higher education institutions. The open micro course introduces five key OEP concepts through five contemporary curriculum design topics, using knowledge co-creation activities which engage learners in iterative shaping of the course, and generate artefacts for demonstration and recognition of learning. Opportunities for short to longer term capacity-building which leverage the micro course are also discussed, in response to significant shifts underway in higher education funding and professional development priorities. [This paper was presented at the Open Education Consortium Global Conference (Banff, Canada, April 22-24, 2015).]

Open Educational Practices (OEP) have played an important role in assisting educational institutions and governments worldwide to meet their current and future educational targets in widening participation, lowering costs, improving the quality of learning and teaching and promoting social inclusion and participatory democracy. There have been some important OEP developments in Australia, but unfortunately the potential of OEP to meet some of the national educational targets has not been fully realised and acknowledged yet, in ways that many countries around the world have. This paper will gather, discuss, and analyse some key national and international policies and documentation available as an attempt to provide a solid foundation for a call to action for OEP in Australia, which will hopefully be an instrument to assist and connect practitioners and policy makers in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For those receiving funding from the UK HEFCE-funded Open Educational Resource Programme (2009-2012), the sustainability of project outputs was one of a number of essential goals. Our approach for the hosting and distribution of health and life science open educational resources (OER) was based on the utilisation of the WordPress.org blogging platform and search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques to curate content and widen discovery. This paper outlines the approaches taken and tools used at the time, and reflects upon the effectiveness of web strategies several years post-funding. The paper concludes that using WordPress.org as a platform for sharing and curating OER, and the adoption of a pragmatic approach to SEO, offers cheap and simple ways for small-scale open education projects to be effective and sustainable.

This paper reports preliminary findings on students enrolled in a massive open online course, who were also assigned to work in groups. Part of a larger study on the effect of groups on retention and completion in MOOCs, the paper provides students' demographics (i.e., location, gender, education level, and employment status), and motivation for taking the course. Findings show that women outnumbered men and that students mostly enrolled into the course because of a friend. Indeed, research on MOOCs demonstrates that men outnumber women and that educational pursuit and professional development are the main motivators for taking MOOCs. Yet, this paper shows that when group work is included in a MOOC, women participate more. Furthermore, for students assigned to groups in a MOOC, friends are the principal incentive for enrolling into the course. These results are discussed in light of previous research, and implications for teaching and learning in online environments addressed.

This paper reports on the first stage of an international comparative study for the project "'Digital educational architectures: Open learning resources in distributed learning infrastructures--EduArc,'" funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. This study reviews the situation of digital educational resources (or (O)ER) framed within the digital transformation of ten different Higher Education (HE) systems (Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Turkey and the United States). Following a comparative case study approach, we investigated issues related to the existence of policies, quality assurance mechanisms and measures for the promotion of change in supporting infrastructure development for (O)ER at the national level in HE in the different countries. The results of this mainly documentary research highlight differences and similarities, which are largely due to variations in these countries' political structure organisation. The discussion and conclusion point at the importance of understanding each country's context and culture, in order to understand the differences between them, as well as the challenges they face.

Open Educational Practices (OEP) have played an important role in assisting educational institutions and governments worldwide to meet their current and future educational targets in widening participation, lowering costs, improving the quality of learning and teaching and promoting social inclusion and participatory democracy. There have been some important OEP developments in Australia, but unfortunately the potential of OEP to meet some of the national educational targets has not been fully realised and acknowledged yet, in ways that many countries around the world have. This paper will gather, discuss, and analyse some key national and international policies and documentation available as an attempt to provide a solid foundation for a call to action for OEP in Australia, which will hopefully be an instrument to assist and connect practitioners and policy makers in higher education.

Open Educational Practices (OEP) have gained traction internationally over the last fifteen years, with individuals, institutions, and governments increasingly interested in the affordances of openness. Whilst initiatives, policies, and support mechanisms are evident, there is an ever-present danger of localised contexts being unintentionally unrecognised, which has a negative effect on mainstreaming the practice sustainably. This paper presents a conceptual framework for open research based on Bronfenbrenner's "Ecology of Human Development" (1979) and asserts that it is through an understanding of complex influences and contexts of practice that strategic and operational processes to enable open education are manifested. It presents the framework through the lens of an emerging research project examining the experience of OEP in four Australian universities which will apply the framework as a guide for not only survey and interview question design, but also data analysis with the aim to inform broader policy development locally and nationally.