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Many notable developments have taken place in the evolution of open educational practices (OEP). Among these, we focus on two in particular. First is the proliferation of the use of open textbooks, which have become a major component within OEP. Second, there are ongoing efforts at rethinking learning design in the context of open education. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how we challenged ourselves to rethink learning designs that can result from a rethinking of open textbooks as educational artefact. We position this in the context of centering equity and social justice in learning design through both challenging single narratives and taking advantage of the affordances of an open textbook. As part of this discussion and challenge, we outline a design-based research project where we are developing a prototype for a community-generated, non-hierarchical teaching and learning resource (“untextbook”) model that is open to ongoing extension and reframing. As we engage in the development of an organic, fluid resource, we invite learners to participate in ongoing cycles of extending and reframing the existing content to open new learning pathways prompted by considerations of relevant issues, lenses, roles and settings in a WordPress-based authoring tool. These cycles include a research project that is in the process of obtaining feedback and reflections from graduate students involved in courses where the prototype is being implemented.

The purpose of this comparative case study is to explore and examine the practices of open course design and development as they are being undertaken in the Open Education Resource university (OERu) network, an international partnership of member post-secondary institutions. With a focus on the design and development of an OER-based university-level course, the study identifies and describes features of OERu open design and development processes and compares and contrasts them to similar practices in traditional instructional design and the open source software (OSS) development field. The study was conducted in three parts. First, a detailed description of the OERu project and its explicit purposes, structure and logic models was provided. Second, a review of the literature traced conceptual roots of the OERu in the history of reusable learning objects, open educational resources, sharing of learning design knowledge and OSS development, interwoven with the functions of social processes and mediating artifacts in collaborative design settings. Third, data were collected though interviews with developers and analysis of communications, artifacts and developer contribution histories within the OERu WikiEducator development environment. The study concludes that the goal of enabling achievement of university credit through study of free OER-based courses imposes important considerations on the planning stages of open design and development at both course development team and partner institution levels. Further, attention to community development is key to the success of open design and development in the OERu.

This is a case study and analysis of the Justice Institute of British Columbia, a Board-governed provincial post-secondary institute. Under contract to various provincial government ministries, the Justice Institute's five Academies and two central Divisions train municipal police, provincial court and correctional employees, fire service personnel, ambulance attendants and provincial emergency program personnel, and provide programs for professionals and the public in the areas of justice and public safety. Although the proposed organization was conceived to meet training and educational needs that existed under the umbrella of the Ministry of Attorney-General, shortly before its formal establishment the Justice Institute was captured by the proposed Colleges and Provincial Institutes Act and now came under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education. Two fundamental issues emerged from the case study: jurisdictional ambiguity, involving the relation between the Justice Institute and the Ministries of Education and Attorney-General; and internal organization, involving the relation between the five Academies and the central Justice Institute administrative structure. These emergent issues were found to be primarily structural in origin. Therefore a structural analysis was conducted, based on Mintzberg's "extended configuration hypothesis," which identifies and explains fundamental relationships among organizational design parameters and characteristics of the environment in which the organization exists. Within Mintzberg's framework the Justice Institute was identified as a divisionalized form. The case study and emergent issues were analyzed in relation to the main characteristics of the divisionalized form. In the context of jurisdictional ambiguity, it was found that decentralized internal structural relationships, and client grouping as opposed to functional grouping, may have been key factors in the survival of the Justice Institute in a period of environmental turbulence during the early to mid 1980s, and in its demonstrated effectiveness in fulfilling its organizational mission. It was further found that a strong central structure was required to stabilize the Justice Institute, particularly at times when the environment was inimical to the continued existence of the Justice Institute. It was suggested that this apparent contradiction lay at the roots of the instability of the early organization. The study recommended that the Justice Institute recognize the weaknesses, and build upon the strengths, of the divisionalized form. Further, it found Mintzberg's extended configuration hypothesis to be an effective instrument for performing a structural analysis of an organization.

The purpose of this study is to provide an overview of how open universities depict their current institutional engagement in open educational practices. In view of the growth of programming for non-traditional students by conventional universities, particularly through online learning and increasing interest in open educational practices, the intention is to gain a better understanding of the unique contributions currently made, or potentially to be made, by open universities in comparison to conventional universities. The study is conducted through a content analysis of open university websites, exploring key themes related to access-oriented open educational practices derived from terms and related concepts in relevant literature. With the growth of distance education, online learning, and other emerging access-oriented open educational practices in traditional higher education, open universities should be uniquely situated to provide visible leadership in these domains. The open university website content analysis explores the extent to which this is the case.