Collaboration
Developing OER as Impactful Educational Interventions
La Trobe University
Dr Julian Pakay and Steven Chang
Overview
This case study outlines our experience of discovering several unanticipated benefits of Open Educational Practices (OEP) to solve learning & teaching problems, attract grant funding, and cultivate academic career recognition. Our collaboration involved a cross-disciplinary team:
- 1 x biochemistry teaching academic
- 1 x open education specialist librarian (La Trobe eBureau)
- 1 x open education project officer (La Trobe eBureau).
Our project aimed to solve persistent difficulties that undergraduate students face for learning key concepts in biomedicine, biochemistry and related life sciences disciplines. Traditional textbooks have focused on comprehensiveness of content rather than tackling the root causes of learning and teaching problems. By contrast, the main idea driving our OE philosophy was to sharply focus on cultivating students’ metacognitive thinking for confronting known learning barriers, including quantitative literacy and key threshold concepts.
Our journey began as a modest open education resource (OER) development project focused specifically on subjects taught at La Trobe University (LTU). Through experimentation, our reflective practices led us to encounters with a broader range of OEP benefits than we anticipated. We used these to transition away from a traditional didactic STEM education towards OER-enabled pedagogy, which included:
- cultivating students’ emerging identities as practitioners
- designing authentic assessment
- enhancing teacher presence
- making difficult concepts accessible
- empowering student voice and representation.
We also demonstrate how academics and professional staff can collaborate as an integrated ‘Third Space’ team to not only generate impactful OERs but create new shared ways of working in higher education that go beyond traditional university binary roles.
Using this case study
This case study supports both academics and professionals (e.g. librarians/learning designers) and highlights how they can work together for mutual gains.
Academics can learn how to use OEP for:
- achieving career recognition, grants, and awards
- making difficult concepts accessible for students
- enhancing educator “presence”
- reducing student anxiety about learning barriers
- enabling students to ‘see themselves’ in learning materials as emerging professionals
- supporting the development of students’ emerging professional identities
- broadening local impact into global solutions
- collaborating with professional staff to create new ways of working in the “Third Space”.
Librarians and learning designers can learn how to:
- Advocate for OEP to raise the visibility of benefits to outweigh costs/time commitments
- Partner with academics to develop their open practitioner identity and capabilities
- Understand their professional role as ‘critical friend’ to drive shared reflective practice
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