Collaboration
Student-Staff Partnership Projects
University of Queensland
Thomas Palmer
Overview
This case study describes a Student-Staff Partnership (SSP) project undertaken by the University of Queensland (UQ) and discusses how the project raised the profile of open textbooks at UQ through collaboration between students, Library staff, Learning Designers, and teaching staff. The SSP was a co-designed project that helped build an evidence base about the use and importance of open textbooks at UQ and explored our students’ feelings and experiences with prescribed commercial and open textbooks. The project culminated in a successful presentation delivered to teaching staff around the University about open textbooks and generated several grant applications for open textbook projects.
This case study describes the process, challenges, and benefits of engaging with Students as Partners, for open educational resource advocacy within a university. It discusses the importance of incorporating the students’ voice in service design, communication, engagement and advocacy.
Using this case study
This case study is useful for teaching academics and library staff. After reading this chapter:
- Academic staff will: Develop awareness of the process, challenges, and benefits of engaging with students as partners for open educational resource advocacy within a university.
- Library staff will: Learn strategies and techniques for building engagement across all stakeholders and gain an insight into a successful workflow with a view to leverage opportunities for assisting academics who are undertaking OER projects with students as partners.
Background
Prior to the project, which ran in Semester 2 of 2022, UQ’s open textbook service (Open Textbooks @ UQ) had produced 10 books across a range of disciplines after operation in 2019. Just over 1,107 students were actively being prescribed open textbooks by Course Coordinators in 2022 as compared to 7,661 students in 2024:
- Social Cost Benefit Analysis & Economic Evaluation (approx. 547 students)
- Public Interest Communication (approx. 114 students)
- JUNTXS Introductory Spanish (approx. 164 students)
- +JUNTXS Intermediate Spanish (approx. 89 students)
- Exercise Delivery (approx. 119 students)
- Dentistry Environment Essentials (approx. 74) (UQ Library, 2024, August 29)
Even though the service had been running for some time, there was limited insight into UQ students’ perspectives about textbooks. It was difficult to gauge how many students were expected to purchase commercial textbooks, at what cost, and how they felt about this.
The Library communicated a range of benefits to teaching staff about open textbook adoption, including:
- cost savings to students
- improved online experiences (no access or download restrictions)
- increased student engagement via interactivity and rich multimedia
- ability to easily incorporate local and/or diverse perspectives in content.
While some courses prescribed open textbooks, th