Overview
Open Education Resources (OER) are celebrated for sharing knowledge further than ever before across the digital world. Remixed OER have the bonus of being quick to produce. With our eyes captivated on Open Education Resources (OER)moving far and fast, we may overlook another remarkable motion spinning within OER themselves: the same technology and licensing that enables easy dissemination also accelerates the potential rate of revision. The switch from fixed, hard-copy textbooks to author-controlled, publishing platforms produces exciting opportunities for writers to refine their work across multiple, frequent iterations. Such potential for rapid change invites the question, if remixed OER can evolve quickly, what measures can creators take at conception to enable a positive, long-term development?
To answer this question, I trace my experiences as leader of a team who produced four iterations of the remixed open textbook Academic Success (Hargreaves et al., 2021) over four years. I share pragmatically my learnings about growth, change and time when I switched from regarding Academic Success as a single, fixed publication to a living, continually-evolving, educational resource. I present six recommendations that future creative teams may incorporate in their own resources to smooth development.
This case study demonstrates how the benefits of team-created remixed OER can be increased by incorporating the following six recommendations to facilitate the long-term development of resources:
- Create a Writing Guidelines document
- Create an Authorship Policy for contributors
- Create an Editorial Board
- Include a version history in the resource
- Decide whether to retain or change URLs for resource revisions
- Create a spreadsheet for storing and mapping the resource’s possible futures.
Background information and stakeholders
In 2020, the University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ) offered an internal grant to encourage staff to produce open textbooks. From this funding, I was contracted for nine weeks as Project Lead of a team of learning advisors to remix Baldwin’s (2021) text College Success into a textbook on academic skills for Australian tertiary students. My responsibilities involved reconceptualising the aim and structure of College Success; making editorial decisions on existing content; overseeing new content created by our team; and managing a short production timeline. For a detailed description of production, please see Hargreaves and Howarth (2022).
Academic Success began as a short, time-limited project, however I soon realised it need not be viewed with the finality of conventional publications. Ideas that I discarded due to time constraints could be resurrected only weeks after publication. A combination of instant, digital self-publishing and the speed of incorporating remixed content, altered my perception of the book as a single project to an ongoing iterative series. Our team could benefit from the ease and speed of revis