Adoption
Supporting OER adoption through a grant program
Deakin University
Angie Williamson
Overview
The use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in teaching and learning in higher education can benefit both students and academic staff. Just as there are many places to find OER, there are just as many ways in which OER can be incorporated into teaching and learning activities. The Deakin University OER grant program enables academics to explore OER available in their discipline or to develop new resources, and to use these in their practice. Although the program also supports academics to develop new OER, the purpose of this case study is to demonstrate the various ways in which academics can be supported by a centralised program to incorporate adopted OER into teaching and learning. While developing a new resource can be rewarding, reusing and adapting resources can be similarly rewarding as these open practices can deliver significant cost savings for students with a lesser time commitment.
Using this case study
Key stakeholders
An OER Grant Program requires collaboration from key stakeholders across the institution. The successful delivery of high quality projects results from collaborative partnerships between faculty staff, library staff including the Open Education Librarian and the Copyright Team, and other third space practitioners such as learning designers. While the staff are main collaborators in the OER program, the key stakeholder group at the centre of the OER adoption projects are the students. Students can benefit greatly from an OER adoption projects. Research has shown in addition to decreases costs for students in purchasing textbooks, moving to an open textbook improves access to resources increasing student retention (Bol 2021) and success (Colvard 2018).
The grant program
The Deakin OER grant program commenced in 2021 to support staff to develop capability in open practices that remove barriers for diverse learners (Hamilton and Hansen, 2024). OER can be used in units and courses in many ways from including an individual resource such as a section of text or an image into learning resources, to converting all resources in a unit or course to OER. Moving to open resources can require substantial amounts of time and work. Locating suitable resources and including these in the learning environment to achieve the required pedagogical outcome can require time, as well as learning design expertise and technical skill. Providing support to academics and professional staff to complete this work can increase the movement towards greater OER usage while supporting the skills development required for open practice and increasing positive experiences for students.
At the commencement of the program, the library team had a steep learning curve in program development. At the time, in the library there was minimal understanding of the Australian open educational environment. Identifying this need, environmental scanning of other institutio