Today a new open book, Open Education down undOER: Australasian case studies was launched at the OE GLobal conference in Brisbane. One of the chapters is by Steven Chang and me, describing some work and thinking we've done this year to reconfigure our open education program to make it more attractive to prospective authors. I'm pretty excited to share this work. I think we have found an approach that will help us to attract and incentivise better and more open textbook proposals and – perhaps more importantly – result in better textbooks and better teaching.
Like open access research, discussion of open education and open educational resources (OER) usually focusses on the social justice aspects and licensing technicalities. OER is promoted as good for students because they don't have to pay for textbooks, and good for academics because the license allows them to "remix" and adjust the books. This is all true, but the reality for most academics is that they feel overwhelmed by workload and if they care about education they care most about the effectiveness of the resources for helping students understand the concepts they want to teach. If it's free to read that's nice, and if it's "free as in speech" then they're not really sure why that matters. It's not that academics don't care about social justice or saving students money. But the primary goal for teaching-focussed educators is achieving educational outcomes, not being idealogically pure.
We've spent a couple of years grappling with how to make OER publishing attractive, and after a lot of consultation and listening, realised that focussing on the benefits to students was where we were going wrong. Students don't decide which textbook is assigned, they just have to use whatever their subject coordinator decides. Once we start thinking about the benefits of open education to educators, a whole bunch of opportunities appear. Openly-licensed teaching and learning resources are more flexible and adaptable than commercially-licensed texts, and educators can customise them to the curriculum rather than forcing the curriculum to align with a given text. Without commercial pressures, authors are free to publish something niche, or experimental. And OERs are a tangible object educators can point to when it comes time to demonstrate their contribution to education beyond student grades or the highly-flawed student satisfaction surveys. Crucially, we've seen that publishing open textbooks changes educators – they think about their work differently and have a more expansive view of education, impact, and collaboration. We would argue that they become better educators.
The key, in essence, is to stop talking about open resources and start talking about open education. More specifically: what is the educator's biggest teaching challenge, and can we use an open education approach to help them resolve that challenge?
This results in higher quality teaching, the OERs are still free to read, and we're aligning the way we describe the benefits with how teaching-focussed academics are rewarded and recognised by their institutions and peers.
We're still learning, but today in the spirit of open we're sharing our thinking and what we've learned, along with a rubric we'll be using to assess future proposals for our OE program. I'm really looking forward to seeing how it works out.