This post was written by Marion Slawson, Project Lead OER PD Program
I’m delighted to be able to let you know that the much-anticipated CAUL OER Professional Development Program will be running from 26 September through to early December. This will be a foundational course, with modules covering an introduction to OER, open licensing and copyright, finding and evaluating OER, and adapting and creating OER.
To make the most of your learning experience, your new knowledge will be applied through a project plan that is developed over the course of the program. This project plan will enable you to consider and plan how you will implement your learning within your own workplace, in a way that is commensurate with your role and opportunities. All content is adapted for an Australian / New Zealand higher education context.
What will you be signing up for? The program will be delivered fully online, and there will be a combination of synchronous (real-time) sessions of up to 1 hour, as well as work to be completed independently at a time that suits you between synchronous sessions. Overall the time required should be no more than 2 hours per week.
If you’re keen to participate, we encourage you to bring a friend (a library colleague or ally, such as a learning designer or academic) so that you can collaborate as you learn and plan how you will activate and implement your knowledge. It’s a great chance to deepen understanding of OERs and the possibilities for change they offer across your workplace, in partnership with others. Of course, you can still participate solo; there will be lots of opportunities to learn with the broader group.
The course is great value, priced at just $95 for CAUL member staff and $175 for non-members. Enrolments will open in early August, so start thinking about who you can participate with now and watch this space so you can secure your place!
The Enabling a Modern Curriculum Conference Project Team is delighted to announce the second keynote presentation for the online Conference, which will be delivered by Dr Tai Peseta and a team of student partners including Thilakshi Mallawa Arachchi, Brooke Mees, Kobi Newell, Lilly-Rose Saliba and Shivani Suresh. Tai and the team of student curriculum partners from Western Sydney University will be presenting a keynote titled Curriculum co-creation as boundary-breaking: expanding our horizons for partnership between students and the academic library.
Partnering to enable a modern curriculum is one of the four themes for the Conference, and we were delighted when Dr Peseta asked if she could partner in her keynote with a team of student partners – modelling partnership while presenting about partnership!
Here’s how they describe their presentation:
We are a team of students and staff at Western Sydney University who have been working together on a university-wide initiative called 21C– a 5-year curriculum transformation project. 21C advances the principles of Partnership Pedagogy – co-design, co-development, co-delivery and co-credentialling – and our stream of work has engaged us energetically in the acts of modern curriculum-making. We have learned how university curriculum gets made through making curriculum with others (academics and external partners), resulting in 10 transdisciplinary Minors – among them – Climate Justice, Equitable Technologies, Urban Evolution, Water for Life, Global Workplaces, and Personal Innovation, and 25 Curiosity Pods that aim to address big society and future of work challenges. Like much of the student-staff curriculum partnership literature suggests (Bovill & Woolmer, 2019; Lubicz-Nawrocka, 2017), the process has been puzzling, eye-opening, satisfying, often-times uncomfortable, and packed with realisations about how power circulates in the university.
Yet, apart from seeing it as a place that collects, curates, and circulates knowledge and resources – books, articles, newspapers, videos, and that offers spaces for study, reflection, and retreat – as a team, we have engaged very little with our own university library. How does an institutional curriculum transformation project like 21C – with similar aims to CAUL’s statement on a modern curriculum – miss the potential and possibility for a more intentional curriculum partnership with the library? In what ways do the institutional boundaries and particularities of curriculum-making prevent us from engaging in a more purposeful, expansive, and productive partnership?
In our presentation, we interrogate our student-staff curriculum practices. We share our experience and diagnosis of curriculum co-creation in the university; our interpretation of the scholarly literature about how libraries are already expanding their ways of working with students as partners; and we make suggestions that encourage all of us – students, academics, and librarians – to disrupt the boundaries of curriculum co-creation together.
If you’re in Sydney, you can also catch Dr Peseta and co-facilitator Dr Amani Bell at a face-to-face workshop focused on student-staff partnerships on Thursday 13 September. Workshop places are limited, so register early! More information about the workshop is available on the Conference website.
This post was written by Dr Nicole Johnston, Project Lead, CAUL Conference
The CAUL Enabling a Modern Curriculum Conference Project Team has been working hard to put together a dynamic program for the Conference, which will be held in September.
We are delighted to announce that our first keynote speaker will be Dr Amanda White. Dr White is a Senior Lecturer and the Deputy Head (Education) of the Accounting Discipline in the UTS Business School and has been teaching accounting at the university level for almost two decades.
She will share her journey of creating an open textbook, Accounting and Accountability – an introductory accounting textbook that will be used by over 2000 students at UTS annually. Amanda is best known for loving auditing and sharing her resources with students and educators around the world through her YouTube channel Amanda Loves to Audit. In 2020 Amanda was awarded the Teaching Excellence Award for Law, Business, Economics and related areas by Universities Australia – partly for her work in creating accessible resources and OER in the area of academic integrity. In 2022, Amanda is taking on the challenge of developing an introductory accounting open textbook – the first in Australasia.
Registrations for the two day online event and face to face workshops are now open.
You’ve now got until 10 June to make your submission to present online at the Enabling a Modern Curriculum Conference in September!
Academic libraries contribute to contemporary teaching and learning in myriad ways. We know that you innovate in OER spaces, embed digital literacy instruction into curriculum, and connect your communities to the collections, information resources and learning environments they need. Your colleagues across the sector what to hear about the work you, your team, and your library are doing in this space.
The CAUL EMC Conference team invites you to submit either a lightning talk or full presentation for inclusion in the online program on Wednesday 7 and Thursday 8 September. Your abstract must reflect and engage with one or more of the following Conference themes:
Open Resources to Enable the Curriculum
Evolving our Digital Practices
Bending and Blending in Learning and Teaching
Partnering to Enable a Modern Curriculum
The call for submissions has been extended and will now close on 10 June.
No papers are required – only a 300 word abstract and a live presentation during the event.
This post was written by Dr Sara King, Training and Engagement Lead, AARNET
For the last year, CAUL’s Digital Dexterity Champions have been developing The Living Book of Digital Skills (you never knew you needed until now) (aka the GitBook). The book is a living, open source online guide to ‘modern not-quite-technical computer skills’ for researchers and the broader academic community.
The Digital Dexterity Champions help realise the goals of CAUL’s Digital Dexterity framework in university libraries through creating and sharing resources across the network, and GitBook is an extension of this work. The Champions identified a need for professional learning for themselves and the research and academic communities they serve related to an ever changing, wide ranging set of digital skills that are needed for library, teaching and research practice. While there are online instructions in various forms for just about any skill, the academic community uses these skills in particular contexts. The GitBook aims to fill this gap in professional learning for ‘not-quite-technical’ digital skills. These are the kinds of skills that are not specifically addressed in formal courses or training, but simply expected by the nature of the digital workplace and data-driven research, and ones that library staff are often approached to be able to address.
Our vision for the book is that it is made by everyone, for everyone. We want it to be accessible to both amateurs and professionals, creators and users. For this reason, we are keen to draw on the academic library community to contribute to the creation of this resource as a way to build our collective capacity to support academics working in this space.
The GitBook team has worked together to create the chapter outline, a code of conduct, instructions for contributors and a copyright statement.
Now, we need you! We’re looking for contributions large and small to build out the book.
A contribution doesn’t have to be anything complex, and you can choose to submit parts of a topic too.
Here is a sample article. You’ll notice that the text is simple and accessible to everyone, with as little jargon as possible. Where there is specialist language, it is explained and can be added to the glossary.
We’d like to invite you to contribute to the project. Here is a list of suggested articles. You can use that or if you have some other relevant content that you would like to share, please do! You can use one of the following options for submitting your contribution:
If you would like to meet the group, we meet on Friday afternoons and we are all super friendly, and welcoming to all. Please write to sara.king@aarnet.edu.au for a meeting invite.
Last week, CAUL launched the OER Collective with an inaugural Community Day for academics and library staff at 30 participating universities across Australia and New Zealand.
Highlights of the day included:
The Open Textbooks 101 session, which explore the basics of OERs generally and open textbooks specifically – what they are, how they work and the key benefits to academics, students and libraries.
A keynote from Amy Hofer, Statewide Open Education Program Director for Open Oregon. Amy provided lots of practical advice on how we can collaboratively push forward the open textbook agenda.
A panel discussion on open textbook advocacy, featuring academics and librarians from across Australia and New Zealand.
An extended Q&A session with a panel of experienced open practice librarians.
The event also featured short presentations about the OER Collective, including:
An overview of the Collective model
An introduction to the Communities of Practice
An introduction to the Collective Publishing Workflow and the documentation to support it
An introduction to the Collective Grants Program (EOIs now open!).
We had lots of great feedback:
This has been fantastic and inspirational. Thanks so much to all who ran it and contributed their knowledge on this topic.
I am very new to this space, so the sessions today have been a fantastic introduction to the world of OERs. The posting of links to resources that were being discussed throughout the sessions was super helpful. Thanks so much for organising the session and I’ll definitely be checking out the CAUL OER guide and joining the CoP.
Terrific, informative, collegial day today!
We can’t wait to do it again next year, but in the mean time, you can catch up on the event via the recording. The recording includes bookmarks so you can jump between the sessions.
You can also find a document containing all the links that were shared in the chat during the event on the event listing on the CAUL website.
Even if your institution isn’t participating in the Collective, there is lots of useful information and inspiration in the recording.
A huge big thank you to the OER Collective Project Team, particularly Tahnee Pearse, Fiona Tyson, Jaime Royals and Richard Levy, who all worked hard to bring the day together. Thanks also to our speakers and panelists, and CAUL’s Engagement & Administration Officer Cicy Zheng. Finally, a big thanks to the 300+ registrants who signed up for the event and joined us at various points during the day. The conversation in the chat was fantastic, and it was so good to see so many people together, furthering the conversation about open textbooks.
This post was written by Dr Bronte van der Hoorn, Senior Lecturer (Project Management), University of Southern Queensland
What academic has time to write an open text? Here’s why I embarked on writing my open text – it’s about using visuals in management – and why I’m glad I did.
Who is willing to print a colour book?
Central to my open text is a catalogue of visual diagrams, and these visuals had to be produced in colour. Mainstream publishers are nervous about colour-print runs, particularly if the potential readership is (relatively) small, and the market (and author!) untested. Incorporating colour diagrams was no problem for University of Southern Queensland (USQ) Open Educational Practice!
My book’s usefulness relied on the reader downloading files
My reader would get maximum value from the book by downloading and adapting the visuals for their own work. Sure, mainstream publishing can set-up a website for such ‘add ons’, but with an open text the downloads could be embedded in the book, thereby providing a fully integrated experience for the reader.
I wanted to give back to my research participants
Recruiting research participants is never easy. I always feel bad that I’m asking participants to volunteer their time for very little personal benefit. It’s not that the participants’ input doesn’t result in research outputs. But my research participants don’t share the same view as Q1 journal editors in terms of what constitutes a worthy ‘contribution’. An open text was a way to communicate my research in a way that could make a difference to practice.
Students want a take-away from their study
My current students get access to lots of eBooks and journal articles, and for many the loss of access to these resources at time of graduation is cause for disappointment. When I chose to publish an open text, I knew that at least this course resource would be accessible for students post-study – and they could share it with colleagues who weren’t students as well!
As I started writing, I was also surprised about some unexpected advantages of open text publishing…
An unexpected level of interactivity
As I started writing my open text, I came across multimedia content that would make the book more engaging. The amazing USQ Open Educational Practice team encouraged me to make use of Pressbooks multimedia and H5P capabilities and embedded videos in the volume and created dynamic hover-overs to enable interactive annotation of each visual, that helps make the book’s content clearer. The book also incorporates a H5P slider preview that enables the reader to quickly flick through each visual – that’s not possible in a hardcopy publication!
Connecting me to academia
I was always committed to my open text project but my excitement when my ‘writing’ day came around each week surprised even me. Any academic knows the competing demands we face and that finding time to write an open text isn’t easy amongst the pressure to produce top quartile articles, teaching duties, and never-ending admin requests.
However, I found this project to be refreshingly different to my other academic (and admin) work! My open text was a space for me to express my passion for the topic in a manner that accurately represented my ideas and made them accessible for my target reader. And this was a novel luxury! I acknowledge here that the USQ Open Educational Practice team were abundantly accommodating of my vision, they trusted me as the content expert to make design decisions (another delightful novelty!) and worked tirelessly to see my vision come to life.
It was during the writing of my open text that I have felt most ‘academic’. Not ‘academic’ in a theoretical, distant, clinical way – but in the way I had hoped academia would be; I was making accessible a topic that I continue to learn (research) about and was helping others to learn and grow interest and capability in that area too – not just in my classrooms, but hopefully beyond.
University libraries play a number of key roles in enabling contemporary teaching and learning, including:
curating, collecting and creating information resources related to the curriculum
consulting and advising through curriculum design processes
partnering with educational designers and academic developers to provide holistic support for course development
embedding information literacy instruction in the curriculum
championing digital literacy
supporting academics to find, use, adapt or create open educational resources.
In many institutions, academic skills development is also part of the library’s remit. Even the work libraries undertake that isn’t directly related to teaching and learning impacts it indirectly. For example, supporting open scholarship results in more open access research outputs, which are in turn used in teaching and learning.
Libraries contribute to contemporary teaching and learning in a myriad ways and so our focus on this blog will also be broad. We are keen to explore the various ways that libraries enable a modern curriculum, and to amplify the work CAUL Member institutions do in the teaching and learning space.
So, we have two questions for you!
What topics related to libraries’ role in teaching and learning would you like to see featured here on the blog? Share your thoughts about the topics you’d like to see us explore in the comments! If you’re reading this post as an email, click the post title to head to the blog and add your comment.
Do you have an idea for a blog post you’d like to write? Perhaps there is something great happening at your institution that you’d like to share, an event that you’d like to write an analysis of, an important message you need to get out, or a resource you’d like to highlight. Perhaps you’d like to share about what enabling a modern curriculum means to you. If you would like to write something from the blog, then we would like to hear from you! You can contact me – Kate Davis (CAUL Director, Strategy & Analytics) – with your ideas for posts.
This post was written by Fiona Salisbury, Executive Director Library and University Librarian at La Trobe University. Fiona is a member of the CAUL Board and the Program Director for the Enabling a Modern Curriculum Program.
It’s been just over 12 months since we launched the CAUL Enabling a Modern Curriculum Program. I am amazed at what has been achieved in this period—but, not surprised! The Program is an example of what 40 library practitioners from 28 institutions can do when they get together to have some fun with five projects. At the end of a very busy year full of competing priorities, I am delighted to say that all projects are on track and some major milestones have been met in 2021.
The Open Educational Resources Collective Pilot Project team developed the Open Educational Resources (OER) Collective model, which was endorsed by the CAUL Board at its November meeting. In developing the model the Project team reviewed the literature, scanned the environment, and surveyed CAUL members. The result is a robust model that will provide an opportunity for participating institutions to publish open textbooks on a shared platform and build institutional capability. It will also provide opportunities for collaborative, cross-institutional development of open textbooks. The OER Collective model will commence from January 2022 and the call for participation is now open. The OER Collective is underpinned by communities of practice for library staff and academics, and the Project team is now working on resources and events that will be part of the launch of the communities of practice in the New Year.
The Open Educational Resources Professional Development Program Project team developed a proposal for an OER professional development (PD) program, which was endorsed by the CAUL Board at its November meeting. There are few OER PD programs available for library staff so this program will fill a gap for library practitioners and allied colleagues in Australia and New Zealand. Informed by a literature review, an environmental scan, and feedback from CAUL members, the OER PD program will be for both experienced and novice practitioners. The aim is to build capacity in leadership of OER practice relating to open textbooks, open educational practices and pedagogy, advocacy, and communications. Next steps for the project team include developing a detailed course overview, structure, and delivery timeline.
The Open Educational Resources Advocacy Project team progressed thinking about how academic libraries can best tackle the issue of raising the visibility of the OER agenda in the higher education sector and nationally. The critical nature of this task cannot be underestimated, and to inform their thinking the team collected data on institutional and individual perspectives on OERs, consulted with key contacts, completed a review of existing OER advocacy resources, and curated a collection of fifty exemplary assets. The team has laid the groundwork for the next step, which is to develop an OER advocacy toolkit proposal that will go to the CAUL Board for endorsement in 2022.
The Enabling a Modern Curriculum with Students as Partners (SaP) Project team launched the National Review of ‘Students as Partners’ in Australian Academic Libraries and completed a national survey of academic libraries across Australia to understand their current perceptions, practices and goals around SaP. Respondents included 15 university librarians and 182 library staff. The project team reported on their preliminary research findings and highlighted project initiatives at the recent Students as Partners roundtable. Individual team members also developed 11 SaP case study projects to be undertaken in their respective libraries. When completed, these case studies and other examples collected via the survey, will create an evidence base to inform a practice toolkit to support CAUL member institutions to engage with student partners as routine academic library practice. What’s more, in 2022 the team will model a SaP approach by collaborating with students on the development of the toolkit.
The CAUL Enabling a Modern Curriculum Conference Project team developed a conference proposal, which was endorsed by the CAUL Board at its September meeting. The conference dates are set – Wednesday 7 and Thursday 8 September 2022 for the online program, and Tuesday 13 September for the face to face events in five capital cities – so make sure CAUL’s inaugural conference is in your calendar. The Project team has planned a hybrid event that will include a mix of workshops, online keynotes and in-person events. There are four conference themes:
Open Resources to enable the curriculum
Evolving our digital practices
Bending and blending in learning and teaching
Partnership to enable a modern curriculum.
Stay tuned for more information and a call for participation in March 2022.
It’s been inspiring working with the project team leaders and their teams this year. Each project team has a distinctive focus and is getting on with the task at hand. A strong emphasis on evidence and engagement through CAUL member surveys and briefing sessions, wide promotion of the projects, creative video production, and blog posts are characteristic of the way the teams work. Since mid-September there have been 20 posts here on the Enabling a Modern Curriculum blog. The blog has an international following, and its scope extends beyond the projects to all the ways libraries enable the curriculum. I encourage you to contribute to the clog in 2022. If you are interested contact a member of the blog editorial team who will be happy to hear from you.
Thank you to everyone who has been involved and contributed to the CAUL Enabling a Modern Curriculum Program this year. This overview doesn’t do justice to the enormous effort and huge contribution of individuals and project teams. I’d like to thank our Project Team Leaders (Marion Slawson – FedUni; Tahnee Pearse – USQ; Adrian Stagg – USQ; Dr Nicole Johnson – ECU; Dr Mollie Dollinger – Deakin), project team members, Dr Kate Davis and staff in the CAUL National Office. It’s a collective effort sustaining such a vibrant and dynamic program. But intentionally positioning academic libraries to build national partnerships to enable the transformation of learning and teaching at their institutions is well worth every effort.
The blog editorial team will be taking a break over the next few weeks. You can expect to hear from us again in the second week in January. We hope everyone in our community has a chance to wind down and take time out over the festive period.
In Open Access Week, we collaborated with Open Access Australasia to put together an event exploring the benefits of, and barriers to adopting, adapting and creating open educational resources. The event featured four case studies with academics who have adopted, adapted or created open educational resources, and unpacked some of the benefits they encountered and the barriers they identified.
Along with the recording, we also wanted to share a bunch of resources that were posted in the chat during the event, and the responses the audience gave to some questions we asked during the event.
About the case studies
We featured four brief interviews with academics during the event, with details shared below. For each of these case studies, we have an extended version coming over the next few weeks, so stay tuned for that!
OER adoption with Dr Mathew Marques
Dr Mathew Marques used a psychology open textbook from the NOBA Project in his course at La Trobe University. He also switched the proprietary software usually used in the course for open source software. More on that coming soon in an extended version of Mathew’s case study!
OER adaptation with Dr Wendy Hargreaves
Dr Wendy Hargreaves led a project at the University of Southern Queensland that adapted the open textbook College Success for the Australian context. The adaptation, Academic Success, is available from USQ’s Pressbooks platform.
Indigenous knowledge and OERs with Dr Johanna Funk
The final case study explored how the underpinning philosophy of open educational practice aligns with Indigenous knowledge practices. Dr Johanna Funk is an academic at Charles Darwin University who uses OERs created by and with Indigenous creators in her teaching practice to encourage students to develop their understanding of Indigenous knowledge practices.
Tackling the barriers
For each of the case studies, we explored strategies for overcoming a barrier that the interviewee mentioned. For each barrier, I posed a question to the audience and to one of my co-facilitators. We tacked four barriers or challenges:
Finding a textbook that covers all of the necessary content in sufficient depth.
Understanding conventions around sharing and reusing content.
Managing a large and complex open textbook project.
Understanding Indigenous knowledge practices.
What the audience said
Browse through the questions we posed and the answers the audience gave.
Reading this post in an email? Click through to the blog to see the embedded slides.
What our panel said
Here’s what our panelists said about some of the barriers our interviewees highlighted.
Finding a textbook that covers all of the relevant content in sufficient depth
I asked Stephen Chang from La Trobe University what resources he would suggest to help academics work around this. You can hear his answer in the video, and here’s the list of resources he suggested:
NOBA open textbooks in psychology: Stephen suggested looking for discipline-specific open resource collections, and the NOBA project is an example of one for psychology.
One of the pieces of advice Dr Govind Krishnamoorthy offered other academics was to think about an open textbook development as a big project. I think a sense of not knowing where to start or how to manage an open textbook project can be a significant barrier for many academics. I asked my co-facilitator Tahnee Pearse to share a bit about how USQ library supports open textbook creation, and what resources she would suggest to help with tackling the management of an open text project. She told us about the Rebus Foundation. Their website is an excellent source of material on writing and publishing open textbooks.
They also run the Rebus Community, which is a “global community working together to create and share Open Educational Resources (OER). Here you’ll find people, processes, and tools to support your publishing efforts. You can use this platform to:
start an open textbook project
give and receive guidance on publishing open textbooks
post and respond to calls for contributors, and
connect with global communities that are changing the world through Open Education.” (Rebus Community)
Additional resources
One of my co-facilitators, Adrian Stagg, also shared some general resources for authors of OERs. Here are the resources he spoke about:
A huge thank you to everyone involved in bringing this event together, including our case study interviewees, my co-facilitators (Fiona Salisbury, Stephen Chang, Tahnee Pearse, Adrian Stagg), interviewers (Nikki Andersen), and planners (Marion Slawson). And a big thanks to the Open Access Week organising committee, led by Thomas Shafee.
