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OPEN EDUCATION
Open Education
International Perspectives in
Higher Education
Edited by Patrick Blessinger and TJ Bliss
https://www.openbookpublishers.com
© 2016 Patrick Blessinger and TJ Bliss. Copyright of each chapter is maintained by the
author/s.
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Attribution should include the following information:
Patrick Blessinger and TJ Bliss, Open Education: International Perspectives in Higher Education.
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0103
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Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or
error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher.
The Hewlett Foundation (http://www.hewlett.org) has generously contributed towards
the publication of this volume.
ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-278-3
ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-279-0
ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-280-6
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DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0103
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Contents
Notes on Contributors viii
Foreword
David Wiley
xxi
Preface
Patrick Blessinger and TJ Bliss
1
1. Introduction to Open Education: Towards a Human
Rights Theory
Patrick Blessinger and TJ Bliss
11
2. Emancipation through Open Education: Rhetoric or
Reality?
Andy Lane
31
3. Technology Strategies for Open Educational Resource
Dissemination
Phil Barker and Lorna M. Campbell
51
4. Identifying Categories of Open Educational Resource
Users
Martin Weller, Beatriz de los Arcos, Rob Farrow, Rebecca Pitt and
Patrick McAndrew
73
5. Situated Learning in Open Communities: The TED
Open Translation Project
Lidia Cámara de la Fuente and Anna Comas-Quinn
93
6. Educational Policy and Open Educational Practice
in Australian Higher Education
Adrian Stagg and Carina Bossu
115
7. The Identified Informal Learner: Recognizing Assessed
Learning in the Open
Patrina Law
137
8. Transformation of Teaching and Learning in Higher
Education towards Open Learning Arenas: A Question
of Quality
Ebba Ossiannilsson, Zehra Altinay, and Fahriye Altinay
159
9. Three Approaches to Open Textbook Development
Rajiv S. Jhangiani, Arthur G. Green, and John D. Belshaw
179
10. What Does It Mean to Open Education? Perspectives
on Using Open Educational Resources at a US Public
University
Linda Vanasupa, Amy Wiley, Lizabeth Schlemer, Dana Ospina,
Peter Schwartz, Deborah Wilhelm, Catherine Waitinas and Kellie Hall
199
11. Expanding Access to Science Field-Based Research
Techniques for Students at a Distance through Open
Educational Resources
Audeliz Matias, Kevin Woo, and Nathan Whitley-Grassi
221
12. A Practitioner’s Guide to Open Educational Resources:
A Case Study
Howard Miller
237
13. Open Assessment Resources for Deeper Learning
David Gibson, Dirk Ifenthaler, and Davor Orlic
257
14. Promoting Open Science and Research in Higher
Education: A Finnish Perspective
Ilkka Väänänen and Kati Peltonen
281
15. Credentials for Open Learning: Scalability and Validity
Mika Hoffman and Ruth Olmsted
301
16. Open Education Practice at the University of Southern
Queensland
Ken Udas, Helen Partridge and Adrian Stagg
321
Index 343
This book is dedicated to educators all over the world and to the
members of the International Higher Education Teaching and Learning
Association whose passion for teaching, learning, research, and service
are helping to transform the academy in many positive ways.
Vision, mission, and values statement
The long-term vision of HETL is to improve educational outcomes
in higher education by creating new knowledge and advancing the
scholarship and practice of teaching and learning.
To bring that vision to reality, the present mission of HETL is to
develop a global community of higher education professionals who
come together to share their knowledge and expertise in teaching and
learning.
To effectively fulfill that mission, HETL adheres to the values of
academic integrity, collegiality, and diversity. As such, HETL supports
academic and pedagogical pluralism, diversity of learning, as well as
practices that promote sustainable learning and peace.
Membership, conference, publishing, and
research information
For information about HETL, please see https://www.hetl.org
Patrick Blessinger
Founder, Director, and Chief Research Scientist
The HETL Association
patrickblessinger@gmail.com
Lorraine Stefani
President
The HETL Association
lorraine.stefani@auckland.ac.nz
16. Open Education Practice at the
University of Southern Queensland
Ken Udas, Helen Partridge and Adrian Stagg
The University of Southern Queensland (USQ) has a strong social
justice ethos. Based on this ethos, USQ is seeking to re-position
and re-conceptualize itself as a university grounded in the
principles of openness and open education. This chapter describes
the experiences of USQ as it strives to build a culture of openness
and agility and investigates the activities undertaken by USQ
including the issues, barriers, challenges and opportunities faced.
The chapter concludes with a discussion of the key lessons learnt
from USQ’s journey to more fully embrace Open Educational
Practice and culture.
© K. Udas, H. Partridge and A. Stagg, CC BY 4.0 hp://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0103.16
322 Open Education
Introduction
This contribution describes the experiences of the University of
Southern Queensland (USQ) as it strives to build a culture of openness
and agility. The aim of this chapter it to give a comprehensive overview
of one university’s journey to re-position and re-conceptualize itself for
openness, including the activities undertaken and the issues, barriers,
challenges and opportunities faced. USQ is a regional Australian
university offering a broad range of academic programming at the
undergraduate and postgraduate levels. It has been a leader in distance
learning since the 1970s and currently 75% of the University’s 28,000
students undertake their studies via online or distance modes. The
University has a strong ethos and reputation for serving people that are
generally under-represented in higher education. Its student population
includes part-time working students, people from socioeconomically
disadvantaged backgrounds, and from remote and rural areas. With
a strong social justice ethos it is therefore not surprising that USQ is
seeking to embrace the principles and practices of openness and open
education. We begin with a brief review of relevant literature before
providing an overview of USQ with specific focus on the evolving focus
and support for Open Educational Practice. The chapter concludes by
discussing USQ’s key lessons learnt and the next steps.
Literature review
Open Educational Practice (OEP), like online learning, has the potential
to transform higher education learning and teaching (Bossu, Bull and
Brown, 2012). OEP refers to the teaching techniques that draw upon
open technologies and high-quality open educational resources (OER) in
order to facilitate collaborative and flexible learning (Beetham, Falconer,
McGill and Littlejohn, 2012). OER, which are defined as “teaching,
learning and research materials that make use of appropriate tools, such
as open licensing, to permit their free reuse, continuous improvement
and repurposing by others for educational purposes” (Orr, Rimini and
Van Damme, 2015, p. 17) are a key mechanism for this collaboration.
The broader term OEP includes Open Access Publishing (OA), Free and
Open Source Software (FOSS), open policy, open textbooks, open data,
open research and, more broadly, open education.
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16. Open Education Practice at the University of Southern Queensland
OEP has been perceived as response to the need for affordable,
equitable access to education and as a way for institutions to meet the
rising demand globally for university education (Bossu, Brown and
Bull, 2012). Whilst open education can be pursued for on-campus degree
programs, the benefits have been discussed primarily for distance and
online education as a way of broadening access to students whilst
potentially reducing the costs associated with studying at university
(Scanlon, McAndrew and O’Shea, 2015). Open education could
provide lower- or no-cost resources to support education in rural and
remote communities, and also empower learner-centered educational
approaches that build contextual cultural competencies within specific
student cohorts (Willems and Bossu, 2012).
When compared to initiatives and engagement with open education
in countries such as Canada, North America and the United Kingdom;
Australian open practice is still maturing (Bossu and Tynan, 2011). The
three current key focus areas arising from the global literature with
particular application to the Australian context are (1) policy frameworks,
(2) open textbooks and (3) formal support for staff capacity-building.
It will be demonstrated that the University of Southern Queensland,
through exploratory and developing initiatives, is addressing these
priority areas.
Global challenges for the open education movement are mirrored
in the Australian environment, although some factors are of particular
concern nationally. The lack of practitioner adoption globally has
been attributed to low awareness, a perceived lack of quality in open
resources, low interest in investing time to author OER, an absence
of extrinsic motivators such as institutional reward and recognition
programs, and a lack of formal institutional-level support to build staff
capacity (Bossu, Bull and Brown, 2012).
In the Australian higher education sector, there is also a lack of
regulatory frameworks or policy relating to, or supporting OEP (Bossu
and Fountain, 2015), a lack of evidence- and practice-based research
(Stagg, 2014) or empirical research about the impact of openness on
the sector (Murphy, 2012), and a rising need to reconcile government
and institutional copyright policy frameworks with the environment
required to fulsomely engage with Open Educational Practice (Padgett,
2013).
324 Open Education
In order to create an environment where taxpayers experience
transparency in government processes (as appropriate) and access to
publicly-funded research outcomes, the Australian Government has
adopted open principles to license government data (ANDS, 2015),
encouraged the selection of open source software in the first instance
(Australian Government, 2011), funded open data sets (ANDS, 2015),
a National Digital Learning Resource Network (Education Services
Australia, 2012), and a nascent Open Access and Licensing Framework
(AusGOAL, 2011).
Despite these initiatives, there has been no mandate, nor even a
consolidated approach to open educational policy in Australian higher
education. Some Australian institutions have enacted policy linking
engagement with OEP to formal recognition and promotion (UTas, 2014)
whilst many others have purely focused on open research outcomes and
data with little attention to learning and teaching.
There is strong conceptual alignment between the goals of OEP
and the recent “Keep it Clever” statement on education (Universities
Australia, 2015), but, as yet, explicit discussion about this alignment
has been absent. The “Keep it Clever” policy document contextualizes
the discussion by stating that educational investment is directly linked
to future positive economic growth and international competitiveness
(Universities Australia, 2015). In order to do so, it calls for “a new social
contract with the Australian public” (p. 4, own emphasis). If the term
“social contract” is used in a historically philosophical sense, this policy
document is both conceptually aligned and politically sympathetic with
openness. The principles outlined in the statement refer to:
• Accessibility — that Australians should be able to readily access a
university education;
• Affordability — that the cost of higher education should not be such
that it excludes segments of Australian society;
• Quality — which refers to the international quality of both teaching and
learning, and research endeavors;
• Research capability — in that universities have a broader societal role in
the generation of knowledge;
• Resourcing — especially calls for sustainable models of education; and
• Accountability — infers not only accountability but transparency for
the return on investment for taxpayer funds (p. 5).
325
16. Open Education Practice at the University of Southern Queensland
Open education systems can be leveraged to influence positive
outcomes indexed against all these criteria, however the systems are not
referenced within the document. This perhaps illustrates a stark gap
in national advocacy and political lobbying for open education in the
Australian landscape.
The use of “new social contract” in the preamble (p. 4) invites deeper
exploration of the status of open education in the proposed educational
future. The foundation of the social contract is that, in order to achieve
security and a civil good, citizens willingly cede some individual freedoms
to the state (Hobbes, 1651) — although Hobbes did admonish citizens to
be wary of submitting to systems that did not serve the ideal of “public
good”. In this way, the social contract is further aligned with Bakunin’s
collectivist anarchy movement of the mid-1800’s, which respected the
differences of individuals within society, but called for societal equality
and equity of access to “social rights” that included education (Masters,
1974). If one considers the assertion by open practitioners (McKerlich,
Ives and McGreal, 2013) that current educational models and copyright
policy frameworks are insufficient to meet the demands of equitably-
accessible twenty-first century education, then the “new social contract”
needs to strongly incorporate aspects of openness.
One could even posit that national openness is a response to ideals
that do not reflect those ideals of “social good”, and that the change
enacted by open practitioners is an approach consistent with Hobbes’
admonishment, by opening a traditionally closed and opaquely
accountable sector. These goals are consistent with both the policy
statement and open education overall and exploring these in more
detail provides a basis — both practically and philosophically — for
policy-supported practice.
The Keep it Clever policy statement, like the previous Review of
Australian Higher Education (Bradley, Noonan, Nugent, and Scales, 2008)
espouses values that are conceptually and practically aligned with open
education — although the latter was far more proscriptive in setting
targets for the Australian sector in terms of participation and inclusion.
If the Keep it Clever principles are examined through an open lens, the
potential for OEP to be woven into national mechanisms becomes explicit.
Accessibility and affordability are conceptually underpinned by
social inclusion and the removal of barriers to a university education.
326 Open Education
Participation in higher education (especially for indigenous, rural and
remote, and low socio-economic status students) has featured in public
educational policy since the early 1990’s, and arguably there has been
little overall success during this time period (Gale and Mills, 2013).
OEP provides a way to leverage reduced-cost or free learning resources
(especially in terms of textbooks), which addresses a significant access
barrier for Australian students. Likewise, authentically open courses can
provide students with a transparent view of university education and
even assist students to transition into their first year by “demystifying”
“university education — a key component of nationally recognized
transitional pedagogy (Kift, Nelson and Clarke, 2010).
There are claims that by providing international access to OER
that the quality of learning and teaching resources can be improved.
A transparent teaching environment provides access to others’ work,
which can be translated and synthesized into local teaching practice
contexts by both educators and students (Bossu and Tynan, 2011).
Australian research capacity can be enhanced by opening access to
research data and published output with the realization that data sets
and publications can become OER when used for learning and teaching
purposes. Increased access to Australian research and data has the
potential to broaden collaboration (especially internationally and cross-
discipline), provide replicable or comparative data sets and also build a
strong foundation for future research.
The aforementioned need for sustainable educational systems in the
face of rising demand will need appropriate resourcing. Whilst open
business models are still maturing (Butcher and Hoosen, 2011), open
institutions are re-evaluating the balance between open content and
commercialization. Additionally, the notion of reputational capital in
higher education — gained through transparency and openness — is
gaining traction. Whilst universities have traditionally focused on
commercializing research output there is a growing acceptance of the
societal role of universities in knowledge construction. The traditionally
espoused value of knowledge construction and dissemination is
transitioning to an enacted value — in part due to the role of openness.
Given the publicly funded nature of education, a level of accountability
should be expected in both research and learning and teaching. Open
327
16. Open Education Practice at the University of Southern Queensland
education systems have the potential to make the teaching resources
and, in a small part, the learning experience, transparent to the sector.
The current weakness in open rhetoric internationally has been
practicality (or a lack thereof). Evidence exists demonstrating that OEP
is, after ten years, neither widespread nor well-known (Conole, 2013),
and is far from mainstream practice (Lane and McAndrew, 2010). This
is certainly the case in Australia.
One of the key areas requiring significant development is internal
staff capacity building. Staff capacity development is essential to
successful engagement with OEP as there are inherent complexities that
have been mostly unexplored through empirical research (Stagg, 2014).
A review of institutional websites shows that many universities
currently have a general information webpage about open
resources — accessible to both staff and students — and that enquiries
are directed to the library. Open access to research and providing
information supporting open publishing models appears far more
frequently. The University of Southern Queensland and the University
of Tasmania were the only institutions that had visible resources
contextualized for the learner (whether staff or students) to explicitly
guide the user through the use of open resources and the possible
benefits to teaching and learning practices. This approach mirrors the
maturation of the open discourse internationally; initiating intended
change through a focus on access to resources and the subsequent
realization that this was an insufficient catalyst alone.
This perception is perhaps exacerbated by open education research,
which often over-simplifies the practitioner experience in (re)using
OER by either presenting the activity as a linear process or using lead-in
fictional use cases that exemplify “best experience” rather than ones
grounded in the complex reality of reuse (Wenk, 2010). This further
illuminates a professional development gap at the institutional and
sector level in Australia.
Any attempt to promote sustainable engagement with open education
needs to acknowledge staff learning challenges and offer a mechanism
to frame strategic responses grounded in institutional needs, which
has yet to occur in an holistic, integrated manner in Australian higher
education.
328 Open Education
The University of Southern Queensland
The University of Southern Queensland (USQ) is based in Toowoomba,
Queensland, Australia, with campuses also in Springfield and Ipswich.
The institution was established in 1967 as the Queensland Institute of
Technology (Darling Downs). In 1971, it became the Darling Downs
Institute of Advanced Education, then the University College of Southern
Queensland in 1990 and finally the University of Southern Queensland
in 1992. In less than fifty years, USQ has become a prominent teaching
and research institution providing education worldwide. In its short
history, USQ has grown rapidly in size and complexity.
USQ consists of five divisions: (i) Academic Division has overall
responsibility for the University’s academic program portfolio; its
continuous improvement, and its quality delivery across all campuses;
(ii) Academic Services Division supports the learning, teaching
and research needs of the University; (iii) Research and Innovation
Division coordinates the University’s research agenda; (iv) Students
and Communities Division is responsible for supporting the student
experience and building relationships with current, future and
past student communities; and (v) University Services Division has
oversight of University finance, human resources, sustainable business
management and improvement and campus services.
USQ’s Academic Division consists of two faculties: the Faculty
of Business, Education, Law and Arts (BELA) consists of six schools:
(i) School of Arts and Communication; (ii) School of Commerce;
(iii) School of Law and Justice; (iv) School of Linguistics, Adult and
Specialist Education; (v) School of Management and Enterprise; (vi)
School of Teacher Education and Early Childhood. The Faculty of
Health, Engineering and Sciences (HES) consists of six schools: (i)
School of Agricultural, Computational and Environmental Sciences; (ii)
School of Civil Engineering and Surveying; and (iii) School of Nursing
and Midwifery; (iv) School of Health and Wellbeing; (v) School of
Mechanical and Electrical Engineering and (vi) School of Psychology
and Counselling. In addition, USQ has three colleges: the Open Access
College, College for Indigenous Studies, Education and Research, and
the Queensland College of Wine Tourism. The University has three
research institutes:
329
16. Open Education Practice at the University of Southern Queensland
• Australian Digital Futures Institute (ADFI).
• Institute for Agriculture and the Environment (IAgE).
• Institute for Resilient Regions (IRR).
USQ has a diverse student population, including undergraduate and
postgraduate students from more than 100 countries, with more than
80 nationalities. The current student enrolment is approximately 28,000
and, of this total, more than 20,000 study off-campus by online/distance
learning. Just over 54% of the students are female, over one quarter are
classified as low socio-economic status and only 10% are first school
leavers.
In 2013, 496 Higher Degree Research students, 4,433 Higher Degree
Coursework and 14,930 Bachelor level students were enrolled at USQ.
In 2013, over 5,000 international students were enrolled, with 1,797
students studying on-campus and the reminder studying outside
Australia either through USQ Education Partners or directly with USQ.
The USQ Strategic Plan 2016-2020 is built on three pillars — Education,
Research, Enriched and Enterprise. The Plan guides the University
in delivering its mission, which is “to lead in economic and social
development through higher education and research excellence”:
• Education: USQ successfully blends access with excellence and is a
leading university for student experience and graduate outcomes.
• Research: USQ is internationally recognized for high impact research
in our areas of research focus.
• Enterprise: USQ is a socially responsible and well managed enterprise
with a work culture that promotes high performance and is reflective
of our values.
USQ and the Conundrum of Openness
The topic of OEP can seem counter-intuitive. After all, it seems natural
that the University would create value through limiting access to data,
information and knowledge generating a market based on constraint.
The internet of ideas makes information markets based on restriction
very expensive to create and protect, while contributing and using the
open market of ideas and artefacts potentially reduces a range of costs
and may increase margins for the University’s core product offerings.
330 Open Education
As will be mentioned in the coming paragraphs, Openness is not an
all or nothing proposition. Although one might argue that there is
value that the University can derive from limitation (its credentials
and patentable discoveries, for instance), but not from unnecessarily
limiting access to the information it uses for the purposes of learning and
teaching. Openness need not simply be accepted as an article of faith,
but it must be accepted in the spirit of the principles that provide the
contours of open practice. USQ has found an easy alignment between
the historical mission (based on the notion of social justice and access)
and the contemporary Open Educational Practice. For any institution,
the question of why openness is an attractive proposition is a critical
first step for purposeful engagement. In recent years, MOOCs (Massive
Open Online Courses) were a high profile example of international
engagement with perceived openness that was often neither connected
nor beneficial to institutional goals or the enhancement of learning and
teaching practice.
The following Openness Principles1 are therefore guiding USQ’s
OEP endeavors:
1 The following are some of the resources that influenced the development of the
proposed Openness Principles at USQ.
• AACU: Academic Freedom and Educational Responsibility (http://www.aacu.org/about/
statements/documents/academicfreedom.pdf)
• AAUP: 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure (http://www.aaup.
org/report/1940-statement-principles-academic-freedom-and-tenure)
• AAUP: Academic Freedom and Electronic Communications (http://www.aaup.org/report/
academic-freedom-and-electronic-communications-2014)
• Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm (http://www.benkler.org/
CoasesPenguin.html)
• EDUCASUE Openness (https://net.educause.edu/elements/staff_web_pages/doblinger/
openness.pdf)
• Free Cultural Works (http://freedomdefined.org/Definition)
• Future Learn (https://about.futurelearn.com/terms/openness)
• Human Rights Initiative (http://www.humanrightsinitiative.org/programs/ai/rti/articles/
handbook_intro_to_openness_&_ai.pdf)
• Oxford Scholarship Online: The Information Society and the Welfare State:
The Finnish Model (http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:
oso/9780199256990.001.0001/acprof-9780199256990)
• Open Government (http://www.opengovpartnership.org/about/open-government-declaration)
• Openness Index (https://wiki.jasig.org/display/2398/Openness+Index)
• Open Science Commons (http://sciencecommons.org/resources/readingroom/
principles-for-open-science)
• Principles on Open Public Sector Information (http://www.oaic.gov.au/images/documents/
information-policy/information-policy-agency-resources/principles_on_psi_short.pdf)
• Unisa Open (http://www.unisa.ac.za/default.asp?Cmd=ViewContent&ContentID=27755)
• WikiEducator (http://wikieducator.org/The_right_license/Free_cultural_works)
331
16. Open Education Practice at the University of Southern Queensland
1. Openness as Core to Education and Social Justice: As an actor in the
twenty-first century, USQ understands that education is practiced
in a data, information, and knowledge ecosystem that is supported
by technical and social networks. Our principal role as a university
is to grow knowledge from more to more, while promoting social
progress and social justice. Open access is a principal factor in the
efficient and effective distribution of information for the growth of
knowledge and promotion of critical and reflective education leading
to civic capacity. We optimize our contribution to the open education
ecosystem by supporting the use and creation of free cultural works
that provide:2
a. the freedom to use the work and enjoy the benefits of using it;
b. the freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired
from it;
c. the freedom to make and redistribute copies, in whole or in part,
of the information or expression; and
d. the freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute
derivative works.
2. Respect for the Traditions of the Academy: Openness is a
fundamental tenant of academic freedom and responsibility for the
academy and the professoriate, striking at the very purpose of the
University and its singular role in free societies.
3. Do the Right Thing: Opening up educational resources for use,
re-use, and modification is a moral good and our academic,
professional, and managerial staff along with our partners should
look to contribute to the stock of open educational resources.
4. Think of our Students: Whenever possible the University should
default to OEP to reduce the overall cost of receiving a high quality,
accessible, and affordable education including the use of open
textbooks, journals, course materials, other supplementary content,
and technologies.
5. Access and Distribution with Respect: Individual learners, faculty,
and visitors to our sites must feel confident that they can participate
in a safe and secure environment for learning, which respects the
content they generate as part of their learning.
6. Default to Open: We believe that opening access to educational
resources is a moral good, and when permissions allow, we will
contribute any content or translations generated by our academic,
2 http://freedomdefined.org/Definition
332 Open Education
professional, and managerial staff and community for the purposes
of learning, teaching, and scholarship as OERs under the Creative
Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.
7. Lawful Practice: Our partner publishers and content suppliers need
to be able to make their own decisions about how their materials and
contributions are used. For partners who request that we restrict free
access to their content to a limited number or type of user, we respect
their requirements and manage their content with the appropriate
Digital Rights Management technology.3
8. Alignment with Public Good: The University of Southern
Queensland is aligned with the broad goals and application of the
Australian Governments Open Access and Licencing Framework
(AUSGoal)4 and Office of the Australian Information Commissioner’s
Eight Principles on Open Public Sector Information in the context of
course materials and information management broadly:
a. Open access to information — a default position.
b. Engaging the community.
c. Effective information governance.
d. Robust information asset management.
e. Discoverable and useable information.
f. Clear reuse rights.
g. Appropriate charging for access.
h. Transparent enquiry and complaints processes.
9. Agility and Agile Practice: The University of Southern Queensland
strives to be an “agile” organization through the adoption of
agile management practices, for which Openness is an essential
precondition.
Openness and Opportunities at USQ
The Openness movement is creating opportunities that challenge
traditional business and education models and may accelerate the use
and impact of information and communication technologies (ICT), new
media, online education and distributed learning. Although USQ was
an early leader in the OER movement, it has not taken full advantage of
3 https://www.libraryforall.org/openness-principles
4 http://www.ausgoal.gov.au
333
16. Open Education Practice at the University of Southern Queensland
that position. That being said, it is still in a position, with appropriate
leadership, to take uncommon advantage of opportunities and assert an
international leadership position in a new order. This will take fortitude,
bravery and willingness to experiment small, and fail early and often,
while succeeding with confidence and making those successes really
matter. Although OEP is a long-term journey that keeps renewing itself,
we need to recognize that others have taken steps by formalizing open
policies at the institutional level. Notable institutions include Lincoln
University (NZ), Otago Polytechnic (NZ), Athabasca University (CA),
the State University of New York (US) and many others.
By experimenting with and adopting open practice, we are practicing
in ways that optimize the value we create through the generation,
curation, use and reuse of information and knowledge assets. We will
also promote meaningful collaboration that brings tangible benefits to
the University, its learners, alumni and broader stakeholders. It helps us
better engage with our social justice mission and, as a public university,
provides us with a natural mechanism to maximize the value that every
Australian can receive from their publicly funded university sector.
Research among universities participating in some form of OEP has
indicated that the priority of the benefits of openness are as follows:
1. participating in an international network of like-minded partners;
2. philanthropic mission/social justice; and
3. new business opportunities.
According to almost every education report available today, twenty-
first century education will be different from the past. Our learners and
our funders will expect (if they do not already) and we will witness
increasingly (if we have not already) personalized, data driven and
technology-enabled learning opportunities. We will participate in the
continued disaggregation of educational services on the institutional
level, and we will facilitate the re-aggregation of education on the
personal level.
Although still under iterative development indicative of agile
methodologies, unique educational processes enabled through Open
Educational Practice are emerging within the OERu. This is evident in
the growing embrace of OER and of courses collaboratively designed
and developed by teams including content area specialists, educational
334 Open Education
technologists and instructional designers who are forging new
approaches to learning and teaching scholarship. This same approach,
supported through the pedagogy of discovery5 lends itself to courses
effectively designed through crowdsourcing, affinity grouping and
distributed educational activities. OERu has proposed a formal program
of Academic Volunteers International6 that was used during USQ’s
first OERu course offering. The course was intended to support peer
mentoring through critique and reflection and, more broadly, reflect
a gradual shift toward learner-centered pedagogies and competency-
based, outcomes-oriented approaches. Participation in twenty-first
century education will require agile organizational management and
governance, digital fluency and transparency that can only result
from open processes and practices and freely available content. The
internet and its presentation environment, the web, were architected to
liberate information, not to impose barriers. The corporatization of the
University demands creative and innovative approaches to a “market”
that feeds on agility. Open education is the natural consequence of and
catalyst for delivering education in such an environment and delivering
in such an environment sits at the very center of USQ’s learning and
teaching strategy.
Current Openness Activities at USQ
During the past five years, the University of Southern Queensland has
been building momentum in support of its commitment to OEP and
OERs. Although OEP is not an all or nothing strategy, it is one that
requires thoughtful engagement throughout the University. Fortunately,
successful OEP adoption tends to have low reputational risk because
adoption tends to be agile and incremental, so OEP can be integrated
into existing operations without incurring additional and significant
cost. However, because of its somewhat counter-intuitive nature, OEP
requires discipline about how we make important strategic as well as
5 http://wikieducator.org/Kenya_national_symposium_on_open_education/
The_pedagogy_of_discovery:_Using_OER_to_enable_free_range_learning
6 OERu Proposal for action for Academic Volunteers International http://
wikieducator.org/OERu/2011.11_OERu_Proposal_for_action_for_Academic_
Volunteers_International
335
16. Open Education Practice at the University of Southern Queensland
operational decisions, the types of questions we ask of ourselves, and
how we structure those questions. For example:
• how we build our intellectual property and copyright policy is
important.
• how we identify, select and prescribe textbooks and whether we
put the onus on explaining why we would assign an expensive
proprietary text or other resource when open and free alternatives
are available of similar quality.
• assuming open licensing first of all and then only retaining all
reserved rights when there is a strong argument to doing so.
• assessing accurately the costs and risks associated with closing
content and managing proprietary intellectual property.
• how can we incentivize high quality open scholarship and publication
as appropriate.
• how can we recognize and incentivize creative reuse, sharing and the
creation of high-quality localized or internationalized works.
• clearly stating and practicing our values relative to our use and
distribution of publicly funded intellectual assets.
Although these are not the types of questions historically asked or
the standards adopted and set, they have recently become much
more clearly articulated in our work on an University IP policy, open
textbook proposal and early stages of a green paper prompting an
“open first” posture on educational content and learning technologies.
We are recognizing that simply asking the questions, publicly and with
conviction, helps promote critical thinking on the topic of openness,
creativity and innovation. Fortunately, USQ was an early adopter of
some aspects of open practice, which has generated a common identity
for a small group of academic and professional staff that have been
experimenting somewhat “under the radar”. The open practice that has
been pursued, although not fully embraced at the University, has been
enough to garner a small reputation for USQ as being a progressive
practitioner in the area.
The University’s current initiatives and activities fall under five
classifications:
1. Open Educational Resources
a. active participation in the OERu.
336 Open Education
b. the first Australian university to join and contribute courses to the
Open Courseware Consortium (OCWC).7
c. faculty driven creation of an open textbook on Sports Physiology
that includes contributions from dozens of internationally leading
scholars who have made their contributions open for the text.
d. participation on an Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT) Seed
Grant along with colleagues at the University of Tasmania to
experiment with the development of micro Open Online Courses
(MOOCs).
e. introduction of a USQ Open Textbook Grant Scheme in which,
through a competitive process, university academics receive
funds to use or develop an open text book.
f. introduction, in 2015, of a USQ eLearning Objects Repository
(eLOR) that helped reduce barriers to sharing content internally
within the University.
2. Open policy and practice
a. building a new capacity in open education environments to
improve authoring and delivering quality through investment
in better content management, intellectual property, licensing
control and enhanced discovery.
b. establishment of a working party with representatives across the
university to explore and articulate recommendations regarding
open content licensing practices.
c. Launch of the USQ Open Practice website (http://www.usq.edu.
au/open-practice) to provide a space to formally articulate and
share USQ’s commitment to openness.
d. having proposed and now developing a workflow and content
management environment supporting open licensing for course
materials.
3. Open research
a. building a new capacity to discover and index the discovery
of open research reports on a global scale through investment
in technology and expertise, taking advantage of structured
repositories of public research and teaching materials that have
not been adequately indexed by major search engines.
7 http://www.ocwconsortium.org/news/2007/07/university-of-southern-queensland-
opencourseware
337
16. Open Education Practice at the University of Southern Queensland
b. having developed relationships with USQ researchers to openly
publish open research outputs that can be used across the
curriculum for learning and teaching.
c. having a USQ ePrints repository to enable the sharing of research
outputs to the broader national and international community.
4. Open source software
a. leadership in a collaborative project with the Open Source
Initiative (OSI), Opman Group, Origin International Technology
Law Group and the OER Foundation to develop and deliver an
open course on Free, Libre and Open Works project management
course.
b. first higher education affiliate with the OSI.
5. Open community participation
a. active participation in and creation of openly available resources
for Open Access Week, OER Week and Information and Library
Studies Week.
These efforts have built a sufficient capacity for the University to take
the next step, but without committing to do so, the USQ academics
will eventually run their course/s as open educators, find alternative
pursuits at USQ or gravitate to universities and other organizations that
value openness as a principle and innovate in their practices.
Change and Change Processes
As already mentioned, USQ has been involved with open educational
resources and open education more broadly for longer than a decade.
Some of our notable “firsts” included participation in the Open
Courseware Initiative in 2007, the OERu in 2011 and, most recently,
our affiliation with the Open Source Initiative in 2015. In very many
ways, early involvement in openness by people like Professor Emeritus
Jim Taylor on behalf of the University points to a very keen insight.
He saw that openness potentially strikes directly at the core purposes
of a university like USQ, which is committed to enhancing access to
learning. OERu provided a perfect pilot for USQ. It provided a need
to engage teachers in designing courses for an open environment, use
of open content and serious consideration of an educational model
based on credentials distributed among partner universities, course and
338 Open Education
content “owned” by a particular university, but freely available, and
without a clear sustainability model. USQ initially sought to engage
with openness through a series of small-scale, diverse projects. This
approach was designed as a multi-pronged capacity-building and
experiential learning strategy aiming for longer-term institutional
normalization. The actualization of this strategy has been a more
complex and resource-intensive undertaking.
We have become more active to incentivize engagement with a variety
of openness activities, some of which have been described to simply
illustrate how openness can liberate creativity. We have worked with
a handful of teachers to rethink the idea of a textbook so it is not only
open but is something fundamentally different than what proprietary
distributors of texts are willing to provide. We have come to grips with
the fact that it is difficult to reposition or re-conceptualize a university that
is growing, financially sound and well led like USQ, principally because
things are generally going well and there is a low sense of urgency. What
we can do is reduce the barriers to experimenting with openness, use
its language liberally, increase the viability of open options and make
decisions that place open first.
Lessons Learnt and Next Steps
It is not good enough to simply espouse openness as an “institutional
good”. Openness needs to be useful, as well, and its value needs to be
discovered and internalized locally, and in many cases individually. If
openness can help teachers more easily design their course, students
more affordably study, or the University be more creative and impactful
in its curriculum, program design and course offerings then openness
and open resources will more likely be adopted. We have learned that
open practice by academic staff needs to be an individual decision but
the University can reward and recognize open behavior and support
experimentation.
In addition to sponsoring projects which are designed to promote
open practices, making it easier to use open resources for course
design and promoting open distribution through modelling our own
practices, we are also ensuring that relevant university policies, such as
Intellectual Property, explicitly recognize open practice and that software
339
16. Open Education Practice at the University of Southern Queensland
procurement processes are open source friendly and consideration is
given to open technology standards and the consumption and creation
of open file formats. The coming year will see an active effort to engender
a university-wide dialogue about open practice as we launch a “green
paper” for open consultation, which will lead to more formal statements
about University commitment to open practice.
Conclusion
The University of Southern Queensland’s approach to openness has
been a decade-long steady march guided more by principle than
opportunity. As a university we have for the most part stayed away from
organizations and efforts that we perceive as “fauxpen” or engaging in
“open washing”. We do not want to confuse the core meaning of open by
introducing predatory marketing into the community. As an institution,
we have also been rather pragmatic and are normally guided by efforts
that we think will either have direct positive outcomes for students
and members of the faculty, meet our educational goals, or promote a
broader open culture at the University. The University has found that
simply participating in genuine open activities and working with open
organizations like the OER Foundation, OERu and the OSI help us
refine our understanding of openness and our practice.
We believe that it is through thoughtful and methodical engagement
that we are developing a culture in which openness is a natural impulse
and those activities that promote closed culture and restrictions on the
free flow of information, knowledge and culture are understood for
what they are. The open impulse not only guides our decision-making
as institutional leaders charged with crafting policy and resourcing
decisions and as individual actors, but also promotes a culture with the
capacity to continuously improve our practice and seriously consider
the implications of agility.
340 Open Education
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Open Education
Patrick Blessinger and TJ Bliss (eds.)
Open Educa on provides a great mix of research and authen c applica on of “open” in
educa on which is global in perspec ve. The contribu ons provide insigh ul evidence
that open educa on as an ecosystem is on the pping point of crossing the chasm from
sharing to learn to learning to share. This book is a must-read for those who care about
more sustainable educa on futures showing that open is a viable pathway to realising
educa on as a fundamental human right.
—Wayne Mackintosh, Founding Director of the OER Founda on and the OER Universitas
In a me of openness vs closure, collabora on vs compe on, eli sm vs democra sa on,
this volume presents a range of perspec ves that make a strong case for open educa on
in both the developed and developing worlds. A recommended read for all those
interested in transforming higher educa on. This book is a rich resource that illuminates
the diff erent dimensions of open educa on and its cri cal link to human rights. This
delivers a very important message: that open educa on is a powerful tool to throw open
the ivory towers and transform higher educa on in the 21st century.
—Asha Kanwar, President & CEO, Commonwealth of Learning
Sustainable Development Goal 4 (United Na ons) enjoins us to ensure inclusive and
equitable quality educa on and promote lifelong learning opportuni es for all. While we
cannot rely on our current rigid and closed educa onal tradi ons to meet this goal, the
concepts of the open educa on movement provide some promise. The importance of
this book lies in its analysis of these concepts through the lens of the democra sa on of
educa on. Open is taken to enable far more than access - rather it focuses in on ideals of
diversity, inclusion, agency, equity and social jus ce, towards the fi nal goal of improving
learning for all.
—Jenny Glennie, Head of Saide
As with all Open Book publica ons, this en re book is available to read for free on the
publisher ’s website. Printed and digital edi ons, together with supplementary digital
material, can also be found here: www.openbookpublishers.com
Cover image: Oditel, Uganda (2011). Photo by Brian Wolfe, CC BY-NC-SA.
International Perspectives in Higher Education
e
book
ebook and OA edi ons
also available
