Aligning Open Education Programs with Academic Reward and Recognition
Open Education Practice (OEP) programs often wrestle with a key dilemma: how do we attract academic project participation in an institutional environment that doesn’t reward open educational practices (OEP)? Standard academic reward and recognition is tied closely to research publication outputs. By contrast, publishing teaching texts is unrewarded at best and often actively discouraged.
For teaching staff, investing time into open education initiatives will only become a priority if these projects will:
- advance a greater purpose beyond the open educational resource (OER) itself
- actively solve existing problems in learning & teaching practices
- align with academic reward and recognition program criteria.
This case study explores how the La Trobe eBureau, an open education program, tackled this problem. It focuses on how librarians used reflexive and reflective thinking to draw upon the experiences of academic open practitioners and develop solutions to this dilemma.
We suggest that the most effective way to align OEP with institutional incentives is to target award, grant, and promotion programs that are learning and teaching focused (rather than research publication focused). Our experiences highlight that the key avenues for achieving this are empowering teaching staff as open practitioners and equipping them to engage in OER-enabled scholarship of learning and teaching.
