Developing OER as Impactful Educational Interventions
This case study outlines our experience of discovering several unanticipated benefits of Open Educational Practices (OEP) to solve learning & teaching problems, attract grant funding, and cultivate academic career recognition. Our collaboration involved a cross-disciplinary team:
- 1 x biochemistry teaching academic
- 1 x open education specialist librarian (La Trobe eBureau)
- 1 x open education project officer (La Trobe eBureau).
Our project aimed to solve persistent difficulties that undergraduate students face for learning key concepts in biomedicine, biochemistry and related life sciences disciplines. Traditional textbooks have focused on comprehensiveness of content rather than tackling the root causes of learning and teaching problems. By contrast, the main idea driving our OE philosophy was to sharply focus on cultivating students’ metacognitive thinking for confronting known learning barriers, including quantitative literacy and key threshold concepts.
Our journey began as a modest open education resource (OER) development project focused specifically on subjects taught at La Trobe University (LTU). Through experimentation, our reflective practices led us to encounters with a broader range of OEP benefits than we anticipated. We used these to transition away from a traditional didactic STEM education towards OER-enabled pedagogy, which included:
- cultivating students’ emerging identities as practitioners
- designing authentic assessment
- enhancing teacher presence
- making difficult concepts accessible
- empowering student voice and representation.
We also demonstrate how academics and professional staff can collaborate as an integrated ‘Third Space’ team to not only generate impactful OERs but create new shared ways of working in higher education that go beyond traditional university binary roles.
This is a peer-reviewed book chapter published in the edited volume: Open Education Down UndOER: Australasian Case Studies