Preface

Open Education Resources (OERs) are defined as ‘learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others’ (UNESCO, n.d.).

OERs first gained prominence overseas as a way for educators to avoid etextbook licensing issues.  A 2021 article in the Guardian outlines this problem:

librarians say academic publishers are failing to offer electronic versions of many books, seen as critical to degree courses during the pandemic. And, they say, universities frequently cannot afford to buy the ebooks available, for which they can be charged more than five times as much as the printed version. (Fazackerley, 2021)

In the Australian educational landscape, OERs were highlighted with the release of the 2024 Australian Universities Accord report, which states:

Internationally, sharing educational resources through digital repositories has become a widespread practice over the past decade, aimed at advancing student learning and promoting global access to higher education. Missing from that landscape of open access resources are quality-assured, student-centred learning materials designed specifically for the Australian context and aligned with the Australian Qualifications Framework. (Department of Education, 2024, p. 181)

OERs have come of age, both in Australia and overseas. Monash University Library has responded by providing creative ways for students and staff to take advantage of these new learning materials. We hope to bring OER expertise to a wider audience in order to make a positive impact on students’ lives through unhindered access to educational resources.

OER rationale

Open textbooks allow new pedagogies to emerge. They can be produced faster. They have the potential to be more engaging and relevant, with the possibility of more frequent adaptation to respond to current events, to represent diverse voices and experiences, to incorporate indigenous knowledges, and to allow students to participate as co-authors and reviewers. OERs provide the opportunity to overcome pricing and licensing barriers that impact students’ ongoing textbook access.

OER vision and strategy

Monash University Library had a vision of working with Monash educators to provide open, high quality, peer reviewed and copy edited texts, with local, Australasian or Indigenous content.  The University, the Library and the authors of these works, branded ‘Monash University’, would be seen as supporting and contributing to high calibre learning materials in Australia and overseas.

We hoped OERs would change the way staff and students create, evaluate, manage, use and leverage learning materials. Since we were starting off with a low staff knowledge and stakeholder support base, the initial years focused on building Monash wide knowledge, skills and competencies to support that transition.

Three Monash University Library strategies support this approach:

• Library Plan and Roadmap for Open Educational Resources (internal)
• Library Plan and Roadmap for Education Support (internal)
• Collection Strategy.

The Monash Library journey, 2022- 2024

Monash University Library’s OER journey began in 2022 when we joined the Council of Australasian University Librarians (CAUL) Open Educational Resources Collective. The plan was to dip our toes in the water by utilising the expertise of Monash University Publishing and learning from the CAUL OER Community of Practice.

From the beginning, we recognised that adopting, adapting and creating OERs were all important parts of open resource development. However, since there were very few Australasian OERs at that time, the Library focused on creating titles to add to the growing corpus of quality texts coming from the CAUL program and to showcase as examples to stakeholders and aspiring authors.

We sourced early adopters from the University’s Alexandria project, a virtual location set up to hold some 300 instances of Monash authored and other learning materials, which was in the process of being decommissioned. These were authors who were already writing open materials, who may have had ideas for new titles.  We also sourced OER authors through referrals from Monash University Press (MUP) and library staff with faculty connections; thereby enlisting motivated educators.  The use of personal communications via liaison librarians was supported by an information pack with slides, draft emails, and information about our project.

This approach suited our limited resources, as we could begin small and create a ‘demo model’ to concretely show what we had in mind to stakeholders, educators, and students. Hence, our program started with ‘creating’ OERs.  Only in 2024 did we shift our focus to adapting and adopting existing OERs, a more sustainable and scalable model for the Library.

In 2022, a single title was chosen for Library support. It was completed and launched in October 2023.^[1]  That year was also notable for Monash’s triple CAUL OER grant success, which led to a focus on the simultaneous creation of the three grant-funded titles.^[2]

OER adopt, adapt and create

The OER ‘adopt, adapt and create’ program that we subsequently developed is defined as follows;

• Adopt – Facilitating the swap of commercial, licensed materials for online and openly accessible ones. These openly accessible resources will normally have a CC licence (or are possibly out of copyright).
• Adapt – The OER adaptation model refers to using a variety of CC  licensed materials, plus newly written materials, to put together a new resource. These OERs may be built on Pressbooks, or another platform, and often have added case studies or Australasian perspectives. This option may be preferred for lecturers who teach in a discipline poorly populated by open texts.
• Create – In this model open educational texts are built from the ground up, and if using Monash Library expertise and a Monash Library funded Pressbooks slot, are supported by Library staff through facilitating peer review, copy editing and copyright advice, provision of Pressbooks and H5P expertise and project management support.

We proposed that over time, the service would transition to a model where the majority of the service supports the ‘flipping or adoption’ model; a smaller service proportion supports the adapt model; and the creation of an OER, where no suitable open alternatives exist, will be supported less frequently and on a competitive basis.

OER Adoption pilot

In 2024 there was a growing corpus of Australian works available for adapting and adopting so the time felt right for Monash to move to the next phase of OER work, the OER Adoption pilot. The Library had incorporated OERs into the recent Library  Plan and Roadmap  for Education Support and formed the focus of the Library Plan and Roadmap for Open Educational Resources. A partnership across the Library portfolios informed and supported the pilot. The Collections and Technology portfolio helped with textbook licensing, cost and use, MUP provided commercial publishing expertise, Copyright advised on Creative Commons issues like reuse, and Academic Services staff had conversations with interested academics and coordinated support around OERs. Outreach and engagement by senior Library staff, such as presentations at Faculty Education Committees, and through existing channels like the MEA (Monash Education Academy) blog was supported by the Library’s Service Development and Communications team.

The pilot was created to allow library staff to work closely with academics to understand what criteria they use to adopt, adapt, or create new OERs for their courses and units. While the aim is to ‘flip’ from commercial, restrictive and expensively licensed materials to open ones, we wanted to understand other factors that influence readings and reading lists.

The OER Adoption pilot group worked on advocacy internally by:

• learning from other institutions, including Monash University Malaysia
• building library staff knowledge of OER adoption
• creating advocacy materials
• revising the Library’s OER service charter
• building visibility of OERs in the Library’s discovery platform (Primo)
• identifying first and second year unit texts for a potential swap.

The group also worked on advocacy within faculties and portfolios by:

• developing content for the Library’s OER webpage
• engaging with senior University stakeholders  in the ten Faculties and the central Education portfolio
• writing a blog post for the Monash teaching community
• offering OER grants for educators.

Role of advocacy

While there are some very good OER advocacy materials online, we found that to get the attention of Monash middle-level and senior stakeholders we needed to clearly tie our program to the priority strategies of the Faculties.  Our push to senior stakeholders only started when the Library program had four successful OER texts to promote, we had a core of skilled staff with the necessary expertise, and most critically, we could demonstrate the alignment of OERs with the University’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Framework.

References

Department of Education. (2024). Australian universities accord: Final report. https://www.education.gov.au/australian-universities-accord/resources/final-report

Fazackerley, A. (2021, January 29).  Price gouging from Covid: Student ebooks costing up to 500% more than in print. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/jan/29/price-gouging-from-covid-student-ebooks-costing-up-to-500-more-than-in-print

UNESCO. (n.d.). Open educational resources. https://www.unesco.org/en/open-educational-resources