UOW Library: In-Step with Our Academic Community

Overview

This case study demonstrates how the University of Wollongong (UOW) librarians advocate for the adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) to the academic teaching and learning community. We take a strengths-based approach to showcasing their value, impact, and benefits in enhancing accessibility and enriching the broader suite of resources available to support teaching, learning and research needs.

In 2023, the UOW Library commenced a deep dive into the open scholarship supports and services available to our academic community. UOW is committed to creating knowledge for a better world and empowering students for their future as clearly articulated in the institution’s 2020-2025 Strategic Plan. The project is directly aligned with our goal of making it easy to find, use and create content, and UOW’s institutional commitment to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

The UOW Library has 56.3 FTE (Full-Time Equivalent) staff and our Liaison Services team consists of the following:

• The Learning & Engagement (L&E) team, with 3.8 FTE staff, are focused on supporting the teaching & learning (T&L) endeavours of UOW academics.
• The Research & Engagement (R&E) team, with 5.4 FTE staff, are focused on supporting researchers and the institution’s research excellence goals.

As a Library, we have transitioned from a transactional relationship with academics and students, towards one of deep understanding across the research and T&L lifecycles. Integral to this work is an evidence-based and user-centred approach, partnering with our academic and student community to collaboratively advance open scholarship from all perspectives.

Key stakeholders

Initially, the key stakeholders of the scoping project included the Library, the Research Services Office (RSO), and the Graduate School of Research (GRS).

As the project progressed, it became evident that our stakeholders extended across three distinct cohorts:

• Library staff, in particular the Learning and Engagement, Resource Sharing, and Collection Development teams, who interact directly with academics regarding resources used for teaching and research purposes;
• Academic staff, particularly subject coordinators managing large student enrolments and essential textbooks and resources for their subjects;
• UOW students who need access to essential library resources for their studies and who encounter issues, particularly with limited or restricted access to high-demand resources relevant to their subjects.

The success of the scoping project was driven by the active involvement of our academic community. Their perspectives and insights were integral to shaping our collaborative approach to the adoption of OER for teaching, learning and research purposes.

We recognised the importance of partnering with academics to achieve the best and most equitable outcomes for students. Ensuring this approach was sustainable and scalable has been a central focus throughout the project’s development and implementation.

Background information

The Library-led initiative responded to a pressing need for equitable, accessible, open, and cost-neutral learning experiences, as highlighted by feedback from academics and students facing difficulties in accessing many of their subject’s essential learning materials.

The scoping project emerged in response to concerns and frustrations expressed by UOW academics and students especially during peak periods in the academic calendar. Staff and students continually encountered barriers to information such as restrictive user license models for ebooks, limited availability of required editions for essential texts, and challenges students faced in purchasing costly textbooks. Data from the Library’s Chat service (Ref Analytics) further underscored the need; revealing a consistent demand for ebooks required by large undergraduate and postgraduate coursework cohorts for assessment tasks and tutorial participation. These issues hinder effective learning and raise equity concerns, as the cost and accessibility of textbooks disproportionately impacts students.

Academics, particularly those interested in exploring alternative and complementary resources, expressed a growing curiosity and interest in the OER model to alleviate these access challenges and to enrich and align with their subjects in an open and equitable manner. However, the distributed nature of the OER landscape posed difficulties for faculty to navigate without adequate support. The Library recognised the importance of engaging OER advocates or champions to guide their peers in adopting open resources, thus addressing some of these challenges and fostering a more equitable and supportive learning environment.

Project description

The project aimed to elevate the profile of OER among UOW academics by encouraging the adoption of existing OER, with the long-term goal of inspiring the UOW academic community to adapt or create their own OER.

In 2022, the L&E team developed an introductory OER library guide as part of the Library’s Services for Teaching and Learning online supports. This guide introduced academics to the concept and benefits of OER, how OER differs from open access resources as part of a holistic approach to developing and understanding the application of open licensing and to highlight key OER discovery platforms. Academics were also encouraged to seek further assistance from the team to identify suitable OER in their subject area.

A key element of the approach is our tactical communications strategy, to integrate the OER agenda and its benefits into the annual communication channels of the L&E team. These communications were adapted for different contexts and included:

• Faculty Education Committee reports
• Presentations to Schools and Faculty
• Individual conversations with academics and subject coordinators.

These conversations centred on partnering to identify suitable resources from both the Library’s collections and authoritative OER repositories to support new and existing subject reading lists.

Further, L&E librarians shared success stories of assisting academics across various disciplines in searching for and curating potential OER for their specific subject needs back into our academic community. Our work as part of a broader open research project actively asked about use of open resources in both the T&L and research contexts, and throughout the project, the team actively pursued identifying OER champions to foster ongoing collaboration with us and to connect them with resources of interest within a sector-wide OER landscape.

Key outcomes

While our progress in identifying OER champions took longer than anticipated, we are pleased to acknowledge and celebrate the successes we have achieved so far. One recent example is a first year History subject featuring a World History OER textbook chapter as a key reading. We share these examples of Open Pedagogy within, and beyond, the Library to raise awareness and support for Open Educational Practice (OEP) across the institution.

Looking forward, we aim to enhance the visibility of OER within the Library’s SEARCH (UOW Library’s main catalogue) results. We are adding openly available resource lists to our discipline-based library guides and investigating the creation of distinct collections within our catalogue to highlight these materials to our staff and student communities. This work will better position these resources alongside our subscription-based and licensed resources. This integration will further support our goal of making OER, and other openly available content, a more prominent and accessible option for academics. This work aligns with Goal 1 of UOW’s 2020-2025 Strategic Plan of empowering students for their future (University of Wollongong 2023), a Library goal of making it easy to find, use and create content, and Goal 4 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Quality Education, which fundamentally focuses on the provision of more inclusive and equitable access to educational materials.

To strengthen our communication efforts and support for academics, the L&E team plans to leverage our information literacy expertise in threshold concepts and scaffolded learning. We aim to refresh and improve the current OER library guide (as of August 2024) alongside the section on ordering new resources and how we clarify issues, concepts and relationships surrounding the often confusing world of copyright, Public Domain, open access, and OER. By incorporating a range of communication methodologies, we hope to clarify and better illustrate key concepts to aid our end-users’ understanding of options for navigating resource issues, such as the complexity and limitations of commercially licensed ebooks compared to the openness and flexibility of OER and other materials available using Creative Commons licenses. These enhancements will better equip the team in our one-on-one consultations with academics, particularly as they prepare for new teaching sessions. Additionally, we will continue to seek opportunities to engage and support the growing pool of dedicated OER champions.

Learnings and recommendations

As a small team, relative to other University libraries in Australia, we took an approach of capacity building, awareness raising and tactical communication strategies as our first position. Coupled with our exceptional relationship building expertise, a reputation for positivity, enthusiasm, and a solutions-focused approach, we have taken an incremental approach. This approach is situated in pragmatism – it is essential that we develop a sustainable and scalable approach for both the UOW Library and our academic community.

This work underscores the importance of being consistently aware and empathetic toward how academics perceive resource issues in their discipline and how they might respond to our well-intentioned approaches. Academics appreciate access to our expertise and guidance; but for many academics initially navigating and making headway in the OER environment this can still be an ‘on top of’ versus ‘instead of’ way of curating learning resources. We have learned that they will expect and value practical measures of support.

Acknowledgement of peer reviewers

The authors gratefully acknowledge the following people who kindly lent their time and expertise to provide peer review of this chapter:

• Melissa Jurd, Education and Research Librarian, Southern Cross University

How to cite and attribute this chapter

Further resources

• Connolly, T. (2013). Visualization Mapping Approaches for Developing and Understanding OER. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 14(2), 129-155. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v14i2.1532
• Tur, G., Havemann, L., Marsh, J., Keefer, J., & Nascimbeni, F. (2020). Becoming an open educator: towards an open threshold framework. Research in Learning Technology, 28. https://doi.org/10.25304/rlt.v28.2338
• United Nations. Sustainable Development Goals. https://sdgs.un.org
• University of Wollongong. (2023). UOW 2020-2025 Strategic Plan. http://documents.uow.edu.au/content/groups/public/@web/@pmcd/documents/doc/uow263521.pdf

About the authors

name: Samantha Hutchinson

institution: University of Wollongong

Samantha’s passion is open scholarship and she values every opportunity to speak with researchers including HDRs, academics, professional colleagues and students about the complementary benefits of this agenda to the Higher Education (HE) sector, the individual and society more broadly. She is currently Acting Scholarly Communications Lead, and is loving the opportunity to work with this team to implement a new open access repository. As part of her substantive role she is a passionate advocate of the faculty she supports – Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. She has worked in the HE sector at multiple Australian institutions and prior to this worked in England at the University of Salford and Universities UK, where her love of HE policy first grew wings!

name: Christina Salopek

institution: University of Wollongong

Christina Salopek is a Learning and Engagement (L&E) Librarian specialising in developing inclusive, sustainable and technologically-enriched learning pathways, across a range of disciplines and cohorts to support the UOW teaching and learning community. An advocate for transformative learning experiences and applying creative solutions in the delivery of learning and engagement services, Christina’s previous roles within museums and curatorship ignited an interest in Open Education, UX and delivering innovative, solution-driven approaches aligned to the needs of users within a higher education setting.

name: Susan Jones

institution: University of Wollongong

Susan Jones is a Learning and Engagement Librarian with the Liaison Services team at the University of Wollongong (UOW) Library, (BA, Grad Dip (Lib & Info Sci), AALIA). Her previous roles at UOW have included Faculty Librarian and University Archives Manager. She has been a keen supporter of information literacy and lifelong learning, as well as community engagement. Susan advocates the benefits of open access resources for teaching, learning and research needs of UOW students and staff, as well as other users across the wider community.