Developing OER as Impactful Educational Interventions

Overview

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.

Core method: Planning OER as problem-focused interventions

Our project has generated two “primary” OERs in the form of open textbooks, targeting biomedicine and biochemistry students, published by the La Trobe eBureau:

Foundations of Biomedical Science: Quantitative Literacy

Threshold Concepts in Biochemistry

Both open textbooks are designed to act as educational interventions, meaning that they are designed to help support struggling students to navigate specific barriers. In designing these it was necessary to adopt a problem-focused approach informed by “backwards design” where outcomes are the starting point of OER ideation (Elder, 2019). Lived teaching experience acted as a driver for us to reflect and systematically define, explore, and research the problem before rushing into OER development. This process identified that students struggled with both quantitative literacy (maths) and were falling behind in biochemistry because they never properly grasped the fundamental concepts.

Building strong foundations through clear purpose (Example 1)

For planning our first OER, Foundations of Biomedical Science, we used the following methods to understand the problem systematically:

• practical classroom observation
• analysis of common student errors (known as diagnostic testing)
• an extensive literature review on quantitative literacy education
• consulting learning & teaching stakeholders in the discipline
• development of a first-year subject focused on quantitative literacy (Foundations of Biomedical Science)

These efforts paid off, as the value of identifying the nature and scope of the problem later ended up outweighing the time invested. This demonstrated that patient planning leads to developing a strong purpose for the OER project.

Our extensive diagnostic testing (Pakay et al., 2019) informed us that many students:

• suffer from maths anxiety, often connected to early learning experiences.
• exhibit avoidance behaviour towards subjects with a maths component.
• lose marks associated with any maths-related assessment because of avoidance.
• can perform abstract maths problems but struggle with applied, worded problems requiring the same operations.

It was clear that a traditional maths textbook was insufficient for solving this problem. Instead, we needed a text that provided problems in a discipline-specific context. We hypothesised that if we explicitly provided meaningful authentic context for maths, this would decrease maths avoidance as students would recognise these skills as integral to future professional practice.

Our ideation led us to another key purpose for the OER: broadening how educators can support quantitative literacy across biological disciplines that share conceptual overlap. By widening the target audience, we increased the utility of the OER to support both commencing students and students at any level requiring a remedial resource. Consequently, the text is now used to support diverse teaching across disciplines, including both a generalist first-year biology subject and biochemistry students from second-year through to Masters.

Building strong foundations through clear purpose (Example 2)

In the case of our second open textbook, Threshold Concepts in Biochemistry, it was again fruitful to plan the OER project based on careful scoping of the problem.

Our methods for scoping the problem included:

• reflecting on practical problems identified in classroom teaching
• searching the biochemistry education literature (Wright et al., 2009, Tansey et al., 2013)
• consulting guidelines/recommendations by professional discipline organisations
• recognising the large-scale nature of this problem (beyond our university)
• mapping practical classroom reflections against barriers identified by literature search

From this, we learnt that many students struggle with a series of fundamental barriers:

• the initial abstract nature of biochemistry
• ideas that seem disconnected but only coalesce when introductory courses conclude
• information overload from traditional textbooks that are information-dense and intimidating to read (average of 900 pages, weighing close to 3 kg!)
• didactic approaches that dominate many introductory biochemistry courses

The widespread nature of this problem made an open textbook the ideal solution due to its permissive licensing for use by all institutions across the globe. Recommendations made by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (Loertscher et al., 2014) suggested a switch to concepts-driven instruction and skills. They provided an inventory of key “threshold concepts” for the discipline, which are defined as concepts that often present a major barrier to learning and progressing in biochemistry, but once mastered allow a transformative shift in a student’s understanding and allow connection of prior and new knowledge in more sophisticated ways.

Scoping the problem this way created a clear project goal for us: create an accessibly compact OER that provides a concept-driven overview of biochemistry by focusing on the identified threshold concepts and how they relate to one another.

Getting started: finding time is about motivation

Academics are often aware of teaching resource gaps but are under immense time pressures from competing priorities. Ultimately, passion alone is not enough and weighing up costs-to-benefits is often needed to proceed. Decisions about time commitments are usually determined by motivation and priorities. This is often driven by a mix of intrinsic personal motivations and incentive-based extrinsic motivation (Herbert et al, 2023; Nagashima and Harch, 2021). In a time-scarce environment, this motivation must come from a judgement that the future benefits of an open education project idea will outweigh the costs in that given situation (see Figure 2).

In our situation, the motivation came from taking a broader view that identified OER benefits beyond access & equity. Learning about OER-enabled pedagogy (Wiley & Hilton, 2018) opened up the full range of OER capabilities to us, and we realised that open textbooks in STEM can be more ambitious than just being free of cost. Making this connection changed the equation for us: the benefits began to outweigh the barriers (see Figure 2). An important part of this was recognising that OER projects are not necessarily a new burden on workloads, as long as they are designed in a way that purposefully enriches and maximises the impact of work already being done by educators.

The problem of scarce time, effort, and OEP expertise was drastically minimised through collaboration with the La Trobe eBureau, who provided open education expertise. We worked together to explore OER-powered creative solutions, which then leveraged significant post-publication benefits.

Importance of professional staff for ‘critical friend’ roles

Our collaboration highlighted how professional open education experts can play a key role as “critical friend” who can integrate different ideas, connect theory and practice, and challenge assumptions about how OERs work. This framing can help professional staff to understand they can make decisive contributions with connective, communicative, and capability-building value.

We achieved this by cultivating a sustained ‘Third Space’ way of working where academic expertise merged with professional experience, driving the project throughout its lifecycle (Whitchurch, 2012). Who better to play the role of “critical friend” than a professional librarian with experience overseeing and collaborating on open projects?

Key elements of this role were:

• providing critical appraisal of project ideation
• connecting the dots between learning & teaching priorities and OEP
• guiding academics through key considerations for OEP projects
• reducing overwhelm by simplifying technical and copyright matters
• drawing expertise from the broader Australasian OEP community into the project
• driving continuous shared reflective practice.

An example of this is our successful application for a 2022 Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) grant, which made Threshold Concepts in Biochemistry possible. Professional staff experience helped us harness the grant criteria (such as inclusion of AU / NZ content) as an ideation tool, rather than treating them only as formal requirements to be fulfilled. This combined with academic knowledge of real-world Australian case studies in STEM to create locally relevant examples so students could relate to the OER better.

A ‘live’ adaptive OEP model

From our experience the best outcomes come from highly iterative OER development. In this process, new teaching knowledge and interventions are flexibly implemented, evaluated, and fed back ‘live’ into the open textbook (see Figure 3). This also enables rapid responses to student feedback.

Our approach is non-linear in nature, which begins with teaching experience, iterates, and returns full circle as the driving force of OER development. This is a significant departure from a common (but self-limiting) object-centric production output approach where publishing the OER is a static endpoint and little consideration is given to continuously integrating teaching practices.

Our adaptive OEP model supports more sustained work over time, as it fluidly interacts with the broader scholarly environment. This enables outcomes such as winning grant applications, awards, and publishing secondary open artefact outputs. All these things generate further motivation for developing and expanding the project and its impacts.

Embedding diverse pedagogies

The most powerful OER feature we leveraged is the ability to incorporate and concentrate diverse pedagogies in one resource. We used this flexibility to tackle an issue we had identified, which is that students in biomedicine often fail to connect the relevance of abstract mathematical concepts to their intended vocation, which adversely affects their motivation (Dyrberg & Holmegaard, 2019).

Connecting concepts to professional practice

Our Foundations of Biomedical Science project aimed to support contextual learning, after we identified that existing maths textbooks lack biomedical context and were therefore too abstract for biomedical students to be meaningful. Our solution was to embed video interviews with a diverse range of practitioners about how important maths is for their professional practice (see Figure 4). Including these practitioner perspectives helps students to see their future selves in the text and meaningfully link their current learning to their future careers.

This encourages students to reflect on their identities as emerging professionals, which is known to be important for retention and influences career trajectories (Huffmyer et al., 2022). Students can now see their future selves reflected in the text, identify how the discipline contributes to Australian society, and recognise the contribution of women to modern biology. This inclusive approach is a contribution to representational and recognitive justice as outlined by Lambert and Fadel (2018).

Similarly, Threshold Concepts in Biochemistry embedded pedagogies for making concepts accessible, rather than overwhelming students with detail like traditional textbooks do (White, 1996). For example, we used creative metaphors and analogies to explain difficult concepts (see Figure 5). In this way it would also aid students in cognate majors to help with common misconceptions and guide their transition from early to later applied study.

Once again, it was our combined academic-professional Third Space perspective that highlighted these avenues for embedding diverse pedagogies through digitally engaging multimedia. This distinguishes our OER from AI tools, which cannot use lived teaching experience to generate such content. Our use of OER-enabled pedagogy also provided an advantage over dense traditional texts that are too content-heavy and formal to engage students effectively. Recognising these powerful capabilities tilted the “do I have time for this?” equation in favour of benefits over costs and generated more motivation for the project.

Enabling online teacher presence

Strong teacher presence is known to be important for engagement in asynchronous learning environments (Watson et al., 2023). We responded to students’ requests for screencasts by directly embedding the OER author’s voice to guide students through practice problems.

Importantly, we designed teacher presence into the OER in a way that engaged students’ motivation and self-belief by recognising, validating, and gently guiding them through their maths anxiety. This could be considered a form of “breaking the fourth wall”: meaningful teacher presence that can mitigate the challenges of online learning (Prestridge et al., 2024).

Empowering students as OER co-creators

Our OEP soon began to influence our assessment approach. We designed an oral presentation assignment where students extend basic threshold concepts from the OER to answer more complex problems. We are now using our CAUL grant funding to incorporate students’ voices by publishing these oral presentations into the next iteration of the OER. A large body of work emphasises the importance of peer assisted learning in higher education, particularly for learning key skills (Stigmar, 2016). We hope that embedding student-generated OER will encourage intrinsic forms of student motivation beyond just their immediate academic results.

Impact and outcomes

Our OERs were originally designed as local interventions, but have created a much wider impact. Planning for impact creates a tension between addressing a broad audience and embedding local teacher presence in an Australian context. We addressed this by combining the discipline-wide scope of our intervention with a permissive open license (CC-BY-NC-SA). This enabled us to encourage both global engagement and context-specific localisation.

Global engagement

OER analytics have been a powerful tool for demonstrating engagement. We discovered that downloads from unique users greatly surpass local enrolments. Over 50% of web engagement is from the United States. We are cautious about what conclusions to draw from analytics alone, but these indicators (and direct feedback from overseas academics) suggest engagement beyond both LTU and Australian institutions.

Foundations of Biomedical Science: Quantitative Literacy Theory and Problems

Total visitors: 5,253

Total web engagements: 11,900

Downloads: 4,437

Threshold Concepts in Biochemistry

Total visitors: 5,633

Total web engagements: 12,500

Downloads: 2,480

Awards, grants, and recognition

OER engagement beyond our university has led to several reward and recognition outcomes.

• Winning the Scientific Education Award from the Australian Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (awarded to Julian Pakay)
• Commissioned to write journal articles on OER for both The Australian Biochemist and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education
• Three glowing international reviews on Open Textbook Library (averaging 4.5 stars)
• Successful 2022 CAUL OER Collective grant application (Threshold Concepts in Biochemistry)
• Successful 2024 CAUL OER Collective grant application (Digital Health for Nursing and Midwifery in Australia)
• Invited award speaker (on OER) for Biomolecular Horizons conference
• Accepted as speakers at OE Global 2024 conference
• Analytics-enhanced promotion application (result pending)

Open artefacts as secondary OER outputs

We have discovered that effective open practices generate new open artefacts in the form of reflections, tools, and practices created by ‘process as pedagogy’ (e.g. this very case study). These are all outputs in their own right which can be shared via institutional open repositories (see Figure 6). In the spirit of this, we are sharing an open collection of ‘secondary’ OER outputs – these were originally generated by our project but can be repurposed by other practitioners.

Thinking about process differently as a form of output (via these open artefacts) is a way to raise the visibility of learning & teaching achievements that would otherwise remain hidden (particularly if they are non-quantitative in nature). It also builds a shared commons to support the growth of the Australasian OEP community.

Where to from here?

We plan to further cultivate the “living link” between the OERs and classroom educator-learner practices through a virtuous loop of feedback and evaluation, as depicted in Figure 3.

Developing evaluative judgement

We intend to use our OER Threshold Concepts in Biochemistry to pilot the integration of student-generated open videos into subject learning activities. The goal will be to enhance students’ evaluative judgement, using principles from Deakin University’s CRADLE resources to inform our approach (Tai et al., 2018). This could look like workshops or assessments that involve:

1. asking students to appraise the recorded student presentations and use shared peer feedback to identify limitations (including reasons why they think these are limitations)
2. discussing the implications of these insights for how they can engage in metacognitive reflective practice for improving their own assessment work.

OER-enabled scholarship of learning & teaching

Our adaptive OEP model depicted in Figure 3 appears to have strong synergy with the ‘practice-led research’ OEP model suggested by Australian researchers Hamilton and Hansen (2024). We look forward to delving into these connections to engage in OER research and evaluation.

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References

Dyrberg, N. R., & Holmegaard, H. T. (2019). Motivational patterns in STEM education: a self-determination perspective on first year courses. Research in Science & Technological Education, 37(1), 90-109. https://doi.org/10.1080/02635143.2017.1421529

Elder, A. (2019). “Considerations for Using or Creating OER” in The OER Starter Kit. Iowa State University Digital Press. https://iastate.pressbooks.pub/oerstarterkit/chapter/considerations/

Hamilton, D., & Hansen, L. (2024). An artful becoming: The case for a practice-led research approach to open educational practice research. Teaching in Higher Education, 29(7), 1757-1774. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2024.2336159

Herbert, M. J., Clinton-Lisell, V., & Stupnisky, R. H. (2023). Faculty motivation for OER textbook adoption and future use. Innovative higher education, 48(2), 371-388. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-022-09625-6

Lambert, S. R. (2018). Changing our (Dis)Course: A Distinctive Social Justice Aligned Definition of Open Education. Journal of Learning for Development, 5(3). https://doi.org/10.56059/jl4d.v5i3.290

Loertscher, J., Green, D., Lewis, J. E., Lin, S., & Minderhout, V. (2014). Identification of threshold concepts for biochemistry. CBE life sciences education, 13(3), 516–528. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.14-04-0066

Nagashima, T., & Harch, S. (2021). Motivating factors among university faculty for adopting open educational resources: Incentives matter. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2021(1). https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1342044

Pakay, J., Young, J., & Carroll, F. (2019). Improving quantitative literacy in incoming biomedical science students. 44th FEBS Congress, Krakow, Poland.

Prestridge, S., Main, K., & Schmid, M. (2024). Identifying how classroom teachers develop presence online: breaking the fourth wall in online learning. Education and Information Technologies, 29(2), 1357-1377. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-023-11714-8

Stigmar, M. (2016). Peer-to-peer teaching in higher education: A critical literature review. Mentoring & Tutoring, 24(2), 124-136. https://doi.org/10.1080/13611267.2016.1178963

Tai, J., Ajjawi, R., Boud, D., Dawson, P., & Panadero, E. (2018). Developing evaluative judgement: enabling students to make decisions about the quality of work. Higher education, 76(3), 467-481. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-017-0220-3

Tansey, J. T., Baird, T., Jr, Cox, M. M., Fox, K. M., Knight, J., Sears, D., & Bell, E. (2013). Foundational concepts and underlying theories for majors in “biochemistry and molecular biology”. Biochemistry and molecular biology education: a bimonthly publication of the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 41(5), 289–296. https://doi.org/10.1002/bmb.20727

Watson, S., Sullivan, D. P., & Watson, K. (2023). Teaching presence in asynchronous online classes: It’s not just a façade. Online Learning, 27(2), 288-303.

Whitchurch, C. (2012). Reconstructing identities in higher education: The rise of “Third Space” professionals. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203098301

White, H. B. (1996). Addressing content in problem-based courses: The learning issue matrix. Biochemical Education, 24, 41–45.

Wiley, D., & Hilton III, J. L. (2018). Defining OER-enabled pedagogy. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 19(4). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v19i4.3601

Wright, T., Hamilton, S., Rafter, M., Howitt, S., Anderson, T., & Costa, M. (2009). Assessing student understanding in the molecular life sciences using a concept inventory. The FASEB Journal, 23(S1). https://doi.org/10.1096/fasebj.23.1_supplement.LB307

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Image descriptions

Figure 1: The two front covers of the primary OER outputs of this case study

Two front covers. The first is for Foundations of Biomedical Science: Quantitative Literacy Theory, featuring a red theme of biological images such as cells. The second is for Threshold Concepts in Biochemistry and features a blue theme of abstract shapes with a biological flavour.

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Figure 2: A representation of a cost-benefit consideration that can drive the impetus for OER development

A graphic representing a balance scale, explaining that the impetus for OER development is created by the benefits outweighing the costs.  The costs include lack of expertise, effort and time while the benefits include access and equity, diverse pedagogies, contextualising content, teacher presence, student outcomes, outside impact, developing OEP expertise, generating open artefacts and awards and promotion.  Together, benefits move beyond access and equity to transform pedagogy, generating student engagement and classroom impact as well increasing academic reward and recognition for the developer through tangible project outputs, analytics and open practitioner development.

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Figure 3: Our adaptive model for OER development begins and ends with teaching experience. All project stages are highly iterative and powered by regular reflective practices

A schematic outlining the process of publishing an OER as an educational intervention from teaching experience to use.  The schematic moves from teaching experience to ideation, expression of interest/formal proposal, drafting, publishing and finally, use.  Use is connected back to teaching experience through evaluation creating a potential virtuous loop.  The development process contains its own iterative loops.  Ideation is influenced and refined by the existing education literature, observation and diagnostics and by student outcomes.  The process of formal proposal is influenced by the current educational landscape and competing resources as well as by considering barriers to delivery, the incorporation of pedagogical innovations and the potential scope of the OER.  Drafting is also an iterative process governed by peer-review, live testing and critical editing.  How the final OER is used will be governed by user feedback, publicity and connecting users and provides an opportunity for professional recognition and the generation of secondary outputs.

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Figure 4: An example of how we used rich multimedia to connect abstract concepts with professional practice in Foundations of Biomedical Science

Yangama Jokwiro, a clinical nurse, is working with a patient care manikin in a realistically simulated hospital ward to demonstrate how he uses maths in healthcare.

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Figure 5: Teaching information flow in biological systems using analogy. An analogy of the cell as a factory is used in Threshold Concepts in Biochemistry

An image of a multi-compartmented factory containing a head office as well as initial manufacturing, storage and usage, refinement and export areas. The components of the factory all have analogous counterparts within cells.

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Figure 6: A diverse collection of OEP-generated open artefacts “orbiting” two primary OERs

A graphic image representing the two primary OERs from this case study as large intersecting circles with smaller circles representing secondary outputs.  The reflective OEP case study is a secondary output which intersects with both primary OERs.  Foundations of Biomedical Science as a primary output generated three separate secondary outputs, a literary review scoping the problem, and an OER evaluation survey questionnaire with an intersecting open dataset of OER survey results.  Threshold Concepts in Biochemistry has generated a conference presentation about the OER.

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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:

• Dr Mais Fatayer, Learner Experience (LX) Design Manager, University of Technology Sydney

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How to cite and attribute this chapter

How to cite this chapter (referencing)

Pakay, J., & Chang, S. (2024). Developing OER as Impactful Educational Interventions. In Open Education Down UndOER: Australasian Case Studies. Council of Australian University Librarians. https://oercollective.caul.edu.au/openedaustralasia/chapter/developing-oer-as-impactful-educational-interventions

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Developing OER as Impactful Educational Interventions by Julian Pakay and Steven Chang is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

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