Abstract
Addressing the gap between global open educational resource (OER) proliferation and the slow adoption of OER and open educational practices (OEP) in Australian higher education, this paper focuses on a capacity-building project targeting academics, academic support staff and educational developers. The conception, design, development, piloting and evaluation of an open, online professional development micro course are detailed, highlighting key aspects of the open design and considerations for sharing and reuse across higher education institutions. The open micro course introduces five key OEP concepts through five contemporary curriculum design topics, using knowledge co-creation activities which engage learners in iterative shaping of the course, and generate artefacts for demonstration and recognition of learning. Opportunities for short to longer term capacity-building which leverage the micro course are also discussed, in response to significant shifts underway in higher education funding and professional development priorities.
Highlights
Despite recent federal investments and important developments in open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEP), the Australian higher education sector lags behind other countries in these endeavours
Previous research has identified a lack of appropriate professional development programs available for academic and related staff as one of the main reasons for the limited adoption of OER and OEP in Australian universities (Bossu, Bull & Brown, 2012)
We explore some opportunities that this micro course might present to the growing demand for, and importance of, courses such as this to meet the professional development needs of academic staff, including casual staff, as higher education sector funding mechanisms and priorities change
Summary
Despite recent federal investments and important developments in open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEP), the Australian higher education sector lags behind other countries in these endeavours. The course has an OEP-based learning design and has been developed in an open platform (WikiEducator); in combination this supports formal and informal learning, and forcredit and not-for-credit reuse options This stage of the project included the planning of the course pilot and evaluation strategy. Explicit modelling of OEP concepts adopted in the course, along with interwoven commentary by the project team on issues faced and our rationale for decisions made, acknowledging the emergent, co-constructed status of OEP in higher education Such issues included designing for culturally diverse learners, diverse digital literacies, multiple institutional settings, open platforms, open licensing, and for the complexity of learners’ personal learning environments (PLEs) in action (Johnson & Liber, 2008). The two major tasks—Task 1: Curation and Peer Feedback and Task 2: Micro Course Reflection—can be reworked and reused in other open course contexts
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