Designing an OER Textbook for challenging environments: Expanding Global Access and Equity in Education [ID 86]
The focus of our presentation will be on the interdepartmental collaboration in creating an Open Educational Resource (textbook) for business students at IBS University (Papua New Guinea), and the stages of the design, development and publishing process. Background context: SCU and IBSU have been in educational partnership for over 20 years. SCU’s move to the Southern Cross model of delivery (the shorter, more focused unit structure, delivered over six weeks) necessitated redesign of the existing, co-delivered, business units for IBSU students. Whereas open educational resources have been present in education for over four decades, it is over the last 10 years that they have gained momentum in the tertiary sector as “a powerful tool for reducing inequalities of educational opportunity and promoting innovative strategies to improve educational problems” (Bliss and Smith, 2017, pp. 9-10). This point of view informed our decision to design and develop an Open Educational Resource (textbook) for SCU/IBSU students in Port Moresby. In December 2023, Library Services, Centre for Teaching and Learning, and Business School academics (from Australia and Papua New Guinea) started a working group with the goal to design and develop an OER textbook for the unit Introduction to the Business Law of Papua New Guinea. The group had regular meetings every fortnight, and responsibilities were: academics were responsible for writing the content, Centre for Teaching and Learning for educational/learning design, and Library Services for administrative and publishing process. We made every attempt in the design stage to place the focus on the Papua New Guinea students’ point of view; our design was informed by the teaching experiences of academics from SCU/IBSU, the students’ feedback on their learning experiences in previous deliveries of the unit, and our visit ISB University. This was achieved through regular (fortnightly) discussions on specificities of the educational environment in PNG and collaborative analysis of students’ feedback form. All decisions in this stage were guided by student-centred design and the Universal Design principles to maximise usability for a wide variety of individuals. In the writing stage, academics produced the content and suggested the corresponding activities. Activities were designed and collectively evaluated for their usefulness and friendliness of use (with student engagement in mind). The development stage included bringing in the digital design expert to consult on story lines (for proposed animations) and a colleague from PNG to advise on images and interpretation of the visuals. The end result is an OER textbook that is easy to use by students, easily scalable, and enhances the unit content and increases student engagement and interaction with the learning material. NB: We expect to have the textbook ‘published’ in July, so we will be able to show it to the audience.
References
Bliss, T J and Smith, M. 2017. A Brief History of Open Educational Resources. In: Jhangiani, R S and Biswas-Diener, R. (eds.) Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science. Pp. 9–27. London: Ubiquity Press. DOI: Ubiquity Press. License: CC-BY 4.0
Liu, C., & Elms, P. (2019). Animating student engagement : The impacts of cartoon instructional videos on learning experience. Research in learning technology, 27, 1-31. https://doi.org/10.25304/rlt.v27.2124
Author Keywords
inclusion diversity equity and access, open access publishing, open educational practices, open textbook, social justice
Session Details
Format: Lightning Talk
Presenter(s): Melissa Jurd, Nikola Kalamir, Talli Allen
Brisbane Time: November 13, 2:40 PM → 2:55 PM AEST
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Room: P5
Topic Area: Practice and Policy in OE
Sched: View in conference schedule
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