Accessible, reusable and participatory

Initiating open education practices

Abstract

How does a university get started with open educational resources (OER)? What institutional tensions and conflicts are likely to be brought into play during this process? The promise of OER for higher education offers more than unrestricted access to high quality knowledge, it implies open and transparent sharing and development of knowledge, that is, integrating the disparate parts of the university through the shared activities of open education practices (OEP). In this paper we investigate how a range of disparate participants organised to establish initial OEP processes in an Australian university in order to embed an open education agenda: setting up repositories and processes for open publishing of educational design, and negotiating agendas of marketing and openness. We attempt to identify the groundwork at the meso-level of the organisation in order to establish OEP; in other words, to identify what comes before any actual resources are produced or made available.