Open Education Week explores the many advantages of creating, sharing and sourcing open resources, but what are the benefits when it comes to career progression? In this blog post based on an OEWeek event, 4 academics from 3 different universities weigh in on where reward and recognition fit into the mix.
Amanda loves to share
UTS’s Amanda White, well known for her Amanda Loves To Audit YouTube channel and author of Accounting and Accountability, appreciates the wider participation that open education brings. The dopamine hit of making something that everyone can use and receiving their appreciation can be rewarding both professionally and personally. She also suggests giving feedback and appreciation back to originators of any open education resources you use.
If you are using an OER from someone else, write to that person and tell them “Hey, just want to let you know I’m using your thing and this is just my feedback.” And just write that person a little note.
Amanda White, UTS
Opening up to professional development
Julian Pakay from La Trobe University knew little about open education prior to getting started on his textbook Foundations of Biomedical Science, but knew he wanted to improve outcomes for students by improving their quantitative literacy. In developing his resources through La Trobe eBureau, he gained new skill sets in areas such as copyright, publishing and multimedia, while more broadly seeing the potential for better teaching and its wider impacts.
Julian noted that, in a perfect world, scholarship in the pursuit of enhancing education would be rewarded as clear evidence of enhancing education outcomes. But, in reality, measuring education outcomes can be difficult, and there are variable awareness and perceptions of OERs. He was also cautious of using metrics to evaluate an OER – a high amount of hits on a resource is not necessarily reflective of its quality.
You can read more from Julian on how OER projects can be used as supporting evidence for academic promotion applications in this exemplar.
Answering the “so what?” question
Also from La Trobe, Steven Chang collaborated on this resource on reward and recognition with Hugh Randle. He too noted the difficulties of achieving reward and recognition with OERs. What is it about openness that seems to go unrecognised and meet with so much indifference?
It comes down to a paradox within open education – that OE is basically about one defining superpower. And that superpower is freedom: free of costs for our students, freedom for teaching staff to teach how they want…
Steven Chang, La Trobe University
Open education faces the same paradox that freedom faces – it doesn’t inherently achieve anything on its own. The output needs to be paired with something to narratively show the impact and how a concrete problem is being solved. This pairing can help us be able to answer the ‘so what?’ question.
Steven suggests leaning into showing how the OER is part of an educational intervention. This requires identifying the problems and design solutions at an early stage and will ensure you are being deliberate with your purpose and outcomes. This makes it easier to articulate the benefits of your resource and show the broader impact beyond your discipline and institution.
The journey from limitations to opportunities
For James Cook University’s Susan Gasson, the OE journey originated in Papua New Guinea where the limitations of resources and library access led to a published work. The promotion and reception of this journal led to it being adapted into an open access resource. This shows the power of users and readers to enable the creation and evolution of shared resources through mutual engagement.
Her Confident Supervisors Pressbook supports supervisors in an environment where contracts may not be renewed. She worked with librarians, formed an editorial committee through a network and applied for a CAUL grant. While the grant was unsuccessful, the process helped with moving things forward and it became an award-winning resource and has yielded a podcast. Her profile has expanded with new opportunities opening up that further improve the writing process and shine a light on future ideas.
What have been your experiences in sharing and using OERs? Have you seen the same benefits and challenges when it comes to academic reward and recognition?
View the event this blog post was based on (duration: 75 mins):