We’ve mentioned open textbooks a few times here on the blog. After Open Education Week in 2021, David Yeats published the event recap Open textbooks will change your life. A few years later, open textbooks really did change my life when I had the pleasure and privilege of working alongside a group of talented learning designers and practitioners to co-write a chapter of Designing Learning Experiences for Inclusivity and Diversity: Advice for Learning Designers. Open Education Week 2025 offered more opportunities to explore open textbooks, with an insightful session that featured open textbook writers sharing advice on this rewarding, yet sometimes daunting, process.
Openness is more important than ever
It’s hard to go wrong with the concept of ‘free books’ generally. Even so, it seems that the principles behind OERs have become even more pressing, and the inequities that open education seeks to address have only grown deeper. As such, the session was a timely discussion of the benefits and the challenges of open textbook creation.
The Open Textbooks event was moderated by Helen Chan (Manager, Open Scholarship and Copyright at UTS Library) and featured a number of presenters with experience in producing open textbooks:
- Ash Barber (OER Collective Senior Coordinator at Council of Australasian University Librarians)
- Dr Lisa Cianci (Manager University Library Digital Learning Team at RMIT)
- Dr Cat Kutay (Senior Lecturer in Faculty of Science and Technology at Charles Darwin University)
- Dr Elyssebeth Leigh (Educator)
- Timothy Boye (Associate Lecturer of Interdisciplinary Engineering at UTS)
- Michelle Bendall (Scholarly Services Librarian – Law at Deakin University)
- Kate Strong (Digital & Information Literacy Librarian at Edith Cowan)
A new text on First Nations engineering
Dr Cat Kutay led the first presentation on Engineering With Country: First Nations Engineering in Practice. Cat highlighted three particular strengths of the book:
- Engineering with Country provides material on perspectives that are crucial for Australia
- The book puts these perspectives into practice
- It also links to key material that explains important concepts
In many different fields, the perspectives and knowledges of First Nations people are not part of education or training, and engineering is no exception to this. By engaging in the open process, Cat and her collaborators were able to tap into valuable resources and make them widely available to students in a structured, high-quality format.
Indigenous Engineering is a high skill, low consumption and low change society with sustainability at heart.
Dr Cat Kutay
Timothy Boye also presented on his chapter of the textbook, which describes a simulation activity for engineering students focused on respectful communication. His advice on writing for open textbooks includes:
- Follow up material and permissions thoroughly
- Work closely with librarians who understand the process
- Write for your diverse audience, who may not have a background in your topic
- “You are making your own blog”
Making colour theory understandable
Dr Lisa Cianci’s Colour Theory: Understanding and working with colour has garnered a considerable reader audience. After noticing that many people who work frequently with colour lack knowledge about “what it is or how it works”, Lisa set out to create an introductory resource.
For the project, the Pressbooks platform offered an effective experience for both producer and reader, with benefits including:
- Functions similiarly to WordPress
- The visual editor is easy to use, with many formatting options for building the book
- Media content can be embedded in the book
- The book can be read online or exported in different formats
- Easy to update and fix issues, keep resource current and relevant
- Accessibility is built in, although could still be improved
Another useful element of Pressbooks is the Analytics feature, which provides information about how readers are accessing the text. This allows Lisa to see that Colour Theory is just about to reach 200,000 views (an impressive figure). She was also able to add an interactive colour wheel into the textbook.
Utilising open practices for law students
Legal Research Skills: an Australian Law Guide is an open textbook that “exemplifies many of the characteristics that OER has to offer”, according to Michelle Bendall (Scholarly Services Librarian – Law at Deakin University). The team behind this book saw a gap for law students in this space, as well as the benefits of publishing under an open education licence.
One of these benefits has been the ability to update the book – where the team began with a text that represented five out of Australia’s nine major legal jurisdictions, they have now progressed to an updated edition that represents all Australian jurisdictions.
Good OERs are living resources.
Michelle Bendall
The new edition will be released in November 2025 and will also include a chapter on GenAI, an exemplar of the capabilities of open textbooks to grow, adapt and change with the times.
CAUL Grants
The OER Collective provides essential support for producing open textbooks, including those that were featured in this session. The CAUL OER Grant Round for 2025-2026 is currently open for Expressions of Interest, and will close on 30 May for Collaborate grants, 2 May for all other grants. Find out more on the CAUL OER Collective website.
View the event this blog post was based on (duration: 90 mins):