WEBINAR SUMMARY:  Engaging with open educational practices (OEP) can seem daunting for staff, who may feel it represents an ‘all or nothing’ proposition for teaching and learning.  In this webinar, OEP will be contextualised and nuanced within the institutional ecology, and practical strategies supporting a transition toward openness will be explored. The underpinning rationale and purposes of open education inform these approaches, whilst also providing a measure for evaluation.

The webinar is informed by recent PhD research that took a mixed methods approach to deeply examining three Australian university case sites.  Bronfenbrenner’s Ecology of Human Development (1979) acted as the conceptual framework to map influencing forces across the institution and sector that impact on manifestations of OEP by privileging context and the thick description provided by the participants. The resulting Ecology of Open Educational Practice will be of interest to university leadership, OEP advocates, learning designers and technologists, lecturers, librarians, and any other staff either supporting or enacting open education at their institution. 

In line with the idea of ‘incrementally open’, the webinar will be practically useful for those interested in taking their first steps into OEP, as well as current practitioners.

Dr Adrian Stagg is the Manager (Open Educational Practice) for the University of Southern Queensland. His career has included both public and academic libraries, and positions as a Learning Technologist, and eLearning Designer.  In 2014, he implemented the first OEP Learning & Teaching Grants Scheme in Australia, and currently supports open textbook publishing and open pedagogy.  His doctoral research focused on ‘The Ecology of OEP in Australian higher education’ to identify the contextual influences within institutions and the sector applied to open education. Adrian recently led the national OER Advocacy Toolkit Project for the Council of Australasian University Librarians, and is a co-founder of the ASCILITE nation Special Interest Group for OEP. He is also an active in the open community through the OERu, and Open Education Network.