ROADMAP FOR THE FUTURE OF OPEN EDUCATION IN AUSTRALIA

摘要

Australia has a long history in open education both as an early pioneer and in delivery at scale. Looking back over the changing definitions, changing channels and changing purposes provides a landscape for consideration of new directions in Australian open education. Open has morphed through three phases: free of location or time constraints; free of pre-requisites; free of cost. The first two phases were supported and facilitated by Australian government strategy and substantial funding for Australian universities. So far, the third phase has no vision or backing at the national level. Whilst the Australian government has put resources and support behind its aspiration to facilitate open access and reuse of Australia's publicly funded research resources via the Australian Government's Open Access and Licensing Framework, the reform process has not significantly moved to embrace educational resources. In 2014, the Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching funded a national project called OpenEdOz [see website openedoz.org] which produced a roadmap for national policy in open education for Australian universities. The project involved the three partner institutions above, plus a reference group and an evaluator, who were OEP experts recognised nationally and internationally. The project conducted think tanks and sourced case studies which provided signposts for national action. A Theme Matrix was developed with initial themes derived from international literature and projects on OER policy including 2012 Paris OER Declaration (2012), Commonwealth of Learning (2015), Policies for OER Uptake project (POERUP, 2014), and Open Education Quality Initiative (2011). The top 11 OEP themes that emerged from this analysis were: Student Voice, Institutional Strategy, National Policy, Student Co-creation, Course offered as OER, Degree design based on OER, Modules based on OER, Credit Transfer, Accreditation of informal & non-formal learning, Open Licensing and Open Textbooks. From the case studies, twenty-five individual strategies that could contribute to national action were provided in the final OpenEdOz National Roadmap which has ten signposts: Awareness, Students, Teachers, Standards, IP & Copyright, ICT Infrastructure, Research, Discoverability, Collaboration and Sustainability. The National Roadmap is intended to directly support the Australia federal government to take advantage of the full potential of Open Education for the Australian higher education sector. The project team hopes that this Roadmap will further inform national level decision makers of the issues to consider while engaging with Open Educational Practices. We also hope this roadmap will encourage the development of OEP focused policies and regulations at national levels, so that the Australian higher education will be able to fully take advantage of the already globally recognised opportunities of OEP. In the meantime, a number of national education bodies have been invited to become fully engaged as drivers of Australia's Open Education Strategy for universities.