Resources

Readings and Resources on Social Justice and Open Education

• Open Textbooks and Social Justice: a National Scoping Study: This study investigated the potential for open textbooks to assist with improving the experience and outcomes of under-represented higher education students in the Australian context.
• Open at the Margins: Critical Perspectives in Open Education: This book represents a starting point towards curating and centring marginal voices and non-dominant epistemic stances in open education. It includes the work of 43 diverse authors whose perspectives challenge the dominant hegemony.
• Evaluating OER for Social Justice: As part of the resource, there’s an OER 101 brochure providing background on essential concepts, an OER Evaluation Rubric that centres on Social Justice, examples of OER reviews completed using the rubric, and a tutorial for those using the rubric to guide their selection of OER.
• OER Equity Blueprint: The overarching goal of the Equity Blueprint is to define, unpack, and explain the multiple dimensions of equity and foreground the role of OER in closing equity gaps.
• It’s Not (Just) About the Cost: Academic Libraries and Intentionally Engaged OER for Social Justice [PDF]: How can librarians seize the radical affordances of OER to complicate standard narratives with the stories of those historically and systemically marginalised? The author discusses the unique potential of the academic library to support intentionally engaged OER as well as the responsibility of librarians to centre marginalised perspectives in their work with faculty as cocreators and identifiers of OER.
• Towards a Sustainable OER Ecosystem: the Case for OER Stewardship: The purpose of the CARE Framework is to articulate a set of shared values and a collective vision for the future of education and learning enabled by the widespread adoption and use of OER. It aims to address the question of how an individual, institution, or organization seeking to be a good steward can contribute to the growth and sustainability of the OER movement consistent with the community’s values.
• The OER Starter Kit: This starter kit has been created to provide instructors with an introduction to the use and creation of open educational resources (OER).
• Leveraging Open Educational Resources to Advance Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: A Guide for Campus Change-Agents: This guide is designed to support the integration of open educational resources (OER) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) goals within higher education institutions. Built upon research funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation that examined the strategies and experiences of the sixty-six colleges, universities, and state systems, this guide provides evidence-based guidance and best practices that result in initiative sustainability and broad adoption of OER by strategically connecting this work to DEI goals, strategies, policies, initiatives, and offices that also exist within a given educational context.
• Making Ripples: A Guidebook to Challenge Status Quo in OER Creation: The purpose of this guide is to explore strategies for you as OER creators to incorporate equitable practices into your workflows.

Readings and Resources on Accessibility

• BcCampus’s Accessibility Toolkit: The goal of this accessibility toolkit, is to provide resources for each content creator, instructional designer, educational technologist, librarian, administrator, and teaching assistant to create a truly open textbook—one that is free and accessible for all students.
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG): Worldwide guidelines for web accessibility to ensure web content is available to all
• How to Ensure Accessibility for Educational Videos: an article that addressed how to make videos accessible.
• H5P Content Type Accessibility: a list of H5P content and whether it is accessible.
• Dos and don’ts on designing for accessibility: The dos and don’ts of designing for accessibility are general best practice guidelines. Currently, there are six different posters in the series that cater to users from these areas: low vision, D/deaf and hard of hearing, dyslexia, motor disabilities, users on the autistic spectrum and users of screen readers
• Australian Inclusive Publishing Initiative guides: two helpful guides for the publishing and disability sectors. The first guide offers publishers a set of workflow strategies for creating accessible digital books that are inclusive by design, and the second guide explains the legal environment for making books accessible to those with a print disability.
• Introduction to Web Accessibility: The instruction here will “interpret” the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1), to make it easier to understand for a general audience. You will have an opportunity to experience barriers firsthand, and then experience that content with the barriers removed, developing a practical understanding of web accessibility.
• Understanding Document Accessibility: With much of the world gone digital, learning to create documents that are accessible to everyone is becoming a necessary skill. Intended for a general audience, this free resource reviews a wide range of document authoring applications, including the tools they contain for creating accessible documents, and tests them to ensure they do not contain potential barriers.
• How to describe images: a guide to writing Alt-text descriptions.

Readings and Resources on Universal Design for Learning and Inclusive Design

• CAST’s UDL Guidelines: The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn.
• Universal Design for Learning (UDL) for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA): This guide will help instructors and others to incorporate principles of UDL and considerations of EDI and Indigenisation in their learning environments.
• A Comprehensive Guide to Applying Universal Design for Learning: A collection of three UDL workbooks.
• UDL Tools for all Grades and Subject Areas: a collection of UDL tools and worksheets for all grades and subject areas.
• The Inclusive Design Guide: a guide on recognising diversity and uniqueness, inclusive process and tools and broader beneficial Impact.
• Neurodiversity and Inclusion: Choosing Kinder Design: tips for inclusive design for neurodiverse people.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Resources

• Protocols for using First Nations Cultural and Intellectual Property in the Arts [PDF]: protocols by the Australian Council of the Arts.
• University of Sydney’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Protocols: The Protocols aim to guide Library staff in promoting culturally safe practices across services, spaces and resources.
• Traditional Knowledge Licenes and Labels: an article explaining Traditional Knowledge licence.
• Pulling Together: A Guide for Indigenization of post-secondary institutions. A professional learning series.
• Interrogating and Supplementing OER Through a Decolonized Lens: an article that explores OER through a decolonised lens.
• USQ’s open text collection for First Nations Studies: a collection of open textbooks for First Nations studies.
• UQ’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Referencing Guide: The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander referencing guide outline a method to acknowledge, celebrate and respect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ knowledge and materials. The guide uses culturally appropriate and respectful language practices when writing with, for or about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, that showcase the culturally diverse knowledge that enriches the teaching curriculum.
• Guidelines for the Ethical Publishing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Authors and Research from those Communities: guidelines for if you want to publish Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander authors or material written about their histories and cultures — and to do it well.

LGBTIQ+ and Trans Inclusion in OER

• Trans Inclusion in OER: This resource is a guide on how to make OER more inclusive and representative of trans and gender-diverse people. It is intended to be easily incorporated into a scholarly communications course, while also being valuable to faculty and others interested in learning about the topic and how to make changes to their own course materials.
• Students as Co-Producers of Queer Pedagogy: Responding to concerns about a textbook reading that students perceived as heteronormative, cisnormative, and antifeminist, staff formed a partnership between students and faculty to reflect on the situation and to workshop ways to move forward.
• The Gender Spectrum Collection: Free stock photos of trans and non-binary people. Licence: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
• Queer in Tech: Photos that promote the visibility of queer and gender-nonconforming (GNC) people in technology, who are often under-represented as workers powering the creative, technical, and business leadership of groundbreaking tech companies and products. Licence: CC BY 3.0.
• Resources for Educators: Teaching in ways that are trans-affirming and gender-just does not require exhaustive knowledge, but it does require an unequivocal investment in trans people and in trans knowledges. Resources across this site can help you begin or continue your journey toward increasingly affirming and ethical pedagogies.

Students as Co-Creators

• A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students: A handbook for faculty interested in practising open pedagogy by involving students in the making of open textbooks, ancillary materials, or other OER.
• Student-led OER to inspire and engage your class: a blog post with examples of student-led OER.
• The benefits of creating open educational resources as assessment in an online education course [PDF]: a conference paper by Australian education academic and open practitioner Eseta Tualaulelei.
• Students as Co-Producers of Queer Pedagogy: Responding to concerns about a textbook reading that students perceived as heteronormative, cisnormative, and antifeminist, staff formed a partnership between students and faculty to reflect on the situation and to workshop ways to move forward.

Readings and Resources on Anti-Racist and Inclusive Open Pedagogy

• The Anti-Racist Discussion Pedagogy [PDF]: An introductory guide to building an anti-racist pedagogy in any discipline through instructor reflection, clear communication guidelines, and inquiry-based discussion.
• Antiracism Toolkit for Allies [PDF]: This guide provides analyses of white advantage and information about how to disrupt racism and create work communities where everyone thrives.
• Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: A Heuristic for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors: This document offers explicit guidance on anti-racist professional practices in the form of a heuristic for editors, reviewers, and authors involved in academic reviewing.
• Open Pedagogy and the Inclusion of Marginalized Students: a blog post by Deirdre Maultsaid.
• Your Discomfort Is Valid: Big Feelings and Open Pedagogy: This article explores the affective reactions of 13 community college students engaged in an open pedagogy textbook creation project.
• Creating Equitable, Diverse, and Inclusive Assessments in Online and Blended Learning: This course provides useful approaches, frameworks, and practical strategies to introduce equitable, diverse, and inclusive (EDI) assessment strategies in the online or hybrid environment.
• Inclusive Pedagogies: This resource introduces educators to educational strategies that can foster more inclusive, equitable, and just classroom environments.
• Designing for Care: Imagining better pedagogies is the first step in creating powerful learning environments. Better, for the authors of this collection, means more humanizing pedagogies that embrace the fact that the people in our learning environments are fantastic, curious, unpredictable, capable, and multi-layered.