Exciting Changes to Library OER Grant Scheme in 2026
There is a lot happening in curriculum at Deakin. With so many changes in progress, Deakin library has decided to pause the OER grant program in 2026 to enable us to reassess the program, ensuring it aligns with the needs of students and academics. This change won’t affect current and previous OER grant recipients, the Library will continue to support these as we always have.
What has the OER Grants Scheme achieved?
Since 2021, Deakin Library’s Open Educational Resources (OER) Grants Scheme has empowered academics to adopt, adapt and create high‑quality open resources that improve access, equity and student success. With support from the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP), the Library has offered over $200,000 in grants and delivered 26 OER projects over the past four years. Project supported by the grant program are estimated to have saved students over $4 million.
Why pause the program now?
From 2026 our funding model and our access to Pressbooks requires change. This gives us an opportunity to pause and reflect on our approach to the grant program and take this opportunity to focus on completing existing projects and setting up our infrastructure (including our own Pressbooks platform) to support the program in the future. We will be continuing to work with the academic community, building our open publishing service and showcasing OER excellence at Deakin.
What does this mean for OER at Deakin?
- Support continues: The OE team will keep providing OER publishing guidance, consultations, publishing infrastructure and capability‑building so you can progress OER projects – even without a new grant round.
- We’ll revisit grants later in 2026. We will provide more communications about OER grants in the second half of 2026, once we have determined the best-fit model for the future.
- Stay in touch: If you are an OER grant recipient with an ongoing project or a past recipient with a resource in our catalogue, and have questions or concerns, please reach out to us anytime at opened@deakin.edu.au.
Open Ed News is a regular publication from Deakin Library, publishing Open Education-related news for the Deakin academic community and the broader Open Education community. To stay in the loop, please subscribe to Article.
To access Open Education services, please navigate to Open Education via the Deakin Library website. You can also get in touch with us at:
- Contact your librarian for support with OER searching and discovery
- Contact the Open Education team about your OER project.
In the spirit of Open Education’s values of openness and transparency, we’d like to share that parts of this article were written with support from ChatGPT for early drafting and editing. We carefully reviewed, peer-reviewed, refined, and verified all content before publication.