New Podcast Episode – Sarah Steen’s OER Story: Workplace Role Play Scenarios
The Library is delighted to share the release of its newest podcast episode: Sarah Steen’s OER Story: Workplace Role Play Scenarios. The episode features guest Dr Sarah Steen, who generously shared her stories about how the OER came to be, it’s impact on learners in and beyond Deakin, and how it’s shaping her own teaching practice in the brave new world of AI-enabled education.
One of many highlights from the episode is Sarah’s story about what she does when she hears from former students who’ve gone on to use the OER in their own workplaces:
I save the email and put it in my positive student feedback folder and, if I’m having a bad day, I’ll read that email and go, ‘Oh, that’s right. We’re making a difference here’.
In the episode, Sarah and show host Lauren Halcomb-Smith also explore:
- How the OER started as a passion project but resulted in career-defining impact
- How it’s creating more consistent learning experiences across an entire course
- How the open CC-BY-NC licence allows Sarah to use the OER to build an interactive AI agent
Sarah Steen is Senior Lecturer and Course Director at Deakin Business School. She is a passionate and innovative educator with over 15 years’ experience. Sarah’s OER, Workplace Role Play Scenarios, gives students the chance to practice difficult workplace conversations, including mediation, before they have to navigate them for real. The OER has attracted over 6,000 visitors and has been adopted by Australian and international universities, as well as integrated into a state government training program. It has been featured in podcasts and showcased through Pressbooks, the Open Education Global Tour series, and open textbook Open Education Down UndOER: Australasian Case Studies. In 2025, Sarah received the Deakin University Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Contribution to Education and Employability in recognition of the OER’s impact.
The entire Library celebrates Sarah’s OER creation, and recognises the significant contribution she has made to the collective wealth of knowledge by openly licensing this resource. We invite you to explore Workplace Role Play Scenarios and share your reflections with the author.
Stories of Openness is a limited-series podcast and research project that features conversations with Deakin academics who have created open textbooks and other Open Educational Resources (OER). The show is hosted by Lauren Halcomb-Smith.
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- Contact your librarian for support with OER searching and discovery
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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 a generative AI tool for early drafting and editing. We carefully reviewed, peer-reviewed, refined and verified all content before publication.