Podcast launch: ‘Stories of Openness: An Open Education Podcast’
What impact do open textbooks have on learning and teaching? Stories of Openness: An Open Education Podcast is exploring this question one conversation at a time.
Stories of Openness, which officially debuts today, features conversations with Deakin academics who have created open textbooks and other Open Educational Resources (OER). The show is hosted by Lauren Halcomb-Smith, and the first three episodes are now available:
Episode 1: Trish Corbett’s Story: ‘Sustainable Marine Futures’ OER
Featuring Dr. Trish Corbett, who is academic director of teaching for the Bachelor of Marine Science in the School of Life and Environmental Science. Trish joins the podcast to talk about her OER Sustainable Marine Futures.
Episode 2: Danielle Hitch’s Story: ‘Enabling and Optimising Recovery from COVID-19’ OER
Featuring Danielle Hitch, an Associate Professor in Deakin’s Faculty of Health, telling the story of OER Enabling and optimising recovery from COVID-19.
Episode 3: Sagarika Mishra’s Story: ‘Business Finance’ OER
Featuring a conversation with Associate Professor Sagarika Mishra from Deakin’s Faculty of Business and Law. Sagarika shares stories from creating and teaching with her OER, Business Finance.
Listen as authors share their stories about creating more accessible learning materials and what it has meant for their students, their teaching practice, and beyond. Stories of Openness is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other popular podcasting platforms.
Podcasting as a research method
Stories of Openness is part of an ongoing research project exploring the impact that Library-funded OER are having on learning and teaching at Deakin, from the perspective of the academics who created them. Podcasting as a research method is an emerging approach to qualitative research that flips the traditional closed-room interview into an openly shareable artefact, whilst still generating rich qualitative data. Both the episode recording and its transcript are shared as open data. To find out more about the research project, visit Stories of Openness: An Open Education Podcast.
Collaboration in practice
Open education is fundamentally a collaborative practice. The launch of this podcast is the result of a collaborative effort involving the generosity and expertise of several colleagues. The podcast is produced by Eddie Pavuna (Scholarly Services Librarian), who also supports the research project. Sarah Fennelly (Visual Design Lead, Deakin Library) created our artwork and our webpage was built by Rachael Wilson (Lead, Digital Content and User Experience, Deakin Library) and Matthew Lyons (Web Developer, Deakin Library). Open publishing would not be possible without the essential contributions of the Deakin Copyright Office. Most of all, we are grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with OER authors in creating this podcast. Their commitment to accessible, equitable learning experiences is exactly what Stories of Openness is here to celebrate.
Find out more
- Email Lauren Halcomb-Smith for more information about this research project.
- Explore Deakin Open eBooks and discover our range of openly licenced eBooks.
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 a generative AI tool for early drafting and editing. We carefully reviewed, peer-reviewed, refined and verified all content before publication.