Go open! Supporting higher education staff engagement in open educational practices

his paper reports on the activities of a team in Dublin City University (DCU), composed of academic staff and library staff, who engaged in a collaborative project, Go Open, in 2020 and 2021 that encourages members of the DCU community to engage in open educational practices. The academic staff team members, from DCU’s Open Education Unit, have experience in providing online, flexible, open education/access programmes that include many examples of open educational practice, while the library staff have experience in advocating for engagement in open educational practice and open scholarship/science.

The project goals were: to produce user-friendly resources that would give an introduction to open education generally and more specifically key types of open educational practice; to provide concrete examples of open educational practice to contextualise the educational problems for which such practices can provide a solution; and provide links to other sources of information on open education such as key websites and thought leaders so that those whose interest in open education is sparked by the resources are facilitated in taking their next step. These project goals align with the first action area of the UNESCO OER recommendation, that of building capacity of stakeholders to create, access, re-use, adapt and redistribute OER.

The Go Open project developed both a guide, ‘Go Open: A beginners guide to open education’, and a LibGuide (https://dcu.libguides.com/GoOpen), both of which were launched at an event in April 2021 as part of the team’s ongoing project output dissemination and advocacy for open education practice. In the two weeks after the launch event the guide had 387 views and 178 downloads, while the libguide had 781 views. The Go Open Project was funded by the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and DCU’s Teaching Enhancement Unit through the SATLE 19 fund.