Sponsored by ASCILITE, the Australian Open Educational Practice Special Interest Group (or OEPSIG, for short) is a practitioner-facilitated community designed to bring open educators (primarily those in higher education) together to explore issues of common interest, collaborate on shared projects, undertake research, and to advocate for the place of OEP in national L&T discussions, strategy, and policy. This is really a ‘grass roots’ community, and engagement with OEP varies greatly across the membership – don’t feel as though you need to be an ‘expert’ to join (in fact most of us are quite the opposite).
In 2021, the SIG includes over eighty members from thirty institutions in Australasia, and continues to grow. The new publication team for the OEP Digest (Australasian Edition) has brought a high level of production and content value to the monthly publication, and we continue to encourage partnerships with like-minded organisations. Of particular note is our stakeholder status in the Council of Australian University Libraries (CAUL) ‘Enabling a Modern Curriculum‘ projects.
We encourage open discussion through the Comments sections on the site, support a collaboratively identified agenda for action, and membership is freely and openly offered to anyone seeking to engage with open education.
2021 UPDATE: As part of a broader ASCILITE move for all Special Interest Groups, part of the OEP-SIG business will move to an ASCILITE-created Microsoft Teams environment. The Convenors acknowledge this means some non-institution members will not have Microsoft Teams access. Our commitment to ensuring the free flow of information means we have begun the following actions on this site:
- Post the OEP Digest (Australasian Edition) to this site to ensure access.
- Retain Zoom as the environment for meetings, to ensure those without Microsoft Teams access are not ‘locked out’
- Advertise all meetings via the ASCILITE events schedule; all interested parties may then learn of, and participate in the community.
- Continue to use Google Drive as the central repository for our collaborative documents, with links posted on this site.
We look forward to seeing this group continue to grow, and work toward a higher awareness of open education nationally.
If you have any questions, please do contact either Adrian Stagg, or Carina Bossu.
Australasian Open Educational Practice Special Interest Group 