Curtin University Library’s experience partnering with students to create open resources
Post written by Amanda Bellenger and Claire Murphy
Curtin University Library has recently launched our UniSkills and 23 Things programs, an ambitious suite of open online learning resources designed to prepare our students for academic success and support them in the development of digital literacy skills crucial to today’s constantly changing workforce.
Through UniSkills, students are supported in the development of the assignment and study skills needed to succeed at University. This ranges from strategies for better time management to approaches to improve academic writing. In comparison, 23 Things was designed to be future-focused, providing the foundation upon which students can build their digital literacy skills and confidence. The program equips them with vital skills as they move out of university and into the workforce.
This suite of online resources was designed with re-use in mind and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA). There were three main drivers why licensing under Creative Commons was the preferred approach for the project.
Firstly, the Library Copyright Officer was processing copyright royalty payments relating to library learning objects that had come from schools and other educational providers via copyright collecting societies. It did not seem ethical to receive payment for use of these objects, particularly from organisations working with limited budgets and resourcing, as we always intended for our resources to be free.
Secondly, many libraries create similar resources on the same topics — a task which uses up a significant portion of their resourcing. In order to maximise this investment, Curtin University Library sees a future where there is widespread re-use of library learning objects. By sharing basic structures, templates and wording for learning objects, library staff can easily contextualise the learning object for their home institution and potentially build upon it for others to freely re-use and adapt further down the line.
Finally, the Library sees itself as having a strong role in advocating for open practices in learning, teaching and research, including the adoption of Creative Commons licensing. By attaching the CC licenses to our own learning objects, we model good practices to the wider Curtin community, while upskilling library staff in the CC license suite and the practical issues faced when making content open for re-use.
What the two sets of learning resources have in common is their goal of providing an active learning experience. To achieve this, we have integrated H5P activities throughout the various modules. As an open source content production tool, H5P was the perfect fit for our open and re-use goal. Copyright and licence information can be recorded for each of the HTML5 activities. They appear with download and embed options, actively encouraging others to incorporate them in their own content. Content is made more discoverable with functionality for easily adding metadata which enables search within the H5P repository.
Both resources have been developed through collaboration between Library staff and Curtin students. Custom website coding of UniSkills and 23 Things was completed by a computing student with a passion for design, while the content of the 23 Things program was entirely created by students for their peers. The outcome of this open pedagogy approach was a diversity of voice and approach that we would not have been able to achieve on our own.
Collaborating on this project has enabled Library staff and the students involved to develop their knowledge by creating resources that could be licensed under a CC-BY-SA license. Working to this brief forced us to move outside of our comfort zones, adopting new ways of working and creating content to ensure that re-use would be possible.
23 Things has been live for about three and a half months with new modules released each week. In that time the site has been visited almost 6500 times, with video editing and data makeover the most popular modules so far. Feedback is positive. One student reports, “Really enjoying the brief lessons that link to other resources — I can pick and choose what I want to learn!” A lecturer let us know that they are, “loving the ‘simple but essential things playlist’ — this is something that we can link in our … [course] sites to refer students to all the time.”
The UniSkills hub is in its pilot phase, however the feedback received so far is also positive. One student commented, “I feel that this new interface is awesome! It looks super clean and more interactive! I will refer to this even after my degree!”
We look forward to further developing our resources and making them available, for the benefit of Curtin and beyond!
About the authors
Amanda and Claire work for Curtin University Library in Western Australia. Amanda is the Manager of the Research and Copyright team with responsibilities for the library’s range of research services and for copyright compliance. Claire is the Coordinator of the Learning Success team, who deliver support for the development of information, digital and academic literacies.
