In contemporary journalism, if a news story is described as “having legs” it means it has the ability to evolve and remain relevant over a long period of time to a wide community. This concept of “having legs” can also be applied to the creation of OER as there is an embedded assumption by the creator of a work that, by assigning an open license to it, their work will become flexible enough to develop “legs” and continue to be successful on its own through adaptation and adoption by others.

In recent years there has been discussion in academia about ways in which academics can make scholarly materials more broadly accessible to a wider audience (Rancic, 2021; Jurgenson, 2012), how the field of education technology suffers from forgetting its own history (Watters 2020), and how Open Educational Resources are seldom revised or adapted (Hilton et al., 2012). With this context in mind, we would like to talk about how we gave “legs” to an openly licensed academic work dealing with the history of education technology, and how we turned the Creative Commons licensed book 25 Years of Ed Tech by Martin Weller into an openly licensed audio version of the book (see 25 Years of Ed Tech) voiced by a community of volunteers from around the world.

In an effort to give the historical topics of the book wider exposure, we also produced an entirely new community driven podcast called ‘Between the Chapters” where issues from the book were discussed. We will talk about how we engaged in Networked Participatory Scholarship (Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012) to bring together a global community of over 50 volunteers to collaborate on both the podcast and the audio version of the book, and how we used open technology tools from the Domains inspired Open Ed Tech Collaborative to support the project.

We propose including participant voices as not only part of the session, but as part of the ongoing podcast series. We will facilitate a discussion with session participants about the process of converting an openly licensed book into an audio version of that book and will turn our discussion into a bonus podcast episode for the series.

This project serves as a case study in collaborative adaptation of openly licensed material, and how that material can be the inspiration for something entirely new.