This presentation discusses the findings of my PhD research as they are applied to the current GO-GN fellowship. The study was a developmental evaluation that used three sets of criteria to filter the OEP in the resources I used as case studies. I took the lessons I learned from examining OEP in Indigenous workforce development and applied the best practices to new curriculum in the College of Indigenous Futures, Education, Arts and Society at Charles Darwin University in remote northern Australia. The criteria used in this development were blended with the principles from my PhD and workforce capabilities outlined in government initiatives for Australian higher education.

Outcomes pointed to ways OEP must respect Indigenous Knowledge Authority (Douglas 2015), be collaborative (Cummins 2009) and consensual (Habermas 1987) with multiple perspectives, allow for their situated application and be transformative at the cultural interfaces (Nakata 2007). At this point in the presentation, I will pause for a polling activity or brief check in (dependent on numbers) to check for consensus around what these principles might mean to participants in their own OEP settings.
I applied these practice principles of OEP to a developmental evaluation of new curriculum for 1st and 2nd year students. Incorporating stakeholder and foundational skills criteria into the new work, we created learning programs that met students with the aforementioned OEP principles of centring Indigenous Knowledge Authority, being collaborative and consensual with students’ multiple realities, and allowing for their situated application and being transformative to their online experience. Additionally, other OEP used were open access readings, student generated open textbooks, blended synchronous/asynchronous content organisation, open peer review of drafts in discussion board forums, and critical digital literacy and pedagogies with ‘real world’ media and events as case studies for student assessment.

This developmental evaluation in my GOGN fellowship research projec found more student–generated evidence for how these approaches worked in the new curriculum. With a view to meeting agendas for ensuring job readiness, I could see OEP as enabling students to practice workforce employability skills. Doing this in a suite of socially and culturally specific learning programs, it also enabled criticality, creativity, agency, and empowerment as evidenced in student work samples and end of semester evaluations. Linking academic knowledge practices and institution based online learning to ‘real world’ social policy and service delivery sectors led to some encouraging evidence for OEP as a healthy contributor to workforce capability.

Evidence and outcomes of the fellowship will be shared as an outcome of practice-based research and developmental evaluation of learning design. Another question-and-answer interaction will come at the end here, based on how participants could use this in various settings.