by PRU MITCHELL and TRACY CREAGH

The Universities Australia Learning and Teaching Repository is a curated space that collects, indexes and amplifies the work of Australian learning and teaching researchers. It provides a set of quality resources on key learning and teaching topics for practitioners.

A partnership between the Repository and  the Student Success journal and associated STARS Conference is investigating the value of indexing and linking to current open access (OA) learning and teaching research. The pilot involves identifying and  matching more recent published articles, practice reports and conference presentations with Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) and predecessor bodies’ project outcomes and dissemination.

There is significant value in this activity. Firstly, indexing OA published research and practice maintains and validates the currency of the Repository as a cross-institutional collection of Australian learning and teaching research – a rich curation of contemporary scholarship that is currently lacking in the sector. Secondly, indexing content from Student Success and the STARS Conference (and eventually other OA learning and teaching specific publications) enables current research and emerging issues and initiatives to be made more accessible.

There are other advantages also. Researchers and authors benefit from increased visibility and engagement with their scholarship (and improved discoverability obviously equals an increase in citations and enhanced impact). Preservation of, and free access to, learning and teaching research provides robust and equitably available systems of knowledge. For example, recent and good practice initiatives presented at the STARS Conference are amplified via the Repository.  Researchers, tertiary educators and professional staff focussed on advancing student learning, success and retention have easy recourse to a dynamic collection that enables them to actively build on the work of others.

This pilot came about as a direct result of two articles separately published by the authors in early 2021 in Sally Kift’s CMM series What’s Needed Now in Teaching and Learning Series: Pru Mitchell’s No limits on learning: The great Australian open access L&T resource and Tracy Creagh’s More to Open Access than research.

This CMM serendipity of itself further validates the Repository’s ethos – openly sharing good practice always has the great potential to enhance and enlarge good practice.

Pru Mitchell, Manager, Information Services, ACER [email protected] @pru

Tracy Creagh, Office for Scholarly Communication, QUT [email protected] @creaght @journalsuccess

2022 STARS Conference 4-6 July https://unistars.org/