Mike Mills Welcome to Open Ed Mic, where educators share stories, insights, and strategies for transforming learning through openness. Wherever you are in your open education journey, we invite you into the conversation. Let's hear who's joining us today. Brittany. Brittany Dudek Hi, Brittany Dudek from Denver, Colorado. I'm the Learning Resource Director at the Colorado Community College System. Mike Mills Kevin. Kevin Corcoran Hi, I'm Kevin Corcoran. I'm from the University of Central Florida. Mike Mills And I'm Mike Mills, a now retired administrator at Montgomery College in Maryland and advocate of all things open. We're missing Zach Clayball today, but he'll be back next episode. Before I introduce today's guest, I want to give a shout out to Kevin. He was shortlisted for the OE Global Open Education Awards for Excellence in the People of Open. Quite the honor, Kevin. Any words of wisdom? Kevin Corcoran I just have a huge chairing section. I am so thankful to the folks that coordinated the submission and gathered the letters of support. I'm actually just blown away by that and shocked that I made it to the short list. But thank you so much. I didn't know you were going to mention that. Mike Mills Well, I didn't tell you because I knew you would tell me not to mention it. Brittany Dudek We're so proud of you, Kevin. Kevin Corcoran Thank you. And the feeling is mutual across the board. Mike Mills And now today's guest, Ash Barber, is joining us from Down Under. Early morning for her. Ash is an open education leader, librarian, community builder, and advocate for making openness more equitable and inclusive. Ash is currently lead strategic communications at the Council of Australasian University Librarians, CALL. Earlier in her career, she served as senior coordinator for the CALL OER Collective and as an academic librarian at the University of South Australia. Across those roles, her work has focused heavily on inclusive open education, collaboration, and expanding equitable access to information. Ash is also chair of the 2026 Open Education Conference Advisory Board and co-convenes the Ascalite Australasian Open Education Practice Special Interest Group. Through our libraries of the Australian Technology Network Fellowship, Ash created Empowered OER, which brings together practical tools, examples, and frameworks for creating and evaluating OER with inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility in mind. The project grew in part from a fellowship trip to North America, exploring how OER might address inequities embedded in traditional textbooks. Ash was also a lead editor of the Open Education Down Under ER Australasian Case Studies, a community-driven collection documenting open education practice across the region, from advocacy, adoption, and authentic assessment to indigenous knowledge, collaboration, artificial intelligence, and affordability. What runs through all of this work is a larger question. What does it mean for education to be truly open, not only accessible, but equitable, inclusive, community-driven, and sustainable? And because much of the conversation on Open Ed Mike has understandably come from a North American perspective, today we have an opportunity to turn the microphone toward Australia and ask what we might learn from the open education community there. Welcome, Ash. Ash Barber Hey, thank you for having me on the podcast. It's very exciting. I've listened to your podcast since it launched, so I've heard everybody else on here, and it's wonderful to be invited on. Mike Mills Well, Ash, you come to open education through university libraries and have since worked across equity, community building, publishing, advocacy, and strategic communications. What first pulled you into open education? Was there a moment when it became more than simply part of your job and became work you felt personally connected to? Ash Barber Yeah, I mean, certainly it never felt like simply part of my job. I actually kind of pushed it to become my job. When I started in libraries, I think, you know, I started from the point of view that sees every lock that there can be for content. I was a graduate library officer at the beginning. And in that role, it's a program that graduates can go through and you move around different departments in the library. So you get a taste for everything, bit of front of house stuff, bit of back of house stuff. So I worked in acquisitions and licensing and copyright where I saw exactly how difficult it can be to just get access to some content. And I happened to be in the copyright team right at a critical moment in Australia where the University of Australia, which is a peak body for the sector, was in a legal dispute with the Copyright Agency, which collects compensation for creators for the educational statutory license, which is how educators here use content in courses without having to ask for permission for every single piece of content. And so that put this laser focus on copyright protected content in institutions and right at the moment that I was in the copyright team. And that's how I learned about things like Creative Commons and looking for openly licensed content to try and replace the more restricted content that we had in the institution. And I remember initially actually kind of being really resistant because I'm also a creator and my first thought was, but my work, what about my rights? I want to be able to earn money off of my content if I want to. And so I think that has given me a really useful foundation in what someone else might think when they first come to open. And so through Creative Commons, I learned actually this is a really flexible approach to licensing. This gives authors a lot of control. And through Creative Commons, I found the OEP SIG, the Australasian Open Educational Practice Special Interest Group, where my eyes were really open to everything open education can do. And from there, I've just been hooked. I think learning about all the ways that open education can make content accessible and make textbooks free for students and all of that, it was very eye-opening. Also for the nerd in me, I just loved it because I'm like, wait, you mean I can go and just learn about astrophysics and I don't have to go and actually do the degree? That's amazing. But I kind of discovered as well that being just cost-free wasn't enough, that that opened education to a lot of people, but not to everybody. And that there was still a lot of systemic barriers in place for people who are systemically marginalized. And through that is how I ended up creating Empowered OER. Brittany Dudek So that's actually a great segue to some of the questions that I had for you. Because so many people do encounter OER through affordability, which is fantastic, right? Like that's a great entry point, a great reason to use OER. And I don't want to discount that. But I think that one of my personal reasons for really becoming so passionate about OER is the way that we can use it to become more inclusive. and so your work with Empowered OER really kind of spoke to me on that and that work specifically pushes the conversation so much further into inclusion and diversity, equity, accessibility. I was thrilled to see all the universal design for learning pieces on there. I have a learning design team that I work with so that's a big conversation for us. So what were you seeing in open education that convinced you that we as open education practitioners needed to focus on equity as like a deliberate focus for open education? Ash Barber Well, so in my role as an academic librarian at UniSA, or any of my librarian roles actually at UniSA, one of the things we see a lot is the access and inclusion unit would send through students to us who had an access plan which would enable us to make copies of content or or alter content somehow to be more accessible for them but it meant that that student had to have gone to get an access plan and then also have the courage to enact the plan and then for us to go and do a thing for them to act they can finally get access to the content it was just this multi-step thing that a small section of students are even going to do, but a much larger section of students are going to need. And it just didn't make sense to me that they had to go through this whole process, which is also lengthy and delays the time they can actually even get the content. It didn't make sense to me that they would have to go and ask for this thing that they should just have from the beginning and should just be built into content from the start. And so whether that is a technologically accessible piece of content or if it is just providing multiple means of access because students operate in different ways because everybody learns differently or contextually learns differently. So I think those were drivers but one of the other things is that the education system here works a bit differently to how it does over in the US and I think in Canada where here for students to pay for their tuition, if you're a domestic student, it's a bit different if you're an international student or have various visas and things, but if you're a domestic student, then you can enrol in essentially a government-supported place and that means the tuition fee is subsidised and it also means that you don't have to pay for it up front. You kind of get a loan and that loan is through the government. It doesn't accrue interest like a private loan would. It gets indexed every year but it's certainly much more accessible away into education in the first place than it is if you had to get a separate loan and then you don't even have to start paying it back until you earn over a certain amount in your salary every year or your wages every year and you pay that back just through taxes. So the actual tuition aspect is much lower a barrier than it is in America. And so that means that the cost argument for OER is a little less useful. And we need to kind of come at it strategically from other angles to show the need for OER and the use for OER rather than just cost. Brittany Dudek That is fascinating. And also a really great argument for why OER is so useful outside of that cost context. I want to go back really quick to something that you did mention about the self-disclosure piece. And I think that that's a huge argument for universal design for learning generally. Requiring people to self-disclose, whatever it might be, is not something that we should be doing, right? they should be able to disclose if they want to. And I think that that's, that kind of hits home. And so if I can ask just a quick follow-up, what would you recommend that an educator, a librarian, an instructor, faculty member, staff member, someone who's working with OER, what would you recommend that they, that they, if they look at a piece of material and they say, is this genuinely inclusive? What should they be looking for? Ash Barber I think it really depends on the goal. I think equity or inclusion or those words can be really overwhelming to people who maybe aren't used to working in that space or thinking through that lens. You know, equity with a capital E. And it's really just a euphemism for an OER that does the thing we're trying to do. And I think if the thought process can kind of be reframed to think about specifically what purpose are you trying to serve with this resource? And then look at those concrete things. So, you know, maybe it's audio clips beside text because you're trying to provide multiple means of engagement. or you're looking for an OER that braids Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledges because you're trying to contribute to decolonising the curriculum. I think rather than going, how can this thing be more inclusive? It's what do my students need? What is the thing I'm trying to specifically achieve? And that brings it back down to something a bit more concrete. Kevin Corcoran I was wondering if I could maybe pull on that a little bit more, you know, sort of pulling on the multiple means of representation and allowing for students. And you mentioned decolonization. We were lucky to have early on in the show, Amy Chen from North America, who was talking about the tribal colleges within the U.S. And I was just wondering, you know, how you go about getting those diverse voices throughout Australia and the region. And then maybe even going a step further, because I guess maybe the concept or the authority of ownership and permission is a little bit different among those indigenous groups. How do you wrestle with trying to have representation and have that broad scope, but also, I guess, respecting or acknowledging different traditions and cultures and how they look at ownership of content? Ash Barber Yeah, it's a really good question. I think, first of all, you know, the adage, nothing about us without us is really highly relevant here. And I'm a non-Indigenous person and so it wouldn't be appropriate for me to lead something like that. It would be appropriate for me to go and build relationships with communities that are underrepresented, their voices are underrepresented in these texts and to see what is it that they actually want to talk about or if they want to talk about anything, if they want to share their knowledge. And you're right that the concept of ownership or copyright or all of that is different. There is this non-Indigenous kind of individualistic view that we tend to have about copyright and ownership and the way that the law works around it as well. But in Indigenous communities here, at least, the concept of ownership of knowledge is kind of more broad than that. A person doesn't own Indigenous knowledge. A group owns that knowledge or is a custodian of the knowledge. And so it changes the way that that knowledge can be shared. It changes the way that permission can be sought because it's not just one person you're seeking permission from. It's a group. It's maybe elders. And that process takes a lot of time. And you kind of can't even put a time frame on it because it's just however long it takes. And I think a lot of it, though, comes back to building relationships that are really based in trust and that aren't just a one way system of I want to do something here. So I'm going to take this knowledge and I'm going to do all this. It's coming at it more from a point of I am in a position where I can facilitate something if this is what would be helpful for you. If this is what you would like to do, what are your goals? How can I actually support those goals? Yeah, so it's kind of complex, but I think ultimately it's just about building relationships. Kevin Corcoran I love the fact that you phrased it as they are custodians of the cultural knowledge or the community knowledge. And then we as non-Indigenous have to be sort of shepherds and making sure that their voices of whatever they're comfortable sharing is included. I love that framing. Mike Mills Ash, are there situations when those of us in the open community just need to be more aware and become more comfortable in saying this should not be open based on that concept of ownership that you explained? Ash Barber Yeah, I mean, there's, you know, that discussion around the Creative Commons license of if you have no derivatives on there, is it really an OER? And, I mean, I certainly lean more towards the idea of yes, just because it doesn't fit the five R's. I think we can maybe evolve our thought around that because of this very type of content, you know, Indigenous knowledges. I think we shouldn't be saying that they have to have an ability to be adapted. So, yeah, I think absolutely there are situations where we can say things shouldn't necessarily be the traditional idea of open because I think it's evolved. Mike Mills Your career has spent a lot of time focusing on collaboration, community building across Australia, the wider region. What have you learned about the difference between building a network of people and building a genuine community of practice? Ash Barber I think the word networking can be so, can have all these connotations of, I don't know, transactional kind of relationship. Whereas I think a community is, it's people who are genuinely moving towards the same goal. Maybe they have different avenues for that because they have their own sort of mini goals along the way, the side quests and things. But the ultimate goal is aligned and you can see how you can actually support each other in that. I think communities have a lot of reciprocal learning in them where you've got people who are more experienced, who are really happily shepherding people, others through, wanting to help them avoid the mistakes that they've already made themselves. And then you've got newer people in the field who are looking for that support, but also bringing maybe some knowledge from another field to actually make this field a bit more robust you know people from the open access movement which has been around longer and and in some ways and has really made a lot of inroads you know having those contacts that are becoming part of the open ed community as well is really useful and I think a community is a space where people can feel really good to just be genuinely there without any pretense of knowing everything you know knowing that they have something to give and that there's a lot here to learn and being really open to that I think that's what makes it feel like a community that it's safe to be to not know everything and to be making mistakes because others are going to want to help you along and want to see you succeed. Brittany Dudek I think that's a nice thread that I've noticed between the library communities and the OER communities is that it's very welcoming, but also happy to kind of teach you along the way, which I've enjoyed. So speaking of the communities, I know that you have spent obviously a lot of time in your Australian community. But you've also been spending a fair amount of time in the North American open community as well. Your Empowered OER Fellowship has brought you to North America. You were here in Denver, which is where I'm located for the Open Ed Conference. And you've got connections in lots of different spaces. And as you move between the different communities, your different international communities, What feels genuinely different to you about how these different open education communities or open education in general is understood or practiced? Ash Barber Gosh, my brain has immediately gone in many directions. The education systems themselves are different. So that creates a fundamentally different kind of conversation. Also, the way that the textbooks are purchased is different as well. I believe that over there, there's a lot of the bookshops on campus. So the ones having discussions with publishers and, you know, they have overlapping motivations there of both wanting to sell a book, which means that that price is not going to be as ideal as it could be for a student because there's a profit to be made and all of that. Whereas here, the library has that conversation with the publisher. And so, you know, we don't want to sell a book. We want to give it away. We want it to come back so we can give it away again. But, you know, it really fundamentally changes the motivation in that conversation. And so that's one way where some of the approaches, the strategies or their tactics will be quite different in these different contexts. And I think it's really important to know that that is a difference when we look at each other's, when Australia looks at things happening in North America and when North America looks at stuff happening in Australia. because that little bit of context changes how we're going to approach something and we can't just duplicate some work that's happening internationally. We need to adapt it or maybe use something different. So that's one of the ways. I think also North America has quite a mature grant structure. You know, there's, I believe, federal funding for some things, but there's also like we're all jealous of California. with their state OER grants. So that sort of stuff, it doesn't really happen here yet. Hopefully it will at some point. But, you know, we have a much less developed system around that. But we, I think as a result, we have a very developed sort of collectivism kind of approach. We are very connected despite the distance in our country. and in New Zealand as well. And, you know, pooling our resources, creating joint infrastructure to move open ed forward in a way that I think can be looked at as a model for other places. Yeah, I would say those are the key differences. Brittany Dudek I think I'm jealous of kind of the collaboration that you have, because, you know, we may have state grant funding or things like that. But, you know, there's one of the things that I think that as a country that we struggle with that we're now kind of starting to focus on. But there's a lot of duplication happening, you know, from one state to another state or even from one college system or one college to another college within the same state. And that sometimes can make it a little challenging, I think, for funding purposes or even from someone who manages, you know, the grants or projects at, you know, my system, which is 13 colleges. you know, sometimes I'll get requests for funding and it's someone's brand new idea and it's a fantastic idea for them. But when I look at the project, I'm like, we've already kind of funded that same project a couple of times, or it already exists in completion in all of these places within the state of Colorado or within the United States. So why are we going to fund it again? You know, we should be adapting or we should be, you know, remixing these things, or at this point, it's not a creation project it's you know something different um and so the fact that that you all are you know have such a kind of a a system set up um at least that's kind of my perspective um brings me some jealousy so something something for us to learn uh and kind of um take advantage of the structure that you have there? Ash Barber Yeah, I think it is born of necessity. Absolutely. And, you know, the funding is so scarce that we are looking at every corner of the internet for does this thing already exist in some way that we can maybe just slightly modify? And so then, you know, of course, we're all kind of keeping each other informed of when we've created something new or when we're going to create something new um the the oep sig is uh currently working on a project to put together we already have a digest where we every month will um send out here are the latest things that have been published in our region um but we are working on a project to uh create just a holistic list basically an air table probably um where uh you can see everything that we've ever said in that digest about those things you can search through there it's kind of like one little I guess like a referatory and also a spot where people can kind of register their ideas for projects and call for collaborators and you know that there can be this central spot that everyone in our community can look to to do that rather than having to search a million different places all the time. Mike Mills Ash, I want to continue along the lines of Brittany's jealousy comment because I agree with her. Oh, and by the way, I think many of us are jealous of California and the money that they provide their folks to develop content. But in North America, we do a really good job of exporting our languages, our models, our programs, our ideas. We don't do a really good job of importing ideas. So what's happening in your space that you wish North American institutions were paying attention to? What should we borrow from you? And of course, we're going to give proper attribution when we borrow. But what can we borrow or what should we borrow? What should we be looking at? Ash Barber Well, I think perhaps borrowing some of that idea of collaboration. But, I mean, we're doing a lot of things here that are highly contextual and highly, you know, regionally applicable. So, but I think having a look at the Open Education down on DOEAR book is a really good spot to start because that is a collection of case studies of the work that's going on in this region. It is, at the moment, I think we only have Australian examples in there, but we're seeking to expand to have New Zealand examples as well. But it is a really good collection of things that aren't just about books. It's also about the application of the OER in context. And it's about open ed a bit more broadly. It looks at Wikipedia projects. It looks at projects that do bring in Indigenous voices as well. So to your question earlier about how do we do that? there's some examples in there of how that's been done. I think that would probably be a really good spot. It's a kind of a gateway text to then a lot of the other work that's going on in the region. Brittany Dudek I see there's a whole section too on authentic assessment as well, which is a really hot topic right now, at least in the community college system that I work in, given the prevalence of AI. And so there's a lot of discussion around authentic assessment and how can we incorporate that better and what better way to do so than with OER. So we'll definitely be adding that to my reading list. Thank you. Ash Barber Brilliant. Kevin Corcoran I wonder, I mean, I don't think there's any conversation in this day and age that we can't talk about AI in some form or fashion, especially in context with open. We've asked this question to many of the other folks that have come on. Is AI friend or foe? Especially when it comes to creating open. And I'm wondering what your perspectives are and what your colleagues are in the region. Ash Barber Yeah, I think it's just as divided here as it is there. You know, in some respects, AI is fantastic for lowering barriers to education and to the creation of OER. You know, it can be a really helpful kind of sounding board. It could help with translating or getting you started on things like that. Obviously, everything needs that human intervention as well. But it can also, on the flip side, perpetuate the biases that's in its training data and do that quietly as well in a way that if you're not aware of the bias that you're seeing, then you're just letting it pass through as well. it's an imperfect um tool but i think that's all it is it's a tool i don't think it's either good or bad it just is um and and i think it's power for bad there lies in ignorance and um you know if we go back to like empowered oer i called it that because i think you know education is empowerment and but education is restricted to the few privileged and uh open education empowers everybody. And so bringing that back to AI, AI literacy is deeply needed so that then it can be used as a tool for good and to minimize the harm that it can do. Kevin Corcoran Looking beyond AI and the conversation that has seemed to consume us for the last two years, what is taking up the sort of the most oxygen or effort in your open community these days? Ash Barber In relation to AI, did you say? Kevin Corcoran Just across the board, beyond AI. So I know you've put a lot of effort into making sure that there are multiple means, multiple ways of representation, what have you. But we always are having conversations about the publisher community and what risks that provides. We're also looking at ways of presenting open beyond a cost savings piece. as we've talked here, what are the other challenges that your community are dealing with? Ash Barber We're dealing with sustainability and burnout. We don't have enough dedicated OER roles. When I was doing the work at UniSA, it wasn't even in my job description, let alone in my job title. And, you know, that's prevalent everywhere. We have a few more roles popping up, which is great. But in general, it's still kind of like a passionate person's side project a lot of the time. And so finding ways to embed that more into the institution to actually get the institution to fund the role, to fund the community rather than the content. like not just funding an individual project but to fund the infrastructure for those projects to continue whether one single staff member who's passionate is there or not that's what we're grappling with the the OER collective the four-year initiative from call it was an amazing program and but you know like like all programs that don't have sustainability necessarily built in from the start it it had an end and so it it's wound down and it's going through a transition process at the moment where content is being moved to another provider to try and keep things together to keep content together but that community now is kind of wondering what's next and they're all figuring out what to do next individually. Some are banding together in another sort of collective that's run by a group called Caval. And others have started up their own presses. Others already had a press and are just leaning into that. Others are sort of looking around and seeing what to do next. And I think that's kind of really the heart of it is that the community has always existed continue to exist. But it's funding the community to continue to grow and thrive. That's the key thing that we're grappling with. Kevin Corcoran You know, you hit it right on the head is when we talk about sustainability and open, a lot of folks just focus on the content and how it's going to be maintained. But you're absolutely right. Without the infrastructure, collaboration falls down. Without the funding to maintain the infrastructure, it all falls down. I absolutely agree. Brittany Dudek Yeah, I think that that is an international problem that we're all grappling with. So I think kind of a final question for you, Ash, is when you look five or 10 years ahead, whether or not you're still working in open, um what would you most like to see become true about open education in australia Ash Barber i think i would like to see i think the community underestimates itself um and i think that's why there has been um such an unsettled feeling with the collective winding down because I don't think the community realizes that the collective is the community and that the collective isn't there but the community still is and I would love if in five or so years time that community has stepped forward into more of a leading role with more confidence to really, I guess, let go of some of the imposter syndrome and believe that the knowledge that they have is expertise and they have experience, they have deep experience to share and to move forward confidently with that. I would really love to see that. Brittany Dudek I think as time goes and as people, you know, mature, you know, organizations, expertise matures, then hopefully the imposter syndrome also will kind of dissipate as well. I think that's something that almost everyone grapples with. So I think, I think that you'll see your vision come to fruition. So we do always close out our podcast here with a very terribly generated AI open ed joke. And so I have been nominated to read the joke of the podcast today. And so hopefully you will laugh, groan, give me applause, boot me off the podcast as, as we go here. So, which you can also just groan. You don't have to actually laugh. Don't worry. So why did the open textbook never get invited to keep a secret? Because it was always sharing everything under an open license. Ash Barber That was not too bad, actually, as far as those jerks have gone. Brittany Dudek Yeah, that was one of the better ones. Mike, did you make that one up by yourself? Did you use it? Mike Mills No, that was not mine. Brittany Dudek Okay. I don't know. Ash Barber I'm honored to receive a good joke. Thank you. Mike Mills And with that, the mic is closed.