The opportunities and challenges for enabling education: implementing Open Educational Practices (OEP)

The open education resource (OER) movement has emerged to encompass wide ranging open practices as it increasingly re-shapes the future of higher education. This popular movement provides both opportunities and challenges for educators, as identified by research addressing the feasibility of open practices (Bossu, Brown & Bull, 2012). Enabling education programs and open education practices would seem to be good partners. Free resources without copyright restriction appear to be a perfect match for policy aimed at widening access to higher education. This paper reports on the challenges faced in developing an enabling course resourced entirely by open licensed materials. The course provides many opportunities for broadening the accessibility of higher education beyond the scope of current enabling programs but has encountered a variety of practical challenges during its development. The paper then proceeds to suggest how some of these challenges might be addressed in the foreseeable future