Designing humanised OERs: A short guide for eBureau authors

29 Oct 2026

Why socio-emotional engagement matters for learning

When you sit down to write an open educational resource (OER) chapter, it is easy to focus on the content: the concepts, the structure, the examples, the references. These matter. But another crucial layer of authoring that is often missed in traditional textbook writing is the socio-emotional layer. Learners do not arrive at your chapter as neutral cognitive processors. They arrive with prior experiences, anxieties, motivations, identities, and uncertainties.

A nursing student reading about restraint may have been on the receiving end of one. A first-year biochemistry student opening a chapter on thermodynamics may already be struggling because they believe they are bad at maths. A learner from a community whose knowledge has been historically erased may be nervous that their way of knowing will be dismissed by the text.

How you write – not only what you write – shapes whether learners can stay with the material, engage with it, and let it change them.

Holding socio-emotional space is a uniquely human contribution to education. AI tools can produce fluent and accurate text, but they cannot anticipate this learner's emotional encounter with this idea, because they have no learners and no lived experience of teaching. The choices you make as a human author on the page are part of what distinguishes a strong OER from generated content.

This guide offers examples and practical strategies for doing this well.

Seven things to do

1. Bring your own experience to your writing

Your lived experience as an educator or practitioner is the most important thing you bring to authoring an OER. Often the best starting point is bringing to mind:

• your most frustrating teaching challenges
• which modules learners struggle with the most
• common misconceptions that confuse learners
• emerging practitioner challenges in real life
• frequent assessment mistakes

On a practical level, these things often mark where to begin, how to frame your content or chapter headings, where to focus your time and effort, and what an effective learner path should address.

Your knowledge of what works (and doesn’t work) in teaching will help you play a more direct educator role in signposting known challenges for learners. This helps them to recognise why content is difficult (rather than seeing difficulty as a result of personal failings), and how to overcome these barriers.

2. Picture a real learner before you write

Before drafting a section, take a moment to picture someone from your teaching experience — a real learner you've taught, or a composite based on real learners or emerging practitioners.

• What might they be feeling as they begin engaging with this section?
• What are they hoping for?
• What are they worried about?

Write to that person. Don’t be afraid to use first- or second-person perspective in your writing style.

3. Anticipate learner anxiety, recognise desirable difficulty

If a concept is hard to grasp, say so. If you know where learners usually experience frustration, name it directly. It makes a difference to acknowledge a common misconception and explain why it’s difficult. Signposting friction in the learning flow makes your attentiveness visible through the text.

This can begin with simple examples like:

Many learners at this point find themselves wondering whether...

If certain content is widely known to generate significant anxiety, it can be valuable to create a space for honest discussion about this as a topic on its own terms. This encourages learners to think about thinking, learn about learning, and become more comfortable with desirable difficulty.

This is where you can use direct educator presence to gently confront the elephant in the room. Here is an example:

Does the thought of having to do some maths make you feel nervous or anxious? If the answer is yes, you are not alone and most likely you are in the majority. In order to overcome this anxiety, it is important to understand that you were not born with it. There was a time when you didn’t have it. Thinking about what contributes to anxiety and maybe what led to it in the first place can help us overcome it…

By highlighting that it is commonplace to encounter difficulties in these areas, we reduce the isolation of struggling alone, which eases the learner flow and offers a path through it.

4. Name difficult emotions when they are present

If the topic is emotionally weighty in a darker way, name it before you launch into the content. For example, you may be designing content that heavily mentions death, trauma, or mental health experiences that emerging practitioners themselves struggle with.

Consider beginning with some recognition of this, such as:

This next section deals with material that may be difficult, particularly for learners with personal experience of these issues.

This does significant work by signalling to the learner that you have thought about them and you care. It also models a stance of professional acknowledgement that is itself part of the discipline you are teaching.

Watch out for two extremes to avoid though:

• Omitting any recognition of challenging content, leaving the learner isolated and wondering why they’ve hit a barrier
• Over-warning to the point of distancing learners from material they need to engage with. Acknowledge, then proceed.

5. Write with a recognisable voice

Direct, personal, active voice is one of the simplest ways to convey your presence as an educator. Here are two examples.

Personal, active, and direct:

I’ve noticed that learners often confuse these two concepts. Here’s one way to tell them apart ...

Impersonal, passive, and indirect:

It is a common misunderstanding to confuse these two concepts. For methods to distinguish them, an effective approach is to ...

The first example makes the educator’s experience and presence visible. The second example presents the same point in an impersonal way that creates distance between the text and the learner.

You do not always need to be informal all the time, as many disciplines or contexts call for formal academic writing. However, learners feel more supported when they sense that a person (or group of people) is teaching them, not that a text is being imposed on them.

If you have a professional standpoint or lived practitioner experience relevant to the content, consider signaling it where appropriate. For example:

As a clinician who has worked in acute mental health settings for two decades, I want to flag something here that the textbooks often miss ...

This is not the kind of learning guidance that AI can generate in an honest way. AI can help generate or adapt text, but it is teaching staff and OER authors who are responsible for bringing the educator voice to it.

6. Use purposeful, situated examples not generic placeholders

Generic examples are less effective because they’re harder to relate to and don’t represent the rich context of real life situations. Examples of this are case studies with nameless individuals who are reduced to one simplistic quality, or a worked problem with arbitrary numbers out of context.

An authentic example is one drawn or adapted from real teaching, practice context, or lived experience. It is specific. It has texture. It signals to the learner that you have selected this scenario in context for this learner at this moment.

Here is an interactive example of OER content that develops mental health practitioner skills through an authentic scenario with impactful response options. Try it yourself:

Notice several authentic features of this activity:

• Stakes are high enough to feel like this matters now (in a safe learning environment).
• Considerable emotional weight.
• None of the response options are outright silly.
• Response options represent real practitioner decisions made under pressure.
• Feedback focuses on situational consequences rather than abstract concepts.

You don't need many. One or two well-chosen, richly contextual examples will do more for engagement than a chapter full of generic illustrations.

7. Address the learner as a whole person

Designing humanised OER content means approaching learners as real people in their full complexity. Recognise the learner as someone with motivations, identity, and working towards a future, rather than just as a cognitive recipient of your material.

This shows up in small ways, like directly addressing learners’ imagination, experiences and futures. Simple examples include:

What this means for you as an emerging practitioner, is ...

Think of a time when you ...

Consider your favourite memory of Melbourne ...

These approaches invite the learner into the content rather than asking them to receive it.

Before you submit a draft: a short self-check

Read your chapter as if you were a learner from your intended audience encountering it for the first time. Consider major assumptions that enable your expertise but confront most learners as new knowledge.

As you review your work, ask questions on behalf of the learner like:

• Is it clear why I’m actually learning this content?
• Do I know anything about who wrote this?
• How much do I sense whether they took care in writing it for someone like me?
• Is this text guiding me, or is it being imposed on me?
• Am I being supported with explanations of difficult concepts, uncertainty, or emotional weight?
• Are the examples believable and relevant, or could they have come from anywhere / AI?
• Where the material is difficult, is there a way to help me understand differently?

These prompts will test the socio-emotional layer of your OER content and are a good way to check your work ahead of submission.

A final word

Intentional socio-emotional design is one of the harder things to learn as an OER author because it is rarely taught in academic writing. It is, however, one of the qualities that most clearly distinguishes humanised OER from AI-generated content. It will affect whether learners stay with your material, engage with it, and hopefully are changed by it.

This is the human contribution to learning. It is worth the care.

Raymond Tini
Lecturer, Nursing & Midwifery (La Trobe University)

Steven Chang
Coordinator, Open Education