FLC on Open Educational Practices

Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs) are supportive and ongoing discussion groups that allow colleagues to gather from across departments in order to discuss and develop their skills around a specific teaching and learning topic. During the Spring 2018 semester our FLC will focus on open educational practices, with a special emphasis on open pedagogy. Open Pedagogy is both an access-oriented commitment to learner-driven education as well as a process of designing architectures and using tools for learning that enable students to shape the public knowledge commons of which they are a part.

Members of this FLC will meet every 3 weeks (beginning on February 2) and will critically explore and workshop innovative open educational practices and how these might be implemented in one or more of their own courses.

February 2

Readings

  1. Wiley, D. (n.d.). Defining the “open” in open content and open educational resources. Retrieved from http://www.opencontent.org/definition/
  2. Hegarty, B. (2015). Attributes of open pedagogy: A model for using open educational resources. Educational Technology. Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Ed_Tech_Hegarty_2015_article_attributes_of_open_pedagogy.pdf
  3. Morris, S. M., & Stommel, J. (2014). If Freire made a MOOC: Open education as resistance. Hybrid Pedagogy. Retrieved from http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/hybridped/freire-made-mooc-open-education-resistance/
  4. DeRosa, R., & Jhangiani, R. S. (2017). Open pedagogy. In E. Mays (Ed.), A guide to making open textbooks with students. The Rebus Community for Open Textbook Creation. Retrieved from https://press.rebus.community/makingopentextbookswithstudents/chapter/open-pedagogy/

Pre-meeting Task

We will use the Hypothes.is plugin to annotate our readings. Please click on this link to join our private Hypothes.is group: https://hypothes.is/groups/LMBeAD6x/kpu-flc
Note: Once you have installed the extension in your Chrome browser, check the box that enables “Access to file URLs” for Hypothes.is on the Extensions page. This will enable you to annotate PDF files as well.

Things that came up during our discussion

  • The relative openness of the licenses.
  • Technical openness.
  • What open license are we are most comfortable assigning to our intellectual property (if any)? What drives this choice? In which situations does the license we choose not match our values?
  • What are our biggest fears about open licensing?
  • Applying the Share-Alike clause instead of the NonCommercial clause.
  • Distinguishing OER from OEP, OEP from Open Pedagogy, and Open Pedagogy from OER-enabled Pedagogy
  • Freire’s banking concept of education.
  • Papert’s views on educational technology.
  • What is the role of the educator in the classroom?
  • What does the instructor risk when innovating with open pedagogy?
  • Open is not the opposite of private.
  • Examples of involving students in open textbook creation/adaptation: Robin DeRosa’s Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature (students selecting/curating readings), David Wiley’s Project Management for Instructional Designers (students adapting an open textbook), Rajiv Jhangiani’s Principles of Social Psychology (students using Hypothes.is to share examples, video clips, & other resources relevant to specific theories/concepts), Robin DeRosa’s OpenSem: A Student-Generated Handbook for the First Year of College (students authoring content).
  • Begin to think about an open pedagogy project that you want to play with/workshop during our third or fourth meetings.

Resources we looked at during our meeting

DS4OER course

Teaching in a Digital Age

Pressbooks

H5P

Hypothes.is

Made with Creative Commons

Noun Project

Unsplash

Alan Levine’s Flickr photostream

February 23

Readings

  1. Dean, M. (2017). What an Open Pedagogy class taught me about myself [Blog post]: https://thechcexplored.wordpress.com/2017/04/26/what-an-open-pedagogy-class-taught-me-about-myself/
  2. Vanasupa, L., Wiley, A., Schlemer, L., Ospina, D., Schwartz, P., Wilhelm, D., Waitinas C., & Hall, K. (2016). What does it mean to Open education? In P. Blessinger & T. J. Bliss (Eds.), Open Education: International Perspectives in Higher Education. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/htmlreader/978-1-78374-278-3/ch10.xhtml#_idTextAnchor026
  3. Bali, M. (2016). Advice for content-independent teaching [Blog post]: http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/content-independent-teaching/62493

Pre-meeting task

Please visit the website http://assignments.ds106.us/, browse through the assignment bank, and choose at least one of the assignments from there that you will complete between our second and third sessions (I will ask you to briefly describe your chosen assignment during our second meeting).

Things that came up during our discussion

  • Is it possible to be an open educator with commercial resources? Is it possible to be a traditional instructor with open resources?
  • Agency/autonomy/choice for students
  • A sense of purpose/meaning/authentic pedagogy
  • Digital resident and visitors (vs. natives and immigrants)
  • “Prescriptive” sometimes conflated with structure and open sometimes conflated with chaos. False dichotomy.
  • Can have an open pedagogy that is well structured.
  • The structure may reflect necessary support for students/acaffolding for a foray into a new practice. Controlled chaos.
  • Provide flexibility where it is feasible and provide structure where it is needed? This is where our expertise comes in.
  • If the traditional approach was open perhaps it too would become reified, institutionalized. We would look for alternatives.
  • Openness is effective opposition to corporatization in higher education
  • As budding open educators what can we do with OER that with our students that we can’t do without it? Flexibility of materials, access and cost piece, culture change around sharing, reuse.
  • Elitism in academia. Elitism within the open education movement. The privilege associated with being able to produce OER via voluntary labour. What ideologies are over-represented? Predominance of english language OER. Openly licensed images like on Unsplash reflect the privilege of their creators.
  • Digital redlining
  • Accessibility
  • Even if we help students get a loaner laptop are we forcing them to “out” themselves socioeconomically or otherwise?
  • A blind student would be excluded from a classroom that harnesses devices.
  • The vulnerability of practicing openness, for faculty and for students.
  • Who is most at risk online. Open scholarship can be harmful to some.
  • Students using psuedonynms. Class decision to open pedagogy beyond the walls of the classroom/LMS.
  • Harsher negative impact on course evals for female open pedagogues?
  • Equation of open with social media. Not necessary. A lot of blind faith in that world.
  • Paralells between faculty and students. Precarity. Vulnerability.
  • Selected DS106 assignments to be completed before next meeting.
  • Potential open pedagogy projects in our contexts.

March 16

April 6

Instead of assigning readings for our last meeting, I would like for us to shift our focus to our own practice. The big question is this: How might you take principles of open pedagogy and apply them to your own practice?

In some cases you are already adapting or creating OER, but of course as you know open pedagogy goes well beyond this. Accordingly, I invite each of you to take 5 minutes to share your ideas and budding plans during our next meeting. The rest of the group can then spend another 10 minutes helping you to clarify and refine details of your proposed implementation, paying particular attention to the issues we have already discussed (e.g., digital redlining, accessibility, privacy, etc.). The goal here is not to interrogate but rather to share, support, and help one another refine our ideas (or help fertilize budding ideas).

We will wrap up our meeting with a discussion of how we plan to will continue our explorations and how you can mentor colleagues in each of your areas who are interested in open pedagogy.