Category Archives: Open Access, open ed, OER

Open Education in the 60s and 70s

icon of footprints with three arrows at the top, pointing in different direction, indicating the concept of choice

Learner choice and autonomy as important to open education in the 60s and 70s. Icon purchased from The Noun Project.

As I’ve been thinking lately about open pedagogy (see all posts on this blog with that tag), I’ve been looking back over some of what others have said about it, and was reminded that a couple of people in the last year have talked about how “open education” has been used/defined in the past and how some of that appears similar to how “open pedagogy” is used today. In this post I dig into some of the earlier work that other people have pointed to, in order to try to understand at least a little bit about some of the history of these concepts, while fully recognizing this is only a tiny taste of what is likely out there.

The things I’ve seen lately from others are from Tannis Morgan (Open Pedagogy and a Very Brief History of the Concept) and Vivien Rolfe (slides for “Open. But not for criticism?” ). Looking at these led me down a bit of a rabbit hole about the open education movement in England & North America in the 60s and 70s. I start here with a bit of general background on the movement, and then look at some of the things Morgan & Rolfe point to.

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Open pedagogy, Open Educational Practices

Venn diagram with open learning and teaching practices in one cirlce and qualities of open learning content in another. Where they cross is called open educational resources (OER)

From Open Practices Briefing Paper (Beetham et al., 2012). Licensed CC BY-NC 3.0

 

This post is part of my reflection on an upcoming talk I’m giving at Douglas College about open pedagogy: “What’s Open about Open Pedagogy?” In my previous post I started collecting some examples of activities that people have put under the umbrella of open pedagogy. In an earlier post I collated a number of definitions of open pedagogy, and in my next post I plan to dig more deeply into what I think open pedagogy is and what might be “open” about it.

Here I’m going to do a short reflection on possible differences between “open pedagogy” and “open educational practices” (OEP). I have used open pedagogy and OEP interchangeably in the past, and I’m now thinking it might be helpful to consider where they might differ.

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Open pedagogy: examples of class activities

An upcoming talk I’m giving

On October 26 I’m giving a talk at Douglas College in the Vancouver, BC (Canada) area, with the title: “What’s Open about Open Pedagogy?” It’s part of Douglas College’s Open Access Week events.

I brainstorm by writing, and I figured I might as well share my rough thoughts with others in case they find any of it useful. I’ll also share the slides from the talk here on my blog when they’re finished. I expect things will change significantly once my thoughts get from the rough brainstorm form to the slides!

I’m thinking at the moment of an outline for the talk along these lines (with an intro as yet unspecified, talking about why it’s useful to discuss this at all):

  1. What are some examples of things that people have called “open pedagogy”?
  2. How have others defined open pedagogy? What do I think?
    • I’ve already had a lot to say about this in a series of blog posts earlier this year. You can see links to all of them in the last post, called “Navigating Open Pedagogy part 2.”
    • What are the relationships between open pedagogy, open educational practices, students as producers, and students as partners?
  3. What’s open about open pedagogy?
    • What does “open” seem to mean, such that it can cover open access, open data, open science, open government, open pedagogy… (this is a gigantic topic in and of itself; I won’t be able to do it justice but I’ll make a start)
    • Does that fit the views of open pedagogy from (1) and (2)?
    • does any of this change our views of “open pedagogy”?

Oh my…now that I write that out, I think: this is going to be too much for a one-hour talk plus Q&A afterwards. This could probably be a book. Oh well…let’s see what comes out of my brainstorming and whether it’s feasible.

In this post I am just collating a few examples of what people have called “open pedagogy” activities in classes.

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Join us virtually at our session at #OpenEd17

laptop on knees of a person with a dog sitting next to them on a couch

Laptop & dog image licensed CC0 from pixabay.com

 

I am working with a fantastic group of people on a session at the upcoming Open Education Conference (Oct. 11-13, Anaheim, California), and we are looking for people who want to join us virtually.

Our session info:

Friday, Oct. 13, 3:30-4:25 pm Pacific time (California)

How can we destroy the open education movement? Conversations about ethics.

Openness is a process that requires and benefits from critical reflection. We believe that facilitating and stimulating critical discussion/debate about the contours and direction of the open education movement (OEM) is essential to its flourishing. In this spirit, the proposed session is intended as a space for participants to unearth and critically explore timely, perhaps uncomfortable questions that may not be at the surface of what we are doing as individuals or as collaborators within the OEM. The facilitators in this session do not have answers. Rather, we host an unconventional, interactive format designed to expose difficult topics and support innovative interventions. The session format supports both in-person and virtual (online) attendees working together on outlining and discussing pressing ethical questions in the OEM. This session allows participants to engage in a critical conversation that is liberating, paradigm challenging, constructive, and inspiring.

Session organizers/facilitators (the following list is those who have been active in planning during the last few meetings):

  • Karen Cangialosi
  • Robin DeRosa
  • Gill Green
  • Christina Hendricks
  • Rajiv Jhangiani
  • Jamison Miller
  • Tara Robertson
  • Scott Robison

Tara and I will not be onsite, but rather joining virtually.

We are looking for others who would like to join virtually as well

I volunteer with Virtually Connecting, but this isn’t quite the same thing: those conversations are usually live streamed on YouTube and also recorded; this one won’t be either live streamed or recorded. It’s just a matter of getting more voices in the room who couldn’t attend the conference in person.

There will be a bit of introduction to the session, but most of the time will be spent in small groups doing discussions, and we envision the virtual participants (including Tara and I) being one of the small groups. We will also have a discussion with the whole room, including the virtual participants, towards the end of the session.

Might you be interested in joining us? If so, please fill out this form to let me know and I’ll get in touch with you with details! We may have to limit the group to a certain number of people, so first come, first in! :)

Any questions? You could ask me on Twitter: @clhendricksbc

 

 

Join the CC open education platform!

Over the past couple of months I’ve been involved with a new Creative Commons initiative, the Open Education Platform. I first learned about the new CC platforms from a Virtually Connecting session with Cable Green and Regina Gong, at the Creative Commons Global Summit in April 2017. That’s where the first draft of the CC Open Education Platform Working doc was created (we are now on version 2). This is an exciting initiative that has the potential to connect people from many parts of the world to make progress on important goals. Yes, many people are already doing this, but for me, I’ve mostly been working with a relatively small group of people from only certain parts of the world, and this is connecting me with more; one of the explicit goals of the platform is to ensure that we are including people from many different geographical areas.

Here is an invitation letter that was recently sent out to many open ed and OER email lists. Please see the letter and links for more information about the CC Platforms, the Open Ed platform, and how to get involved!

Greetings Open Education Colleagues:

In early 2017, the Creative Commons Global Network (CCGN) completed a consultation process of renewing and reorganizing itself to support a strong and growing global movement. The year-long process resulted in the CCGN Global Network Strategy. Part of the new strategy is to establish defined areas of focus, or “platforms,” which will drive CC’s global activities. Platforms are how we organize areas of work for the CC community, where individuals and institutions organize and coordinate themselves across the CC Global Network.

In the spirit of openness and to effectively strategize, these platforms are open to all interested parties working in the platform area and adjacent spaces. That’s why Creative Commons invites you to join the CC Global Network Open Education Platform!

WHY join?

  • Stay connected to global actions in open education resources, practice, and policy.
  • Identify, plan and coordinate multi-national open education, practices and policy projects to collaboratively solve education challenges with an amazing group of open education leaders from around the world.
  • Secure funding (from Creative Commons and other funding sources) for the open education projects we collectively select.
  • Contribute to global perspectives on open education to strengthen advocacy worldwide.
  • Connect your country / region to global open education initiatives.
  • Be on the forefront in implementing Creative Commons’ global network strategy.
  • Meet annually, in-person, at the Creative Commons Summit with members of the CC Open Education Platform to celebrate successes, share best practices, and plan for the next year.
  • Explore, practice, and share innovative methods for inclusive and open engagement with educators, learners and governments around the world..

WHO should join?

  • Open education advocates working in the areas of open educational resources, open educational practices, and/or open education policy.

WHAT are we working on right now?

  • Reaching the right people (you!) to build a strong open education platform.
  • Developing decision making and engagement structures.
  • Defining the goals and projects the CC Open Education Platform will pursue.

 

Joining the CC Open Education Platform is easy and free:

 

  • Sign up for IM (Slack or IRC):

 

      • Slack: sign up: (it will send an invitation email), then sign up to the #cc-openedu channel
      • IRC: to join the #creativecommons-openedu IRC channel, connect via Freenode.

 

 

  • Attend and participate in the monthly meetings.
    • The next meeting is October 18: 8:00pm / October 19: 9:00am (PDT, UTC -7).
    • Note: every meeting has two different times – so everyone can attend one of the meetings during local daylight hours.

 

Please join the e-mail list and IM channel, introduce yourself and we’ll see you at the next meeting!

Students and open education

For an article I am writing this week, I’d like to showcase work by students relating to open education and Open Educational Resources (OER). I’m writing this brief post mostly to gather comments from others on examples I don’t know about!

Here are a few things that come to mind:

  • Student advocacy on campuses and what it has accomplished: there has been some great stuff happening at UBC due to student advocacy around OER, and I’ll talk about that. What else has student advocacy accomplished?
  • Students creating OERs: I will speak about work I know of here at UBC where students are creating OER, including Wikipedia projects and also other open educational resources. What else is out there?
  • Students contributing to open textbooks: Yes, open textbooks are OERs, but I’m separating them out here just for now. I know that Robin DeRosa has involved students in creating open textbooks, and this blog post from the Conversations on Open Education for Language Learning blog talks about a couple more (by students in classes with David Wiley and Lixun Wang). What other such projects do you know about?
  • Anything else that would fall under students working to create, revise, or promote OER?

Please provide your ideas in the comments!

 

Update Aug. 21, 2017: Several people replied on Twitter instead of in the comments below, and in order to keep all of the contributions in one place, I’m embedding the tweets here.

Open Case Studies project

I am involved in an OER (Open Educational Resources) creation and sharing project called Open Case Studies that started about a year ago. I’m writing this post to give a general overview of the project to introduce it to new people who might want to participate.

This post will generally follow the format of a couple of presentations I’ve already given recently. Here is a set of slides from one of them, that goes over the basics of the project. You can download the slides as powerpoint, here: BCcampus-OpenEdWebinar-OpenCaseStudies-Feb2017

Motivation for the project

This project started from an idea by Daniel Munro, who was in 2015-2016 the Associate VP Academic for the student association at UBC, the Alma Mater Society. He wanted to start a project that would allow for several things:

  • Creation and adaptation of OER by both faculty and students at UBC, to be shared for revision and reuse by others
  • Interdisciplinary discussions and activities–students and faculty working across disciplines
  • Students avoiding “disposable assignments” and instead creating things that add value to the world; this is also connected to the idea of students as producers of knowledge rather than just consumers

You can see more about the objectives of the project on the “about” page of the Open Case Studies project website.

Project in a nutshell

Our project and site involve both faculty and students creating or editing case studies that are openly licensed (CC BY) to allow for revision and reuse by anyone with no restrictions except an attribution to the original source. See here for more about CC BY and other Creative Commons open licenses.

We held a two-day sprint in May 2016 in which faculty and students wrote the first set of case studies. You can see all about that sprint in my blog post about it.

How the case studies have been used in courses

In the 2016-2017 academic year, several faculty members used the case studies in their courses at UBC. There are many ways to do so! Here is what has been done so far:

  • One faculty member has assigned a case study “as is” in a course
  • One has asked students to add “action plans” at the end of one of the case studies (see here)
  • Several have asked students to write their own case studies
    • See the Forestry case studies on our site
    • And also this case study from Civil Engineering
    • A class in Gender, Race and Social Justice had students write case studies too, but they’re not on the site because we haven’t yet sought permission to give them a CC BY license. You can see them on the UBC Wiki, here.

We have a teaching guide for the project that shows some examples of assignment instructions faculty have used with the case studies. See the “sample assignments” on the Teaching Guide page for the project.

We are particularly interested in developing interdisciplinary activities involving the case studies. So far students in single disciplines have been approaching the case studies from those disciplines. But we would love it if students could approach existing case studies from a separate discipline and add their own perspectives. There are places in each case study where such perspectives can be added.

Or perhaps two classes could work together on creating case studies from two (or more) different disciplines.

Help with implementing open case studies into courses

This project is funded in part by a Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund grant from UBC, which allows us to hire graduate assistants to help faculty design and implement assignments.

We also have access to help from the UBC Library and the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology in creating resources to help students understand how to write or otherwise contribute to the open case studies.

So anyone from UBC who would like to join has access to help in implementing open case studies into their course (at least for the next year or so)!

Anyone can contribute

We have focused most of our efforts so far on UBC faculty and students, but we are also opening out the project to anyone who would like to join in, from any post-secondary institution.

We are working on creating a form for people who are interested to fill out that will be posted on the site, but for now, please just email me if you would like more information or think you might be interested: c.hendricks@ubc.ca

And be sure to check out our website!

 

 

 

 

 

Navigating open pedagogy, part 2

many different colours of embroidery thread, tangled together

Trying to pull together stray threads. Threads image licensed CC0 on pixabay.com

This is the last (for now) in a series of posts over the last couple of days on open pedagogy. Previous posts:

  • Part 1, where I do some not terribly focused reflecting on some recent posts on open pedagogy, as well as my own view before reading them (warning: long!)
  • Part 1.5, where I consider: why try to define open pedagogy at all?

This post is dedicated to trying to pull together some of the threads from what I’ve read in the last two days.

Note: I have gone back later (November 2017) and added some things here and there…so not all of this was written in the original post.

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Why define open pedagogy?

This is a kind of addendum to my last post, where I did some summarizing of and reflecting on a few definitions of open pedagogy given on blogs and elsewhere lately.

When I first heard about the flurry of blog posts on open pedagogy, and the disagreements on how to define it, I thought: why do we need to spend so much time arguing about the definition? Why is it so important to focus on how to define it?

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Navigating open pedagogy, part 1

In April 2017 there was a flurry of blog posts and a hangout about open pedagogy–various ways of defining it, thinking about it, etc. That was during a heavy teaching term for me and mostly I just saw that it was happening and read maybe one or two of the many blog posts at the time.

You can see a curated list of them, here (thanks Maha Bali!).

In a couple of days I am presenting on a panel for the BCcampus Open Textbook Summit, called Open Pedagogy Case Studies & Examples from Langara, UBC and Athabasca. Marianne Gianacopoulos (Langara), Michael Dabrowski (Athabasca) and I will be speaking on projects we’re involved in that we each think of as having an element of open pedagogy. So we’re starting with a discussion of just what “open pedagogy” is.

Thus, I figured it was time to visit that large number of blog posts linked above.

I won’t be able to read them all before Wednesday. And I definitely won’t be able to synthesize all of even those I manage to read. I am writing this post just to gather some thoughts from what I am reading in the next day or so. Think of it as my own filtering, focusing on what I find most interesting or surprising or what I want to think further about, rather than a definitive analysis of what I think open pedagogy is. [Aside: As I’m writing this post I’m surprised to find I don’t already have a tag on this blog for “open pedagogy.” Just changed that.]

This post is my somewhat rambling reflections on reading some of the posts Maha Bali curated (linked above). The next one, part 2, is where I will try to pull some of these threads together into a revised view of my own.

[Addendum added later: Actually, it turns out I wrote another one before part 2: part 1.5, why define open pedagogy?]

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