Open Policies

Institutional Support for OER

An emerging motivation for uptake of open education resources and practices at UBC is the increased presence of University policies and programs that support OER. The 2016/17 edition of the Guide to Reappointment, Promotion and Tenure Procedures at UBC (pdf) includes contributions to open educational resources and repositories as a possible criteria for evidence of educational leadership (p. 16, 19 & 51) for those instructors in the educational leadership stream. I believe that the inclusion of open resources and repositories in a promotion and tenure guideline is pretty unique at this point (although many institutions have open access policies).

Additionally, both the 2018 UBC-V Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund and the 2018/19 Aspire Teaching and Learning Fund at UBC have priority focus areas for the development or integration of open educational resources that are intended to be used in a course, multiple courses within a program, or across several programs. The 2018 TLEF call for Large TLEF proposals is now open and letters of intent are due July 14, 2017.

Purpose

Dealing Critically with Reality

David Moscrop recently wrote in Maclean’s that “the right to speech is meaningless unless it is underwritten by a public that knows things—that is, an educated public.” However, in his book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire writes that education is not neutral; instead he states:

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

Recently, the UBC Library hosted an open mic event on Freedom of Expression in the Post Truth Era and I had the opportunity to listen to amazing students, professors, librarians, and poets reflect on the state of truth and knowledge in today’s world. As I listened, I was reminded of Freire’s framing of education as a means to “deal critically with reality” – a framing that I think gets to right to the role of the university. If we are, indeed, in a post truth world, it’s not simply enough to read, learn, or know something, we also have to be able to critique and evaluate what it is and how we know it.

Lately, I’ve been involved in a number of conversations about how to embed digital literacies into curriculum; put simply, how do we help students learn the skills needed to evaluate whether something is true or not? I often promote the pedagogical model known as the student as producer model. This model came out out of a project at the University of Lincoln where they were shifting from research informed teaching to research engaged teaching; I partly interpret this as pushing the values and processes of research into the undergraduate curriculum. Why this model is important is that I think that many aspects inherent in research lend themselves to the sort of competencies involved in critique and digital literacies.

In his open textbook Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers, Mike Caulfield outlines four strategies for getting closer to the truth of an online claim:

Check for previous work: Look around to see if someone else has already fact-checked the claim or provided a synthesis of research.
Go upstream to the source: Most web content is not original. Get to the original source to understand the trustworthiness of the information.
Read laterally: Once you get to the source of a claim, read what other people say about the source (publication, author, etc.). The truth is in the network.
Circle back: If you get lost, or hit dead ends, or find yourself going down an increasingly confusing rabbit hole, back up and start over knowing what you know now. You’re likely to take a more informed path with different search terms and better decisions.

Or, as one faculty member at the open mic event succinctly framed it: “don’t be gullible and lazy.”

What I enjoy about these strategies is how common they are to research. Knowledge is not created in a vacuum and research is often a critique on the current understanding. Writing a literature review is an exercise in evaluating sources, following the discussion, and trying different search approaches to find additional context. Publishing research is the act of creation and the act opening ourselves up to critique. Embedding the values of research into teaching and learning embeds the processes of acquiring digital literacies into the student experience.

Martin Weller writes in his open textbook The Battle for Open that, increasingly, the narrative around the role of the university is “one of a straightforward investment transaction – students pay a certain fee, and in return they receive an education that will allow them to earn more money later in life.” However, if this becomes the prevailing role of the university, I think we all miss out. We must value inclusivity and empathy and we must also promote critique. We should question what we know and how we know it, so, as Freire wrote, education becomes the practice of freedom.

Open UBC

Open UBC Snapshots: OER Adoption on the Rise

Thanks to the amazing faculty and students, there’s a lot of open educational activities happening at UBC. In an attempt to quantify and explore some of the trends, I, along with some of my colleagues, have tried to dig into some of the nitty gritty details in a new resource published at open.ubc.ca that I’m calling Open UBC Snapshots.

This first Snapshot attempts to look at how open resources are replacing traditional textbooks and what we found is that the number of UBC students impacted by open resources has doubled in 2016 compared to 2015. A large driver of this trend is the great faculty in the Math Department, who have replaced textbooks with open resources in all first year and most second year courses.

In trying to quantify OER adoptions, it quickly became apparent that much of it is happening below the radar and we’ve tried our best to surface and verify OER adoptions. Largely, there is no real radar for how and which educational resources are used and I suspect that we’ll have missed some very important open practices. If you know of any open resource adoptions at UBC that do not seem to be reflected in the Snapshot, please let me know so we can be as accurate as possible. In the next Snapshot, we’ll move away from resources and examine some of the open practices have long been adopted or are emerging.

You can check our first Snapshot here: Open UBC Snapshots: Textbook Displacements by Open Resources

Technology

Examples of Teaching with WordPress at UBC

Here’s a quick (well not that quick) screencast I put together as part of the Teaching with WordPress course. In the video, I highlight some of the different approaches and use cases of how WP is being used for teaching and learning at UBC. Here’s the specific courses and plugs-in that I mention:

SoilWeb200: http://soilweb200.landfood.ubc.ca/
Video Game Law: http://videogame.law.ubc.ca/
Phys101: https://blogs.ubc.ca/phys101/
Arts One Open: http://artsone-open.arts.ubc.ca/
Arts One Seminar: http://a1hendricks.arts.ubc.ca/

Gravity Forms: http://www.gravityforms.com/
Wiki Embed Plug in: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wiki-em…

Apologies for all of the scrolling!

Purpose

Open Learning Design: A (draft) Manifesto

Recently, my colleagues Cindy, Rie, and myself undertook an exercise to map the frameworks and principles of Open Learning Design, which is at the intersection of our separate portfolios on Learning Resource Design and Open Education Initiatives. Since one of the principles in this area is that education is a political act, we’ve thought it would be fun to draft a manifesto for Open Learning Design. We hope to refine it, so, as always, comment and critique are welcome.

Sharing is the foundation of the University.

Sharing is not a functionality within the University; rather the University is the functionality of sharing within its community.

Embedded within the vision and values of the University is that it “supports scholarly pursuits that contribute to knowledge and understanding within and across disciplines, and seeks every opportunity to share them broadly.” Teaching and learning is at the heart of these scholarly pursuits and, as Teachers and Learners, we must seek every opportunity to share broadly, for, as others have noted, “we share our work in education so that one day we might become free through education.”

As Teachers and Learners, we understand that open practices enhance teaching and learning.

As learners, we understand we have the greatest capacity to learn when we are free to share in the shared knowledge of the University. Free, as Wiley defined, to access, to reuse, to revise, to remix, to retain, and to redistribute that knowledge, those materials, that help us learn. We also understand that learners contribute to this shared knowledge and that we should, as Bruff describes, not merely be passive consumers of knowledge but producers, engaged in meaningful, generative work of the University.

As Teachers, we understand that knowledge does not equal understanding and that meaningful learning is authentic learning.

We understand that good teaching requires empathy and that authenticity is grounded in the expertise of the learner in their own learning. We strive to make our students be co-collaborators and co-producers of the curriculum. We work to build trust through honest collaboration for, as Neary states, the capacity for students as producers is “grounded in the human attributes of creativity and desire, so that students can recognise themselves in a world of their own design.”

As Teachers and Learners, we design for sharing and we create for understanding.

We are not wasteful. We are not afraid of failure. Understanding is developed through opportunities to iterate and practice across time and contexts, applying feedback to refine and deepen. Understanding requires self-awareness, practice, reflection and feedback. Understanding is supported by who you know and have access to through your networks, and good educational design facilitates connections.

As Teachers and Learners, we understand that we are one community. We understand that our community is not the University but rather that it is the community which forms the University. Sharing broadly is the means to remove the artificial barriers between the University and the community.

Education is the means that allows the individual, as Freire states, to “deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.” The University’s role is to share this education broadly.