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Teaching with OER, Open Pedagogy, and Working with Learners
2 Teaching with OER
Ibukun D. Alegbeleye; Apurva Ashok; Robin DeRosa; Rajiv Jhangiani; Open Washington Open Educational Resources Network; Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges; Open Education Group; BCcampus Open Education; Lauri Aesoph; SPARC Open Education Leadership Program; Opening Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS); The Open University; Abbey Elder; Nadia Mireles; and LynleyShimat Renée Lys
Chapter Overview: Teaching with OER
This chapter consists of several parts.
Becoming an Open Educator offers a series of writings by Open educators on their experience and suggestions for new Open Educators. It also offers an introduction to the self-paced course, “Becoming an Open Educator,” which is included later in this book.
Benefits & Best Practices of OER Enabled Pedagogy offers a series of materials on the benefits of teaching with OER and best practices for OER enabled pedagogy.
Workshops & Faculty Development Resources offers links and materials related to Open Pedagogy and OER workshops and faculty development resources. First, we provide a series of useful quick links compiled by Open Educator Rajiv Jhangiani. Then we include an outline and links for the SPARC* Open Education Leadership Curriculum. Finally, we offer an introduction to the OEPS Course, which will be provided in the next section.
I should have a lot to write about open pedagogy, I thought to myself ;)…Well, fast forward to this week, I realized I didn’t know as much as I thought I knew about open pedagogy. I had thought open pedagogy was all about open educational resources; alas! it was more than that. I have learned from the readings this week that open educational resources (e.g., open access, open science) is just a subset of open education, however, when people think about open education, they think more about open educational resources and less about open pedagogy.
Ironically, I have always appreciated open pedagogy, I just didn’t know what it was called. I took a course last year and the professor practiced, to some degree, open pedagogy. At the beginning of the course, he asked us to edit the syllabus as we saw fit. Specifically, he asked that we assign grade weights. We worked in groups and we eventually decided on how we wanted our grades weighed and distributed. This was the first time I would be in a class where the professor would invite the students to share some power. I really liked this practice and I decided to adopt it in my future classes. The semester after that, I was the instructor for a recitation class and I tried it out in my class, and the feedback from my students was great – they loved it.
Well, I straight up included it in my teaching philosophy. Here’s an excerpt from my teaching philosophy:
“I believe that instruction should be learner-centered and engaged as much as possible. I consider my role as that of a facilitator rather than a teacher – in fact, I learn from all my students. I endeavor to provide a conducive learning environment that provides psychological safety to students, and such that encourages them to actively participate physically, mentally, and socially in class discussions. One of the ways I do this is to decenter power (as much as possible) and allow my students to regulate some aspects of their learning. For example, I sometimes allow my students to suggest how they want their grades distributed and weighted.”
Although I had made a decision to be open in my pedagogy about a year ago, I just really understood what it means this week. Here’s my definition: Open pedagogy is freedom; it is about inviting students to be free in the classroom. Freedom may take many forms. Examples include:
Freedom to ask questions freely
Freedom to think critically and innovatively (which may include disagreement with the professor’s perspective)
Freedom to co-create their learning experience (e.g., setting learning objectives, participating in grade weighing, etc.).
Well, freedom leads to power decentralization, which makes many professors feel uneasy. Also, it takes hard work on the part of the professors to implement. For example, allowing the students to adjust the syllabus to fit their learning needs is extra work for the professor, and it may not be very rewarding after all. In fact, many professors have said that working in a big research university like Virginia Tech does not help with investing effort into teaching, since the tenure process places more emphasis on research than teaching. I think it is high time universities (including research universities) start making teaching a big part of the tenure application packet. This should help the cause of open pedagogy on a larger scale.
As for me, I have made a decision to continue to practice open pedagogy and I will keep learning more ways to be more open with my teaching.
My Open Textbook: Pedagogy and Practice — Robin DeRosa
I’ve spent some time talking about open pedagogy at several universities this Spring, and in each of those presentations and workshops, I have usually mentioned The Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature, an OER anthology that my students and I produced last year for an American literature survey course I taught. When I talk about the anthology, it’s usually to make a point about open pedagogy. I began the project with the simple desire to save my students about $85 US, which is how much they were (ostensibly) paying for the Heath Anthology of American Literature Volume A. Most of the actual texts in the Heath were public domain texts, freely available and not under any copyright restrictions. As the Heath produced new editions (of literature from roughly 1400-1800!), forcing students to buy new textbooks or be irritatingly out of sync with page numbers, and as students turned to rental markets that necessitated them giving their books back at the end of the semester, I began to look in earnest for an alternative.
I launched the open textbook project over a summer, and because I teach at a public university where I had no easy access to graduate assistants or funding, I hired a bunch of undergrad students and recent alums, and paid them out of my own pocket to assist me. Turns out, most of them were willing to work for free (I didn’t let them, though what I paid was low because it was all I could spare), and turns out the whole endeavor of building the work turned out to be transformative to my own pedagogy and to the course that followed. I want to share here the nuts and bolts of how we built the textbook, and reflect on how it affected the pedagogy that surrounded the book.
Building the Book
I have basic WordPress experience, and since I am too busy with teaching to explore every cool new thing I’d like to, I wanted to stick with an easy tool to build the book. I settled on Pressbooks, which is a very simple, WordPress-based platform. If you are somewhat tech-savvy and comfortable playing around with things, you could definitely teach yourself the basics in an hour or so. I opened a free account and set up a framework for the book. Every section would feature a primary-source public domain document from the period, as well as an introductory context-setting piece.
I created a GoogleDoc and posted a call for research assistants on the undergraduate English Department Facebook group at my university. Research Assistants (RAs) were paid $10 for every public domain text they retrieved and documented, and we tracked it all in the GoogleDoc. Each RA was also paid to complete a basic training on copyright and open licensing, so they understood the definition of “public domain” and understood how to ascertain whether a particular digital version of a text was under copyright.
We started with the main texts that I wanted to cover in the course, based on what I had covered in the past using the Heath and other anthologies. Together over the summer, eight of us built the initial skeleton of the anthology: seven undergraduates (or recent alums) and me. In most cases, students provided the texts, and I edited and excerpted them myself, and then I loaded them into Pressbooks. When the Fall came, the course started and I introduced our rudimentary textbook to the crop of enrolled students, many of whom were aware of the project because their friends had participated in creating the book so far.
What the book still lacked, which my undergraduates really wanted, was the front matter that is conventionally included at the beginning of each text, which generally provides historical and biographical context to help students engage more fully with the primary documents. So students in the course signed up to create these introductions as we went through the course. Generally, they submitted them in time for the class to use them when we covered the text in the syllabus, but they also often revised them after we discussed the text in class if they thought they could improve them. Students also did editorial work on the primary documents, particularly in terms of modernizing spelling, which was a helpful exercise for them in terms of learning how to read original early documents, but also helpful to future students, who can now read the texts more quickly in the modernized versions; in one case, this version is the only openly-licensed modernized version of the text that currently exists.
In addition, students occasionally produced short films, discussion questions, and assignments related to the primary texts, and I have begun uploading those into the anthology as well. I am transitioning to a new department this summer, and doubt I will have time to really stick with this project (anyone can pick it up, of course, but I am also hoping to formally pass it to someone who will commit to building it out), but it’s easy to see the possibilities of how the collection could grow, and how the students could continue to add additional interactive materials.
So many of you are thinking, “That’s great, but my field isn’t comprised of public domain literature that I can just copy and paste into a book.” Well, let me tell you about my second textbook project! The book I am currently working on is a different animal altogether. It’s designed for Interdisciplinary Studies students, and will include foundational theory as well as research methodologies and a new vision for the field that integrates open pedagogy into interdisciplinary scholarship. I started working on the book last year in my courses by asking students to blog about different topics we covered. They assimilated ideas from outside readings (all properly cited), from my lectures, and from active learning projects that we did. They also wrote about their own customized majors and applied capstone projects (service-learning/experiential/partnership-based) and how it all tied in with the foundational theories of the field.
I just received a small grant from the University System of New Hampshire to develop this textbook. This summer, the plan is to take the student-created content (all of which is cc-licensed) and drop it into a Pressbooks shell much the way we did with the public domain literature in the anthology project. And in the Fall, students in the Interdisciplinary Studies (IDS) intro course will edit that material, create glossaries and short introductions, add assignments and writing prompts, and in-load multimedia supplements. In the Spring, the capstone students will augment the sections that relate to the practice of IDS in their field experiences, and link their own websites (we call them “ePorts”) into the book to demonstrate how different principles get applied in their curricula and practica. Students will also help me curate resource links for further reading, and locate other openly-licensed articles to import into the book.
People often ask me how students can create textbooks when they are only just beginning to learn about the topics that the textbooks cover. My answer to this is that unlike many other scholarly materials, textbooks are primarily designed to be accessible to students– to new scholars in a particular academic area or sub-specialty. Students are the perfect people to help create textbooks, since they are the most keenly tuned in to what other students will need in order to engage with the material in meaningful ways. By taking the foundational principles of a field– most of which are not “owned” by any prior textbook publisher– and refiguring them through their own lens, student textbook creators can easily tap their market. They can access and learn about these principles in multiple ways (conventional or open textbooks, faculty lecture and guidance, reading current work in the field, conversations with related networks, videos and webinars, etc.), and they are quite capable, in my opinion, of designing engaging ways to reframe those principles in ways that will be more helpful to students than anything that has come before.
In other words, whether your subject matter will be made up of public domain literature or not, your students can help you create a textbook in most any field. Here are some practical reminders that might be helpful:
There is no rush! Don’t worry about producing a beautiful, flawless textbook. Build it in stages across multiple years, and let different cohorts of students contribute in different, layered ways. Make no claims to perfection. Your textbook is a work-in-progress, and it will continually improve as learners engage with it.
Academic labor is labor. Students can help build the textbook if it’s a meaningful part of the learning process in a class. Outside of that, find funding sources to support students or instructors who want to assist with the development of the project.
You don’t need to be a tech guru to do this. Learn how to openly license your book and learn how to get it online so folks can access and share it. Make sure you understand copyright issues so you can assure that everything in your book is freely available for you to use. The library is probably your best first stop for licensing questions, and your academic technology folks can assist you with getting a Pressbooks or website set up to host your textbook.
The Effects on Pedagogy
Ok, so now that stuff is out of the way, let’s talk pedagogy. The $85 dollars that I saved for each of my students seemed to be the least of what was exciting to me about the open anthology (and that was pretty exciting, given that many of my students struggled to afford our previous book– to the point that it often took them weeks to raise enough funds to get their own copy). Let me start by telling you that no student in any of my classes ever told me that they loved our Heath anthology back when I was using it. In sixteen years of teaching the course, no student every remarked on a course evaluation that our anthology was the best part of the class. They tolerated it, often liked the helpful glosses, and sometimes loved the literature itself. But a textbook is a textbook, and they saw it as neutral at best, uninspiring or frustrating at worst. I didn’t really set out to make a better textbook. I was just looking to replace a textbook and save some cash for strapped students. Boy, did I underestimate the power of the open textbook.
As students and alums worked with me over the summer to create that first skeletonic text, it was clear something amazing was happening. The students immediately seemed invested in the project– almost like they were, well, writing a book with me. To me, the work seemed sort of second nature, since I often write for publication. But for my students, the idea that they were creating something that would be read/used by a different cohort of students a few months later was a truly novel and thrilling concept. They repeatedly volunteered to work for free (I resisted this), and they still sometimes inquire about whether there are roles they can play now that the book is at its next stage of development. When the students in the class started working with and contributing to the book, they often made comments about liking our textbook! But by getting to contribute to the book, make curatorial decisions about the kinds of texts to include, and frame the work in their own words, they seemed more connected to the textbook itself, more willing to engage with it. Here’s a short video featuring several of my students, which explores their experience of using OER and engaging in open pedagogy-based learning.
I also did something else that I think made a big impact on the class. I was sensitive to the fact that our new textbook would be digital, and that most students would not want to use up their print quotas by printing it out. I had read all the same stuff you have probably read about how READING OFF A SCREEN IS BAD and TAKING NOTES ON A LAPTOP IS BAD, but it occurred to me that both of these things have to do with the fact that we spend so little time parsing the differences between reading off a screen and reading print, and so little time examining how digital notetaking differs from handwriting our notes. My hunch is that it’s not that screen reading or digital notetaking are worse for learning, but that we don’t talk enough about what the digital texts enable that might be quite different from what is enabled by print. So I started the class with a consideration of the problems and potential of moving to digital texts, and with a challenge to the class to try to produce our own work–even our notes on the text– digitally, even if that felt awkward. We would assess at the end of the course which digital tools we would continue to work with and which we would jettison in favor of a return to the analog.
So I added an app called “Hypothesis” to the course, which allows readers to take notes on the text digitally. Because we set our notes to “public,” students in my course (and in other courses at other colleges!) could see each others’ annotations and comment on them. Almost immediately, we all realized that it wasn’t the digital quality of the notes that was engaging; it was the social quality of the notes. Suddenly, our student-created textbook was turning into a cacophonous, heteroglossic tapestry of voices talking to each other about the literature. While it may very well be true that taking notes longhand can help students recall specific detail more effectively than taking notes on a laptop, the question of how digital annotation of a text differs from hand-written annotation seems distinct, and there is no question that there were certain dimensions that opened up when we allowed the annotations–allowed ourselves– to talk to one another within the context of the close reading.
When I finally had time to sit down and take stock of what was happening, I realized a few things.
The open textbook allowed for student contribution to the “master text” of the course, which seemed to change the whole dynamic of the course from a banking model (I download info from the textbook into their brains) to an inquiry-based model (they converse with me and with the text, altering both my thinking and the text itself with their contributions).
The digital textbook meant they all had the book on Day 1 and nobody was behind, which seemed to level the playing field so we were all contributing more evenly than I had seen in the past.
The fact that there were no limits on the kinds of things we could add into the textbook seemed to engender creativity in students, and allowed them to play to their strengths in figuring out what they brought to the table. This looked more like a real-world group project, in which team members would be asked to bring their talents to bear on some task.
As all of this became more evident to me, I began to be more concerted about playing up the open pedagogy that was developing. I became more reliant on Twitter as a tool in our class, and worked to develop the class community on our course hashtag, with the idea that letting students feel connected to each other outside of class would help them begin to engage with the work more as scholars and less as students. I opened Twitter chats with working scholars, tweeted links to their own student blogs when they interested me (we worked mostly outside of the LMS), and encouraged them to share their own work across whatever social media platforms they enjoyed using.
I also realized that my course was basically functioning as a MOOC (minus the “massive”–maybe it was a PMOOC: “Potentially Massive Open Online Course”). The text was free online. The syllabus and all assignments were online. The annotation system was publicly accessible, and the students were mostly all blogging on public websites that they built. Many class discussions had Twitter chats embedded inside of them, and any of the lectures I gave were livetweeted (pre-Periscope!). While we still had a sense of intimacy and trust in our classroom, it seemed to liven everything up to connect our work as scholars of history and literature to larger communities outside of that classroom.
Now I want to pause for a second and get off the hype-mobile that I have been riding so far in this post. While it’s true that the creation of the open textbook absolutely transformed my teaching and my pedagogy, and while it is true that an open textbook has much more to offer faculty and students than cost-savings, it is not true that the open textbook is magic. For every affordance it offered, my open textbook also revealed serious pitfalls, barriers, and challenges that I am still working out. Here are a few of them, which I hope to tease out more thoroughly in my work over the next year or so:
If OER is free, what hidden costs exist in using it that still hinder student access to education? For example, at my institution, 94% of students come to school with a laptop, which mostly means that my university wasn’t too worried about providing laptops for students because (as one colleague told me) “they all have them.” But all meant that in my 25-student classes, there were regularly 1-2 student(s) who didn’t have a machine. In order to do what I wanted to do with the digital textbook and the connected learning, I had to first work to get a laptop rental program installed in my library to ensure that my students all had access to hardware. I also had to spend a LOT of time going through each step of basic tech set-up. Because the “digital native” concept is (still a) fallacy, and because my institution does not fully cover basic electracy (I just learned that word from Gardner Campbell and Alex Reid) or digital literacy skills at the introductory level, I couldn’t shorthand things like “create a Hypothesis login” without immediately leaving some students behind. While I am all for letting students find their own way through the acquisition of specific tech skills, this self-directed approach to tech learning is something that has to be modeled and facilitated to ensure that students who are newer to technology can participate fully. Bottom line, opening one line of access to a free eBook doesn’t erase about a zillion other access issues that you will want to acknowledge honestly and assertively.
If OER is free, what hidden costs exist in its production? Making these textbooks is taking me a chunk of time in the off-season. Thanks to my salaried position, I feel ok about putting in the overtime, but it’s a privilege my colleagues who teach under year-to-year part-time non-contracts can’t afford. Who should be funding OER creation? Institutions? Students? For-profit start-ups? How will you invest time in this project without obscuring the true costs of academic labor? Right now, we pass the corruptly high cost of academic publishing onto the backs of academia’s most vulnerable members: students. But as OER gains steam, we need to come up with funding models that don’t land us back in the same quagmire of exploitation that we were trying to get out of.
Working in public is exciting and enriching, and I have seen my students thrilled by the connections they have made and engaged by the ability to produce work for a larger academic commons. That being said, working in public, and asking students to work in public, is fraught with dangers and challenges. Students need to understand privacy and safety issues (and so do we; in case you haven’t had FERPA waved in your face recently let me do that for you now). They may not know about trolling or how to respond to it (seriously, we can’t even say there is a universally agreed-upon best practice for handling trolling). They may (will) face vicious harassment, racism, sexism, homophobia, and all of the other things that we do a reasonably good job at regulating in our classrooms (maybe?), depending on the kind of work they do or the kind of digital profiles they put forward, purposefully or otherwise. They will put crappy work online sometimes (sometimes they will know it’s crappy and sometimes they won’t); is that ok? Will it come back to haunt them when they look for a job (we need to take this concern seriously, given the debt they incur to study with us)? What professional risks do I assume when my pedagogy is so fully exposed? And who in the academy can afford to take those risks…and who cannot?
So yeah, that’s only three bullet points, but there are so many threads embedded in each of those, I think I will stop there.
Here’s the takeaways, for those of you who are first and last paragraph readers:
Open textbooks save money, which matters deeply to our students. But they can also create a new relationship between learners and course content, and if teachers choose to acknowledge and enable this, it can have a profound effect on the whole fabric of the course. Jumping into the “open” part of the open textbook means opening our eyes to the real hazards and challenges of connecting our courses to a wider public. I am no expert on any of this, and I welcome feedback and thoughts (and suggestions for further reading) as I start to pick my way through this kind of teaching. My best advice is just to share your experiences and roadblocks with others. Lots of people are promising that “open” is a panacea for everything that ails us in education, and lots of people are rejecting “open” for its failures to deliver on that promise. Both of those positions seem reductive to me. So maybe I’ll leave with two questions aimed at opening, rather than closing, the conversation:
Do you use an open textbook? If so, what’s that “open” part doing to/for your course? If you want to try incorporating an open textbook into your course but haven’t yet, what questions do you have before you’d want to give it a go?
Introduction to Open Pedagogy
There are many ways to begin a discussion of “Open Pedagogy.” Although providing a framing definition might be the obvious place to start, we want to resist that for just a moment to ask a set of related questions: What are your hopes for education, particularly for higher education? What vision do you work toward when you design your daily professional practices in and out of the classroom? How do you see the roles of the learner and the teacher? What challenges do your students face in their learning environments, and how does your pedagogy address them?
“Open Pedagogy,” as we engage with it, is a site of praxis, a place where theories about learning, teaching, technology, and social justice enter into a conversation with each other and inform the development of educational practices and structures. This site is dynamic, contested, constantly under revision, and resists static definitional claims. But it is not a site vacant of meaning or political conviction. In this brief introduction, we offer a pathway for engaging with the current conversations around Open Pedagogy, some ideas about its philosophical foundation, investments, and its utility, and some concrete ways that students and teachers—all of us learners—can “open” education. We hope that this chapter will inspire those of us in education to focus our critical and aspirational lenses on larger questions about the ideology embedded within our educational systems and the ways in which pedagogy impacts these systems. At the same time we hope to provide some tools and techniques to those who want to build a more empowering, collaborative, and just architecture for learning.
“Open Pedagogy” as a named approach to teaching is nothing new. Scholars such as Catherine Cronin, Katy Jordan, Vivien Rolfe, and Tannis Morgan have traced the term back to early etymologies. Morgan cites a 1979 article by the Canadian Claude Paquette: “Paquette outlines three sets of foundational values of Open Pedagogy, namely: autonomy and interdependence; freedom and responsibility; democracy and participation.”
Many of us who work with Open Pedagogy today have come into the conversations not only through an interest in the historical arc of the scholarship of teaching and learning, but also by way of Open Education, and specifically, by way of Open Educational Resources (OERs). OERs are educational materials that are openly-licensed, usually with Creative Commons licenses, and therefore they are generally characterized by the 5 Rs: they can be reused, retained, redistributed, revised, and remixed. As conversations about teaching and learning developed around the experience of adopting and adapting OERs, the phrase “Open Pedagogy” began to re-emerge, this time crucially inflected with the same “open” that inflects the phrase “open license.”
In this way, we can think about Open Pedagogy as a term that is connected to many teaching and learning theories that predate Open Education, but also as a term that is newly energized by its relationship to OERs and the broader ecosystem of open (Open Education, yes, but also Open Access, Open Science, Open Data, Open Source, Open Government, etc.). David Wiley, the Chief Academic Officer of Lumen Learning, was one of the first OER-focused scholars who articulated how the use of OERs could transform pedagogy. He wrote in 2013 about the tragedy of “disposable assignments” that “actually suck value out of the world,” and he postulated not only that OERs offer a free alternative to high-priced commercial textbooks, but also that the open license would allow students (and teaching faculty) to contribute to the knowledge commons, not just consume from it, in meaningful and lasting ways. Recently, Wiley has revised his language to focus on “OER-Enabled Pedagogy,” with an explicit commitment to foregrounding the 5R permissions and the ways that they transform teaching and learning.
As Wiley has focused on students-as-contributors and the role of OERs in education, other Open Pedagogues have widened the lens through which Open Pedagogy refracts. Mike Caulfield, for example, has argued that while OER has been driving the car for a while, Open Pedagogy is in the backseat ready to hop over into the front. Caulfield sees the replacement of the proprietary textbook by OERs as a necessary step in enabling widespread institutional open learning practice. In that post, Caulfield shorthands Open Pedagogy: “student blogs, wikis, etc.” We might delve in a bit deeper here. Beyond participating in the creation of OERs via the 5 Rs, what exactly does it mean to engage in “Open Pedagogy?”
First, we want to recognize that Open Pedagogy shares common investments with many other historical and contemporary schools of pedagogy. For example, constructivist pedagogy, connected learning, and critical digital pedagogy are all recognizable pedagogical strands that overlap with Open Pedagogy. From constructivist pedagogy, particularly as it emerged from John Dewey and, in terms of its relationship to technology, from Seymour Papert, we recognize a critique of industrial and automated models for learning, a valuing of experiential and learner-centered inquiry, and a democratizing vision for the educational process. From connected learning, especially as it coheres in work supported by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, we recognize a hope that human connections facilitated by technologies can help learners engage more fully with the knowledge and ideas that shape our world. And from critical digital pedagogy, as developed by Digital Humanities-influenced thinkers at Digital Pedagogy Lab out of educational philosophy espoused by scholars such as Paulo Freire and bell hooks, we recognize a commitment to diversity, collaboration, and structural critique of both educational systems and the technologies that permeate them.
If we merge OER advocacy with the kinds of pedagogical approaches that focus on collaboration, connection, diversity, democracy, and critical assessments of educational tools and structures, we can begin to understand the breadth and power of Open Pedagogy as a guiding praxis. To do this, we need to link these pedagogical investments with the reality of the educational landscape as it now exists. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts that “higher education shall be equally accessible to all.” Yet, even in North America in 2017, “the likelihood of earning a college degree is tied to family income” according to Sara Goldrick-Rab, author of Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid and the Betrayal of the American Dream (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016). For those of us who work in higher ed, it’s likely that we have been casually aware of the link between family income and college enrollment, attendance, persistence, and completion. But for those of us who teach, it’s also likely that the pedagogies and processes that inflect our daily work are several steps removed from the economic challenges that our students face. Even though 67% of college students in Florida and 54% of those in British Columbia, according to Rajiv Sunil Jhangiani and Surita Jhangiani, cannot afford to purchase at least one of their required course textbooks, we more readily attribute their inability to complete assigned readings to laziness and entitlement than to unaffordability. This is precisely why the push to reduce the high cost of textbooks that has been the cornerstone of the OER movement has been a wake-up call for many of us who may not always have understood what we could do to directly impact the affordability of a college degree.
If a central gift that OERs bring to students is that they make college more affordable, one of the central gifts that they bring to faculty is that of agency, and how this can help us rethink our pedagogies in ways that center on access. If we do this, we might start asking broader questions that go beyond “How can I lower the cost of textbooks in this course?” If we think of ourselves as responsible for making sure that everyone can come to our course table to learn, we will find ourselves concerned with the many other expenses that students face in paying for college. How will they get to class if they can’t afford gas money or a bus pass? How will they afford childcare on top of tuition fees? How will they focus on their homework if they haven’t had a square meal in two days or if they don’t know where they will be sleeping that night? How will their families pay rent if they cut back their work hours in order to attend classes? How much more student loan debt will they take on for each additional semester it takes to complete all of their required classes? How will they obtain the credit card they need to purchase an access code? How will they regularly access their free open textbook if they don’t own an expensive laptop or tablet?
And what other access issues do students face as they face these economic challenges? Will they be able to read their Chemistry textbook given their vision impairment? Will their LMS site list them by their birth name rather than their chosen name, and thereby misgender them? Will they have access to the knowledge they need for research if their college restricts their search access or if they don’t have Wi-Fi or a computer at home? Are they safe to participate in online, public collaborations if they are undocumented? Is their college or the required adaptive learning platform collecting data on them, and if so, could those data be used in ways that could put them at risk?
OERs invite faculty to play a direct role in making higher education more accessible. And they invite faculty to ask questions about how we can impact access in ways that go beyond textbook costs. At the very least, they help us see the challenges that students face in accessing higher education as broad, as severe, and as directly related to their academic success, or lack thereof.
So one key component of Open Pedagogy might be that it sees access, broadly writ, as fundamental to learning and to teaching, and agency as an important way of broadening that access. OERs are licensed with open licenses, which reflects not just a commitment to access in terms of the cost of knowledge, but also access in terms of the creation of knowledge. Embedded in the social justice commitment to making college affordable for all students is a related belief that knowledge should not be an elite domain. Knowledge consumption and knowledge creation are not separate but parallel processes, as knowledge is co-constructed, contextualized, cumulative, iterative, and recursive. In this way, Open Pedagogy invites us to focus on how we can increase access to higher education and how we can increase access to knowledge–both its reception and its creation. This is, fundamentally, about the dream of a public learning commons, where learners are empowered to shape the world as they encounter it. With the open license at the heart of our work, we care both about “free” and about “freedom,” about resources and practices, about access and about accessibility, about content and about contribution. This is not a magical thinking approach to digital pedagogy. It’s an honest appraisal of the barriers that exist in our educational systems and a refusal to abdicate responsibility for those barriers.
To summarize, we might think about Open Pedagogy as an access-oriented commitment to learner-driven education AND 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. We might insist on the centrality of the 5 Rs to this work, and we might foreground the investments that Open Pedagogy shares with other learner-centered approaches to education. We might reconstitute Open Pedagogy continually, as our contexts shift and change and demand new, site-specific articulations. But if we want to begin “open” our courses, programs, and/or institutions, what practical steps can we take to get started?
OEP, or Open Educational Practices, can be defined as the set of practices that accompany either the use of OERs or, more to our point, the adoption of Open Pedagogy. Here are some simple but profoundly transformative examples of OEPs:
Adapt or remix OERs with your students. Even the simple act of adding problem sets or discussion questions to an existing open textbook will help contribute to knowledge, to the quality of available OERs, and to your students’ sense of doing work that matters. The adaptation of the open textbook Project Management for Instructional Designers by successive cohorts of graduate students at Brigham Young University provides an excellent example of this approach.
Build OERs with your students. Though students may be beginners with most of the content in your course, they are often more adept than you at understanding what beginning students need in order to understand the material. Asking students to help reframe and re-present course content in new and inventive ways can add valuable OERs to the commons while also allowing for the work that students do in courses to go on to have meaningful impact once the course ends. Consider the examples of the open textbook Environmental Science Bites written by undergraduate students at the Ohio State University or the brief explainer videos created by Psychology students around the world and curated by the NOBA Project.
Teach your students how to edit Wikipedia articles. By adding new content, revising existing content, adding citations, or adding images, students can (with the support of the Wiki Education Foundation) make direct contributions to one of the most popular public repositories for information. Indeed, more than 22,000 students already have, including medical students at the University of California San Francisco. More than developing digital literacy and learning how to synthesize, articulate, and share information, students engage with and understand the politics of editing, including how “truth” is negotiated by those who have access to the tools that shape it.
Facilitate student-created and student-controlled learning environments. The Learning Management System (Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, etc.) generally locks students into closed environments that prevent sharing and collaboration outside of the class unit; it perpetuates a surveillance model of education in which the instructor is able to consider metrics that students are not given access to; and it presupposes that all student work is disposable (as all of it will be deleted when the new course shell is imported for the next semester). Initiatives such as Domain of One’s Own enable students to build “personal cyberinfrastructures” where they can manage their own learning, control their own data, and design home ports that can serve as sites for collaboration and conversation about their work. Students can choose to openly license the work that they post on these sites, thereby contributing OERs to the commons; they can also choose not to openly license their work, which is an exercising of their rights and perfectly in keeping with the ethos of Open Pedagogy. If students create their own learning architectures, they can (and should) control how public or private they wish to be, how and when to share or license their work, and what kinds of design, tools, and plug-ins will enhance their learning. It is important to point out here that open is not the opposite of private.
Engage students in public chats with authors or experts. Platforms such as Twitter can help engage students in scholarly and professional conversations with practitioners in their fields. This is another way that students can contribute to—not just consume—knowledge, and it shifts learning into a dialogic experience. In addition, if students are sharing work publicly, they can also use social media channels to drive mentors, teachers, peers, critics, experts, friends, family, and the public to their work for comment. Opening conversations about academic and transdisciplinary work—both student work and the work of established scholars and practitioners—is, like contributing to OERs, a way to grow a thriving knowledge commons.
Build course policies, outcomes, assignments, rubrics, and schedules of work collaboratively with students. Once we involve students in creating or revising OERs or in shaping learning architectures, we can begin to see the syllabus as more of a collaborative document, co-generated at least in part with our students. Can students help craft course policies that would support their learning, that they feel more ownership over? Can they add or revise course learning outcomes in order to ensure the relevancy of the course to their future paths? Can they develop assignments for themselves and/or their classmates, and craft rubrics to accompany them to guide an evaluative process? Can they shape the course schedule according to rhythms that will help maximize their efforts and success?
Let students curate course content. Your course is likely split into a predictable number of units (fourteen, for example) to conform to the academic calendar of the institution within which the course is offered. We would probably all agree that such segmenting of our fields is somewhat arbitrary; there is nothing ontological about Introduction to Psychology being fourteen weeks long (or spanning twenty-eight textbook chapters, etc.). And when we select a novel for a course on postcolonial literature or a lab exercise for Anatomy and Physiology, we are aware that there are a multitude of other good options for each that we could have chosen. We can involve students in the process of curating content for courses, either by offering them limited choices between different texts or by offering them solid time to curate a future unit more or less on their own (or in a group) as a research project. The content of a course may be somewhat prescribed by accreditation or field standards, but within those confines, we can involve students in the curation process, increasing the level of investment they have with the content while helping them acquire a key twenty-first century skill.
Ask critical questions about “open.” When you develop new pathways based on Open Pedagogy, pay special attention to the barriers, challenges, and problems that emerge. Be explicit about them, honest about them, and share them widely with others working in Open Education so that we can work together to make improvements. Being an open educator in this fashion is especially crucial if we wish to avoid digital redlining, creating inequities (however unintentionally) through the use of technology. Ask yourself: Do your students have access to broadband at home? Do they have the laptops or tablets they need to easily access and engage with OERs? Do they have the supports they need to experiment creatively, often for the first time, with technology tools? Do they have the digital literacies they need to ensure as much as is possible their safety and privacy online? Do you have a full understanding of the terms of service of the EdTech tools you are using in your courses? As you work to increase the accessibility of your own course, are you also evaluating the tools and technologies you are using to ask how they help or hinder your larger vision for higher education?
These are just a few ideas for getting started with Open Pedagogy. Most important, find people to talk with about your ideas. Ask questions about how OERs and the 5 Rs change the nature of a course or the relationships that students have to their learning materials. Look to programs and colleges that are widely accessible and which serve a broad variety of learners and ask questions about how their course designs are distinct or compelling. Ask your students about meaningful academic contributions they have made, and what structures were in place that facilitated those contributions. Try, explore, fail, share, revise.
Open Pedagogy is not a magical panacea for the crises that currently challenge higher ed. That being said, we both feel that Open Pedagogy offers a set of dynamic commitments that could help faculty and students articulate a sustainable, vibrant, and inclusive future for our educational institutions. By focusing on access, agency, and a commons-oriented approach to education, we can clarify our challenges and firmly assert a learner-centered vision for higher education.
Robin DeRosa is director of interdisciplinary studies at Plymouth State University, part of the university system of New Hampshire. Her current research and advocacy work focuses on Open Education, and how universities can innovate in order to bring down costs for students, increase interdisciplinary collaboration, and refocus the academic world on strengthening the public good. She is also an editor for Hybrid Pedagogy, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that combines the strands of critical pedagogy and digital pedagogy to arrive at the best social and civil uses for technology and new media in education.
Rajiv Jhangiani is the University Teaching Fellow in Open Studies and a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. He also serves as an Open Education Advisor with BCcampus and an associate editor of Psychology Learning and Teaching. Previously he served as an OER Research Fellow with the Open Education Group, a faculty fellow with the BC Open Textbook Project, a faculty workshop facilitator with the Open Textbook Network, and the associate editor of NOBA Psychology.
Becoming an Open Educator: Course Overview — Quick Intro by Apurva Ashok
Becoming an Open Educator is a great resource for faculty or instructors who are wondering about the benefits and impact of open. It begins with a basic introduction to the tenets of Open Education, and later answers more in-depth questions about creating and disseminating Open Educational Resources. This online course is designed to let you work at your own pace, while also providing you with activities, quizzes, and access to additional resources. You can interact with peers, maintain a reflective log, and earn a badge of completion. This relatively straightforward course was developed as part of the Opening Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS) and supplies the foundational information required for anyone who is curious about the power of open.
Quiz: Becoming An Open Educator
Benefits & Best Practices of OER Enabled Pedagogy
This section offers a series of materials on the benefits of teaching with OER and best practices for OER enabled pedagogy. First, we provide an article from Open Washington on the importance and benefits of OER. Next, we include a guide to the unique potential of OER-enabled pedagogy by the Open Education Group. Further, we offer materials from BC Campus and Open educator Lauri Aesoph on basic rules of textbook development, guidelines to student-centered Open pedagogy, including accessibility, diversity, and inclusion; and a quick guide to fix-as-you-go as a principle of OER material and textbook development.
Table of Contents: Benefits & Best Practices of OER Enabled Pedagogy
Learning Objectives: Benefits & Best Practices of OER Enabled Pedagogy
By the end of this section, learners should be able to:
Identify OER practices and discuss their relevance to education
Give concrete examples of how OER-enabled pedagogy is implemented in the real world
Outline best practices for textbook design and development
Discuss key points of accessibility and of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI)
Relate key roles and duties of a fixer and the concept of fix as you go
A short video: “Open Education Matters: Why is it important to share content?” by Nadia Mireles.
Why OER Matters — Open Washington
We have discussed OER, Open Licenses, Creative Commons Licenses, and Public Domain. We learned that there are quality open resources made available for educators like us to adopt and adapt. Here, we will discuss why all these matter to us (or not).
What are the benefits in using OER?
Why on earth do we care? Why do open educational resources matter? What is the point of using OER?
The development and promotion of open educational resources is often motivated by a desire to curb the commodification of knowledge and provide an alternate or enhanced educational paradigm (sentence from Wikipedia, OER). As an educator, what benefits do you see in using OER for you and your students?
Below are some of the benefits of using open educational resources that I have seen while working with OER over the past several years.
Saves costs for students
OER can offer drastic savings in the cost of education. Some students, who otherwise cannot afford to buy expensive textbooks or other course materials, will appreciate this affordable option when taking your course. A faculty member from a community college said during an interview
“Many of my students are struggling. They are working adults trying to make ends meet. I used to use a $150 textbook from a publisher and I switched to an open textbook. My students love it because it costs nothing. They are now asking if my next course will use the free textbook too.”
“I made my own course materials package for my students. It is free to download and a printed version is only 40 dollars. I could not find a ready-made open textbook for my course. So I combined the open resources out there and developed my own. It was a lot of work, but my students are happy to save good money.”
Grants access to more quality choices
There are more than 1000 free online courses from leading universities that are open to the public. Students in low-resource environments can enjoy the recorded lectures and video tutorials developed by other institutions such as,
This is just to name a few. Many other universities, colleges, and other educational institutions in higher education are preparing to offer open online courses to the public. Educators are happily sharing their life’s work with students and enjoying the greater influence their materials have on larger audiences.
Helps prior learning and after learning
If an instructor opens his/her own course materials, and shares them with the public it greatly enhances opportunities for learning for both students who already took the course and the prospective students.
Students often would like to look over course materials before the term begins. If students have that opportunity to take a look at the course materials it will help them make more informed decisions in choosing their courses, and will give them the opportunity to prepare themselves for the class.
Students also would like to revisit their course materials after the quarter/semester is over to refresh their memories or to further study the topics. Open course materials will help them reinforce what they have learned and further develop their level of understanding in the area.
Provides peace of mind for all users
If you’re re-using someone else’s materials, one of the best reasons for using OER is for peace of mind about attribution. The resources are licensed to allow the sharing of content and so you will not need to contact the author about making use of his or her work provided that what you want to do falls within the ‘open’ license. OERs are free at the point of use, so you will not need to provide monetary compensation for using them. Then there is the opportunity of discovering alternative ideas for presenting and teaching your subject matter or being able to point your students to the alternative explanations for further study (text in this paragraph is from Why OER by Kabils, CC BY).
Other benefits
• Showcases research to widest possible audience
• Enhances a school’s reputation as well as that of the teacher or researcher
• Social responsibility – provides education for all
• Shares best practice internationally
• Creates additional opportunities for peer review
• Maximizes the use and increases availability of educational materials
• Raises the quality standards for educational resources by gathering more contributors
What do you see? Do they make sense? Think about what OER can do for you and your students.
What are the challenges in using OER?
Below are some of the challenges of using/providing open educational resources.
Quality Assurance
A growing number of digital resources are available. Teachers, students and self-learners looking for resources will not have trouble finding resources but might have a harder time judging their quality and relevance. Many institutions that supply OER go through an internal review process before releasing them to the public but these processes are not open in the sense that the user of the resource can follow them (text from Open Educational Resources by Jan Hylen, CC-BY). Also there is a lack of research data focusing on comparing the amount students learn from OER compared to the amount they learn from prevailing publisher materials. Whether the material is free or expensive, quality does matter.
Sustainability of OER
Many OER initiatives begun in recent years were dependent on one-time start-up funding. Although some projects have a strong institutional backing, it is likely that the initial funding will cease after a few years and maintaining the resources will be difficult and expensive. Without maintenance the resources will become obsolete and the quality could be lost. Therefore it is critical to figure out how to sustain these initiatives in the long run.
Lack of public understanding about OER
At just over ten years old OER is a very recent development in education. It requires a huge paradigm shift and attitude change and this is a much bigger challenge than introducing a new tool or knowledge. Many in education do not understand the potential of OER and feel that it threatens their ownership of intellectual property. It takes some time to understand that open licenses, such as Creative Commons licenses, clearly recognize and can reinforce someone’s intellectual ownership. The open licenses are simply to make the sharing process easy while protecting the copyright.
What other challenges do you see?
Below are presentation slides that discuss the benefits and challenges of OER prepared by Washington State Community and Technical College faculty.
OER-Enabled Pedagogy Library – Open Education Group
OER-Enabled Pedagogy
OER-Enabled Pedagogy isthe set of teaching and learning practices only practical in the context of the 5R permissions characteristic of open educational resources. Some people – but not all – use the terms “open pedagogy” or “open educational practices” synonymously.
The purpose of this page is to provide a list of concrete examples of how OER-enabled pedagogy, is implemented in the real world. (We appreciate earlier efforts to collect examples like this one by BC Campus). We’ve kept our descriptions brief and, where possible, linked directly to the artifacts students have created or to articles that provide more information on what they did. Please send additional examples to David Wiley and we will add them to this list with a credit.
Murder, Madness & Mayhem assigned students to edit (and if necessary create) Wikipedia articles about lesser known Latin American authors.
Azzam assigned fourth-year medical students to edit and improve Wikipedia articles related to public health topics.
See additional Wikipedia-based assignments here and here. Also, see this report that 6% of edits to science articles in on Wikipedia in April 2016 were made by students.
Students remix audiovisual materials to both entertain and inform
Blogs and Wikis combines existing video with new audio to describe the difference between blogs and wikis.
District Policies Regarding Blogs and Wikis combines existing video with new audio to warn teachers about how their desire to use social media may run afoul of school district policies.
Students openly license supplemental materials they create for each other
Teachers at Mountain Heights Academy encourage students to create openly licensed study guides, review games, tutorial videos, and other materials which they review and integrate into their courses.
Students create test banks
Jhangiani describes a Social Psychology course in which 35 students created over 1400 test questions for a quiz bank.
Students create their own assignments
DS106 has students create (or remix) and share assignments, together with worked examples, difficulty ratings, and tutorials for how to successfully complete the assignment.
Additional Ideas
Here are some other ideas for engaging in open pedagogy that we haven’t yet seen in the real world. If you’ve seen them, let us know.
Students create tutorial videos
Students can create tutorial videos for a particular topic or assignment. These tutorial videos could cover a wide range of topics such as teaching specific skills, summarizing key concepts, providing worked examples, or creating connections to student lives.
Students create summaries
Students can create written or video-based presentations that summarize key aspects of the storyline, character, interpretation, symbolism, etc. These summaries could be both used by and improved upon by future generations of learners.
Students create worked examples
Students can create worked examples that provide other students with step-by-step templates of how to do problems (these are particularly popular in math), like this one, specifically in topics that have proven troublesome to students in past semesters.
Students connect principles with popular culture
Students can explain how principles studied in class are exemplified in popular media like movies, television, music, or books.
Students create games
Students can create games to be played by future generations of learners to help them prepare for, or deepen their learning on, specific topics.
Students create guided notes
Students createguides to direct other students through readings or lecture.
Five Rules of Textbook Development — BCcampus OpenEducation & Lauri Aesoph
The below list provides five rules that help guide the development of a good textbook, adapted from wikibooks.
1. Rule of frameworks
Memory and understanding are promoted by the use of a structure that mimics the structures we all use within our minds to store information. Before we can use or master a subject, we have to have a mental road map that allows us to navigate within and through the subject domain. The text can best aid understanding by making this framework visible early on within each section or topic. The extent to which the student understands that they are using a framework, and knows what that framework is, is important as they internalize and make use of the material presented.
2. Rule of meaningful names
Everything we know is tagged with an index or a title. These indices are critical to the ability to recall or retrieve the things we know and remember. Each concept, process, technique or fact presented should aid the student to assign a meaningful name for it in their own mental organization of the material. To be most useful, these names shouldn’t have to be relearned at higher levels of study. The names assigned by the text should be useful in that they support some future activities: communication with other practitioners, reference within the text to earlier mastered material, and conformity to the framework used for the subject. Each unique element of the subject domain should have a unique name, and each name should be used for only one element.
3. Rule of manageable numbers
When we learn from an outline, an illustration, or an example, most of us are limited in our ability to absorb new material. As we become familiar with part of a subject domain this number expands, but for new material four to six new elements is a reasonable limit. If a chapter outline contains twelve items, the student will have forgotten the outline before getting to the last item. When a text fails to support this rule, it requires even a diligent student to needlessly repeat material.
4. Rule of hierarchy
Our mental frameworks are hierarchical. Learning is aided by using the student’s ability to couple or link new material with that already mastered. When presenting new domains for hierarchical understanding, the rules for meaningful names and manageable numbers have increased importance and more limited application. A maximum of three levels of hierarchy should be presented at one time. The root should be already mastered, the current element under consideration clearly examined, and lower levels outlined only to the extent that they help the student understand the scope or importance of the current element. This area is supplemented by two more rules within this rule: those of Connectivity and Cohesion. Connectivity requires consideration of what the student likely knows at this point. The more already mastered elements that one can connect with a new element, the easier it is to retain. Cohesion requires that the characteristics of new elements as they are presented be tightly coupled.
5. Rule of repetition
Most people learn by repetition, and only a few with native genius can achieve mastery without it. There is a pattern of repetition that aids in promoting the elements of a subject from short-term to long-term memory. Implementations of this rule may mean that frameworks and important hierarchies are repeated as many as five or six times, while frequently used elements are repeated three or four times, and elements of lesser utility may not be repeated at all. The first repetition should normally occur within a day of first presentation, followed by a gradually decreasing frequency. Exercises and review sections are ideally contributing to a designed repetition pattern.
The rule of frameworks means maintain a consistent structure. The text can best aid understanding by making this framework visible early on.
The rule of meaningful names means create and use consistent titles and terminologies. The names are critical to the ability to recall or retrieve the things we know and remember.
The rule of manageable numbers means limit the amount of new information introduced at one time.
Rule of hierarchy means new knowledge builds on learned knowledge. The student needs to understand the foundational knowledge before being introduced to a new concept. When new concepts are introduced the should be explicitly connected to the foundational material.
The rule of repetition means repeat important concepts. There is a pattern of repetition that aids in promoting the elements of a subject from short-term to long-term memory.
Quick Guide: Accessibility & Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) — Adapted with minor edits from BCcampus & Lauri Aesoph
One of the basic premises of open education is access. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) believes:
…that universal access to high quality education is key to the building of peace, sustainable social and economic development, and intercultural dialogue. Open Educational Resources (OER) provide a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of education as well as facilitate policy dialogue, knowledge sharing and capacity building.
Access in this context refers to the ability for students, instructors, and others to obtain access to education. Releasing textbooks and other educational resources with open-copyright licenses is a big step toward removing barriers, as it makes these materials free of cost and free to use, distribute, and change. But there is more that goes into accessing a resource than it just being free and online.
For a textbook to be truly accessible, people of all abilities need to be able to access the content. This means designing a textbook that accommodates people with diverse learning styles and ensuring the content can be accessed by all, regardless of disability. It also means creating materials that include diverse viewpoints and voices. As you plan your textbook, contemplate how to design it so it is accessible, diverse, and inclusive.
As an open textbook author and publisher, it’s important to consider the social-justice side of open education. Listed below are some of the barriers students face during their education, as well as some solutions and examples.
Reducing Barriers to Access
Barrier Type
Challenge
Solution
Example
Physical Impairments
Low vision or blindness
Use alternative text (alt-text) to describe an image’s content or function that can be read by a screen reader.
In the context of writing an open textbook, equity, diversity, and inclusion means centering a wide range of perspectives in your textbook. This can help ensure that more readers identify with and relate to the material. Some benefits are:
Engaging more students because they recognize themselves or their life experiences in the material
Appealing to instructors in a variety of educational settings
Creating a more interesting reading and learning experience
Whether intentional or not, ethnocentrism — “a tendency to view alien groups or cultures from the perspective of one’s own” — can creep into the content and presentation of a textbook, and it is something all authors should be aware of. This doesn’t mean you must write a book that fits every culture and perspective, only that you are respectful.
Once your book is published, if instructors from another country and culture want to use your work, they may customize it for their classroom needs. The changes made might include:
Translating the book into a different language
Adjusting the content to meet the local cultural, regional, and geographical needs
Revising the material for a different learning environment
During production, it’s a good idea to have — in addition to a copy editor — someone who oversees the layout, formatting, and correct treatment of the various elements of your book.
This is your fixer.
A good fixer can be invaluable. Through experience, we learned they should be an individual with a keen eye for detail, have the ability to accurately match the exceptions noted on the style sheet against the textbook, be willing to review each chapter and section of your book repeatedly, and be able to distinguish between errors they should correct as part of their job and problems that require input from the author or project lead.
A fixer can also help add elements to the textbook, such as learning-objective textboxes and attribution statements.
Lastly, you and your fixer will learn as you go. The fixer will be spending a lot of time with the textbook, and because of this, they can offer many helpful suggestions about what’s working, what isn’t, and where the problems are.
Fixer tasks
Before they begin, create a detailed job description for the fixer or fixers so it’s clear what’s expected. Keep a running “fix list” to record both anticipated and discovered errors and inconsistencies, and note details regarding each correction, including what was fixed, the date completed, and who did the job (if there is more one person involved).
The fixer does not copy edit. However, if the fixer notices problems with the language — such as grammar, unclear text, repetitive phrases — they can report these to the copy editor or author.
Typical fixer tasks might include:
Auditing external resources (images, videos, audio clips) to ensure they meet licensing requirements
Ensuring that all images, videos, and other external resources added are correctly attributed. The fixer can also be assigned to adding attribution statements. (See Resources: Captions and Attributions.)
Making sure that figures and tables are correctly captioned, numbered, and referenced in the text
Comparing key terms highlighted in the textbook against the glossary
Confirming that links works
Reviewing the citation style of in-text references or footnotes and the reference list
Checking the heading styles are correct
Depending on the country in which a textbook is published, the fixer might be instructed to:
change measurements (e.g., from imperial to metric)
ensure region-appropriate spelling is used.
Quiz: Benefits & Best Practices of OER Enabled Pedagogy
Workshops & Faculty Development Resources
This section offers links and materials related to Open Pedagogy and OER workshops and faculty development resources. First, we provide a series of useful quick links compiled by Open Educator Rajiv Jhangiani. Then we include an outline and links for the SPARC* Open Education Leadership Curriculum. Finally, we offer an introduction to the OEPS Course, which will be provided in the next section.
SPARC* unique curriculum blends online, peer-to-peer, and project-based learning opportunities to develop participants into subject matter experts with the practical know-how to advance open education initiatives on campus.
Curriculum
Program Outcomes
Gain a comprehensive understanding of how to approach the discovery, creation, adoption, licensing, and stewardship of open educational resources and how this connects to open pedagogy.
Develop skills to define, communicate, and advocate for open education to a wide variety of stakeholder audiences.
Learn how to assess local needs and barriers relating to open education, and design an initiative to address them.
Gain practical experience planning, implementing, and assessing an open education project that both has an impact locally and contributes back to the community.
Develop as a leader through personalized feedback, mentorship, and peer-to-peer support.
Build a network within the open education community, both through a cohort of peers and access to leading experts in the field.
Intensive Online Course
The first step of the program is an intensive online course facilitated by an instructor. The course is structured into weekly modules, with each module addressing a different theme.
Here is a list of resources that will provide you and your campus a place to begin in discovering OER. Some may be familiar, other may not be (and feel free to explore them, as each name will be linked to the source):
Large Repositories: The “big three” large repositories of OER material are below.
OER Commons: Supported in part by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, ISKME, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education.
OpenStax CNX: A large collection of CC BY licensed OER supported by Rice University.
MERLOT: Led by California State University, along with 23 other universities and institutional partners that support the operation of this repository.
Institution-Based Collections: Below is a set of collections that contain either a selected set of resources, or resources created through a specific project. All are housed at institutions of higher education.
Open Textbook Network: Curated catalog of open textbooks with faculty reviews housed by the University of Minnesota.
OpenStax: Non-profit open textbook publishing company housed at Rice University that offers optional add-ons from outside partners.
Open SUNY: Textbooks developed by the SUNY system.
Other Collections: Below are a set of OER collections created or curated by other entities, including the private sector.
Lumen Learning: Includes course shells created by Lumen.
Boundless: Includes texts broken into chapters and modules, so that part or a whole chapter or book can be incorporated into a course.
Saylor: Sponsored by the Saylor Academy, this site takes you to the textbooks they sponsor, although they also have online courses and other open material.
In addition, check out the following places:
SPARC’s Libraries and OER Forum: Join and receive up-to-date information on Open Access and Open Education resources that you can pass on to your faculty.
OEPS 1.0 Course — Opening Educational Practices in Scotland & The Open University
This course, which was produced as part of the Opening Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS) project is aimed at anyone who is curious about how ‘free’ and ‘open’ might change our approach to teaching and learning and has been designed for administrators, educators and facilitators in all sectors. It asks you to consider a range of questions. For example, how do I find open resources and what benefits might they bring? Does openness change our relationship to the content I create, the people I create content for, others with whom I share the material, and our own everyday practice and context? And if so, what impact, if any, does openness have on these practices and relationships?
This course is divided into five sections, each with an accompanying ‘If you want to know more …’ section, which thematically presents supplementary material and resources on the topics for that section. You can use the course in any way that you choose.
The course begins with the basics of open educational practices (OEP) and open educational resources (OER). Section one of the course explores what ‘open’ means and what open practices and resources are. It also introduces the concept of an ‘open license’ and what this means. Section two focuses on developing earlier discussions of open educational resources (OER) and explores why one might want to use OER or incorporate more open practices, both as individuals and at an institutional level. In addition, the course looks at the importance of developing both your own, and learners’, digital literacy.
Sections three and four of the course focus on the practicalities of using OER. Section three looks at using OER, where to find open resources, what factors might influence your resource choice, how to attribute a resource and introduces the idea of curation. Building on the introduction to using OER in section three, section four focuses on remixing open resources, what you will need to consider when you create OER, how to share your resources and how to choose the most appropriate license for your context.
The final section of the course focuses on the importance of measuring the impact of what you create and explores a range of other practices you might want to consider. It also offers a range of different suggestions for ideas you might want to try before encouraging you to build on your work so far in the course to consider where you want to go next in your ‘open’ journey!