For the final week of Open Learning ’18, we’ll be thinking together about the premise underlying both iterations of this learning experience: open faculty development in higher education offers a vital, unique, and uniquely effective opportunity for shared learning in the digital age.
That premise can be contested of course. For that matter, each of the claims and terms in that final clause above can be contested. Each can also be celebrated, complicated, and analyzed. So let’s get these parties started!
MONDAY and TUESDAY, March 26-27: Let’s get meta! Annotating openlearninghub.net
Using Hypothes.is completely in the open (the “Public” setting), annotate the central site for Open Learning ’18 and ’17: openlearninghub,net. Comment on anything and everything you want. This is a wide-open invitation to let your fellow learners know what’s worked well for you, what’s most valuable in the resources each iteration has developed, and of course where things have fallen short–for whatever reason.
If you’re not sure where to start, just click on one of the weeks in the syllabus, and annotate any or the week’s activities with your thoughts about that activity.
WEDNESDAY, March 28: Is Faculty Development Possible? Is Faculty Development Desirable? A Twitter Chat.
Join Gardner Campbell for a Twitter chat at noon EDT to consider the provocative and only partially tongue-in-cheek questions of whether faculty development is possible or desirable in higher education. Bring your links for examples of successes and failures. And if you want to get truly recursive, link to annotations on openlearninghub.net, a site that represents not only faculty development but also, and importantly, a conversation about that very topic. As always, use the hashtag #openlearning18 to participate in the conversation.
THURSDAY, MARCH 29: Blog, ye hearties!
Let’s all publish one blog post on this day, on the topic of faculty development. Posts on the idea or practice or experience of open faculty development are particularly welcome. Let’s see if we can get a little blog-rally going. Tag your post #openlearning18–and if you’re not already part of openlearninghub.net, be sure to tweet out your URL with #openlearning18, or just email the link to Gardner (gardnercampbell AT gmail.com) and he’ll post it to the site.
FRIDAY, MARCH 30: Special Event TBA
Can you contain your anticipation? Bate your breath? Watch this space!
Post by hub director and Week 7 director Gardner Campbell
Your facilitator this week is Amy Nelson (Virginia Tech) in collaboration with the Open Education group and Open Education Week at the Virginia Tech Libraries.
A quick review as we approach the conclusion of “#openlearning18: We have talked about “fifty shades of open” and considered the affordances and characteristics of the internet and the World Wide Web, the significance of information literacy, and the role of Open Access and OER in keeping knowledge public. This week we will pull from all of these areas to think through the powerful implications of open pedagogies.
Some of our familiar activities will remain: We will read and annotate on Hypothes.is and stay in touch on Twitter throughout the week. But the focus will shift a bit, as the “make” for this week is to create and / or share a piece of Open Pedagogy. So, learning by doing, modeling a mode of engagement, working together and independently, playing around with ideas and tools, and then sharing it out in the OPEN — these integrated, recursive practices should help us explore and articulate our praxis in open pedagogy.
Non-Disposable Assignment for this week: Share a critically engaged, innovative, disruptive (or already proven effective) example of Open Pedagogy. This could be an exercise, or an artifact, or a guided, collaborative reading of a text, image, film, song, etc.
Sunday (3/18): What is Open Pedagogy?
Robin de Rosa (@actualham) : “I think it’s a connected learning piece. It’s a critical digital pedagogy piece. It’s an access piece. You roll those together and you get open pedagogy.”
Taking a transparent, public or open approach to one’s work as an instructor or academic can be daunting for even the most competent and skilled faculty. Faculty, students, and a librarian from five different Virginia institutions of higher education are involved in working in the open — in their teaching, publishing, creating with students, and/or building or leveraging learning experiences. Panelists will discuss their motivations, opportunities leveraged, and challenges they encounter in taking non-traditional and open approaches to teaching, learning, and publishing.
Panelists
Kathryn Murphy-Judy, Virginia Commonwealth University @kmurphyj
Jennifer Kidd, Old Dominion University @jenniferjkidd
Matthew DeCarlo, Radford University
Susan Erickson, Virginia Wesleyan University, Associate Hub-Director #openlearning18 @SueErickson10
Amy Nelson, Virginia Tech, Steering Committee Member, #openlearning18 @purling4peas
Open Education practices (OEP) have emerged as a transformational force in higher education. Whereas, higher education promises to be an instrument for economic and social mobility, in reality our institutions reinforce existing inequalities: Achievement, engagement, and persistence are closely tied to affordability. Our claim to be student-centered is likewise hypocritical as faculty pressures, accreditation requirements, and budgetary constraints influence or dictate the structure and content of learning experiences.
Open Educational practices support teaching, learning, and publication in an increasingly diverse faculty and student body. OEP encompass the creation, adaptation, and adoption of open educational resources, open course development, and even the design of renewable, real-world assignments where students are empowered as co-creators of knowledge. These practices leverage learning beyond socio-economic disparities and put engaged, active student (and faculty) learning at the center. These practices champion academic freedom, pedagogical innovation, applied approaches, and innovation. OEP represents learner-centered and learning-together approaches to education that radically enhance both agency and access.
This presentation will draw on a diverse set of examples to make a case for why the shift away from traditional (closed) practices is not only desirable but also inevitable, and how OEP support the modern university’s mission by serving academic achievement, faculty and student engagement, diversity & inclusion, pedagogical innovation, and the university’s Land-grant mission.
Tuesday (3/20):Practical ideas for Open Pedagogies
1:00-2:00 Twitter Chat with Dr. Jhangiani and Anita Walz
Wednesday (3/21): Open and Critical
“Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of information.”
— Paulo Freire
The legacy of Critical Pedagogy and educators such as Paulo Freire and bell hooks informs many key tenets of Open Pedagogy. When we talk about education as a public good, when we commit to making our learning spaces as accessible and inclusive as possible, and when we use OEP to empower students to transform their world, we are engaging in the practices of Critical Pedagogy.
Today’s readings take on two aspects of critical pedagogy that connect to openlearning18. The article by John Pell and William Duffy asks us to think about how we can use Freire’s work on literacy to cultivate civil discourse (and reminds us of the importance of that endeavor). My interview with Shelli Fowler explores the conceptual underpinnings of a professional development course on Contemporary Pedagogy for future faculty. Shelli developed this course, and I modified it and have been teaching in in the open since 2015. Modules on inclusive pedagogy and critical pedagogy provide the foundation for a course offers both a theoretical exploration of learner-centered, technology-enhanced learning and the scaffolding to develop a teaching portfolio.
AND: A small sampling of things that have resonated with our work on Open Pedagogy authored by people not taking part in the cMOOC. Also check out the references in Jhangiani and DeRosa’s chapter assigned for Monday.
OER, which is an acronym for Open Educational Resources, seems like a no-brainer to me. In my 30+ year career teaching Principles of Economics, I have used a variety of books, including traditional commercial textbooks, books written on economic subjects for lay audiences (in lieu of a standard textbook), and no text book at all. I’ve concluded that most intro books are pretty much the same, and that any experienced instructor can teach effectively using pretty much any intro text. Why then should we ask our students to use commercial textbooks that cost $75, $175 or $375, when there are free or very inexpensive alternatives available? Yes it takes some time and effort to adopt and transition to using a new text. I don’t discount this, but as professionals don’t we have an obligation to do that if we think it would be better for our students?
Over the last few years, I’ve adopted OER for my intro courses. Before we go further, let’s get a few myths out of the way. When I talk about OER this week, I’m not referring to class materials, bits of content, what used to be called learning objects. I mean open source, complete printed or digital texts usually edited and published by organizations with solid reputations.
For faculty who don’t have experience with OER, there are five key questions we will explore this week:
What is OER?
What are faculty and student perceptions of OER?
How good are open source textbooks?
Why adopt OER? Why start an OER initiative at your institution?
How to find OER in your discipline?
Monday: What is OER?
Open educational resources are much more than simply free resources. OER give students and teachers the following five rights:
Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)
It is because of these permissions, that OER are free.
While you may not yet fully understand the “5 Rs,” as David Wiley calls them, but understand this: they dramatically change the role of a textbook in a course (or at least they offer the potential for that).
How can we be sure that the quality is equal to that of traditional commercial textbooks? Are open source textbooks peer-reviewed? Do they go through a comparable quality control process?
Conversation with Rajiv Jhangiani, 2:00-3:00pm EDT via Zoom (link TBA) & submit questions via Twitter, hashtag #openlearning18.
Are you concerned about higher education access and affordability? Open textbooks can help ease the burden of textbook costs for students and provide faculty with high quality, customizable course content. Join us for a discussion of textbook costs, student success, and more.
Join In: Find an open textbook in your discipline (administrators too, please!) using the information above. Take a quick look at it and tell us what you think on Twitter. 3:00-4:00 pm EDT
Page by Steve Greenlaw, edited for Open Learning ’18 hub by hub director Gardner Campbell
Our plan for this week is to have participants explore issues around Open Access (OA) and share their motivations for participating in OA. With a variety of activities and platforms, we hope to facilitate learning from each other’s experiences and practices with open access and open scholarship. We will also explore particular issues around OA in a global context.
Sunday, March 4 & Monday March 5
Begin reading Peter Suber’s book Open Access, focusing mainly on chapter 1: What is Open Access? If you participated in OpenLearning17 and have already read chapter 1, feel free to move on to chapter 2.
We will be collectively annotating chapter 1 of Suber’s Open Access in Hypothes.is, but feel free to annotate other chapters that interest you throughout the week, and to blog your reflections.
The home page for Suber’s book, with updates and supplements, can be found at:
3-4pm EST (8-9pm UTC). Watchlink below. Contribute questions and comments during the hangout on Twitter: #openlearning18.
Google Hangout on Air across three continents and 5 countries with guests:
Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard University Office for Scholarly Communication, and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project (@PeterSuber),
Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou, International President of APSOHA, the Association for the Promotion of OpenScience in Haiti and Africa (@mboathomas) and
Ivonne Lujano Vilchis, DOAJ Ambassador, Latin America and works at Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México. (@ivonnelujano). There is space for 5 additional participants – if you would like to join the conversation on video, please tweet to @bali_maha or @SueErickson10 – or ask questions on Twitter via #OpenLearning18)
Read the guests’ work on Open Access here:
The home page for Suber’s book, with updates and supplements, can be found at:
(French) Le libre accès vu d’Afrique francophone subsaharienne – Florence Piron, Antonin Benoît Diouf, Marie Sophie Dibounje Madiba, Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou, Zoé Aubierge Ouangré, Djossè Roméo Tessy, Hamissou Rhissa Achaffert, Anderson Pierre and Zakari Lire (2017) (CC-BY-NC-SA)
You can find this article by Ivonne and Federico Vasin (Spanish – but try Google Translate): http://www.revistas.unam.mx/index.php/rmcpys/article/view/58652 “National classification systems for scientific journals in Latin America: recent trends and implications for academic evaluation in social science”
Sherpa Romeo is a great resource for learning about open access policies of subscription journals: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/index.php – do you have articles in subscription-based journals which can be made available via Green OA? If not, make them available and tweet them to #OpenLearning18
Friday, March 9
Write a blog post or make a meme about something new you learned about Open Access this week. Be sure to use the #openlearning18 hashtag.
Post by co-directors Sue Erickson and Maha Bali
Edited by hub director Gardner Campbell
Information literacy requires frameworks to support an ecology of nodes and connections. Photo by Timothy Vogel. CC license BY-NC 2.0
OpenLearning ‘18 – Information Literacy Week (Feb. 25-March 3)
This week focuses on information literacy and its relevance for open education. We will be immersed in the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and will approach it from a number of angles. A number of experts will join the conversation throughout the week.
Event: 2-3pm Google Hangout with Jenny Dale and others – the ACRL Framework Roadshow.
Activity: Blog about any of this week’s readings or activities. What are your takeaways from this week? How will you take your learning from this week into your work going forward?
Post by Sue Erickson, associate hub director
Edited by Gardner Campbell, hub director
Twitter TAGS Explorer for Open Learning ’17 and ’18. Affordance created by @mhawksey (Martin Hawksey, Open University)
It’s 2018. What could be more familiar than the Internet and the World Wide Web?
This week may yield some surprising answers to those questions–and those answers may help us better understand, and design, architectures of productive participation within our global, light-speed telecommunications environment.
We’ll be reading, annotating, and discussing two key essays this week. In addition to blogging and a Twitter chat, you’ll need to work with hypothes.is, the affordance with which we’ll annotate these essays together, in public, on the web. In short, we’ll be making a web of annotations across documents about the Internet and the Web, and that web of annotations becomes part of the very network it seeks to understand. As we say in the biz, “recursion FTW.”
The hypothes.is website has a great quick-start guide for you. And if you run into difficulties, don’t hesitate to tweet, blog, or even email a call for help. We’re all learning together here.
FRIDAY, February 23: Twitter chat, 3 PM EST, to discuss the Berners-Lee article. Blogging opportunity: What do you think are the most important things learners should know about the Internet and the World Wide Web? How might higher education address that need?
BONUS ROUND:
A conversation featuring two leaders of the Hypothes.is annotation project: Jeremy Dean, Director of Education, and Jon Udell, Director, Integration. We discuss Vannevar Bush’s classic essay “As We May Think,” liberal learning, and Hypothes.is’ goal of empowering a conversation around the world’s knowledge.
You don’t have to read the essay to enjoy the interview, though of course it couldn’t hurt. 🙂
Photo by robotpolisher: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lintbrush/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
This pre-cMOOC week, directed by Stephanie Blackmon, helps you prepare for Open Learning ’18 with learning opportunities around finding and building an openly networked public voice.
Day 2 (Feb. 6): Using Blogs, Twitter, and Hypothes.is to Participate in #openlearning18
Engagement in cMOOC #openlearning18
For those of you who participated in Open Learning ’17 and those of you who have participated in a similar faculty development experience, we hope that you will use Open Learning ’18 as an opportunity to take a deeper dive into the topic of open educational resources (OERs), expand your network around faculty development and open education, and help those who are new to the Open Learning experience build stronger connections around open education. For those of you who consider yourselves Open Learning environment novices, see the following helpful hints from Sue Erickson:
Twitter chat on various experiences with OERs (or what you would like to learn about OERs)
Note: Once you log on to Twitter, use the search box or your search filter (or click here) to find #openlearning18. Locating the hashtag will help you keep up with the Twitter chat and general Open Learning ’18 happenings! If it seems that you may be missing #openlearning18 tweets, just refresh your page.
Day 5 (Feb. 9): Blogging Opportunity
Blog Post on What You’re Looking Forward To in Open Learning ’18
Two guiding questions: What do you hope to get from Open Learning ’18? What do you hope to contribute to Open Learning ’18?
In this grand finale for Open Learning ’17, four members of the Virginia Faculty Collaboratives Steering Committee (Beverly Covington, Steve Greenlaw, Amy Nelson, and Gardner Campbell) discuss lessons learned as well as connections between Open Learning ’17 and the projects currently underway or planned in the other nine Faculty Collaboratives states. A little past the halfway mark, AAC&U Senior Scholar Susan Albertine, leader of the Faculty Collaboratives Initiative, joins the discussion and adds her perspective.
Click on the image below to watch the video:
Post by hub director Gardner Campbell. This video is a lightly edited version of the original live stream. Some technical difficulties and “dead air” were removed or smoothed over in the editing.
In the winter of 2013, a week before classes started, Dr. Amy Nelson tried a bold experiment in redesigning her classes for openly networked connected learning. In this conversation, you’ll hear why she decided to do so, and what she learned. These are stories of meaningful exchanges, faculty development, and the ongoing importance of liberal education in a democracy.
To hear Dr. Nelson’s conversation, please click on the image below.
Dr. Amy Nelson
For a detailed look at the course transformation Amy describes, don’t miss “Connected Learning & Integrative Thinking: Teaching History at Virginia Tech”:
OER, which is an acronym for Open Educational Resources, seems like a no-brainer to me. In my 30+ year career teaching Principles of Economics, I have used a variety of books, including traditional commercial textbooks, books written on economic subjects for lay audiences (in lieu of a standard textbook), and no text book at all. I’ve concluded that most intro books are pretty much the same, and that any experienced instructor can teach effectively using pretty much any intro text. Why then should we ask our students to use commercial textbooks that cost $75, $175 or $375, when there are free or very inexpensive alternatives available? Yes it takes some time and effort to adopt and transition to using a new text. I don’t discount this, but as professionals don’t we have an obligation to do that if we think it would be better for our students?
