Active vs. Passive Learners: Involving Students in Open Pedagogy

Originally published in the Learning and Teaching weekly newsletter (internal publication) at Saskatchewan Polytechnic. 

Are you faced with disposable assignments that fail to engage students and are equally boring for you to mark? Perhaps you are frustrated with the number of cases of academic misconduct in your class, as the assignment can easily be found online. Not to mention that the course textbooks are expensive, dated and do not provide the local context.

Open Pedagogy provides a solution to all of these issues. Open pedagogy is defined as the “use of open educational resources (OER) to support learning, or the open sharing of teaching practices with a goal of improving education and training at the institutional, professional, and individual level” (BCcampus, n.d., para. 1). But what does that really mean and how can you incorporate this activity into your classroom? A common example of open pedagogy transforms the major course assignment, tasking each student with researching and writing a portion of a larger text, website, or other open option. A professor in the College of Education at the U of S did just that, asking students to “contribute[ ] to the creation of an open textbook based on their experiences as teachers of English as an additional language” (University of Saskatchewan, n.d., para. 8). The opening page of the work details the assignment, and the collection editor notes that the work expands the resources that are available to teachers in EAL programs (Prokopchuk, 2019) not only in Saskatchewan, but also across the globe. This resource has been licenced with CC BY, which encourages further modification, adaption, and adoption by others. Technically the same assignment, but the students have become contributors to the field of knowledge, and this resource is made available for others to learn from and use.

You may ask yourself, well what about next year? Because your resource has been openly shared, it can continually be updated in each subsequent iteration of the course. Open pedagogy has the potential to increase student engagement, as students feel a sense of responsibility over the quality of the work as it will be made publicly available. This type of project increases student investment and provides them with real-world experience. Another advantage of open pedagogy was noted by Baran and AlZoubi (2020) whose analysis “revealed that awareness of ethical issues included student understanding about copyrighting, reliability/credibility, and integrity of available open resources” (p. 239). Learning to use and present information ethically is an important part of digital literacy, as well as academic integrity. Jhangiani and DeRosa (n.d.) emphasize that open pedagogy shifts the role of the students from mere passive consumers to active contributors of knowledge where teachers and students are active and equal participants in the learning process.

References and Suggested Further Reading

Baran, E., & AlZoubi, D. (2020). Affordances, challenges, and impact of open pedagogy: Examining students’ voices. Distance Education, 41(2), 230-244. https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2020.1757409

BCcampus. (n.d.). What is open pedagogy? [Blog entry]. https://open.bccampus.ca/what-is-open-education/what-is-open-pedagogy/

Jhangiani, R., & DeRosa, R. (n.d.). Open pedagogy [Blog entry]. Open Pedagogy Notebook. http://openpedagogy.org/open-pedagogy/

Prokopchuk, N. (2019). Sharing our knowledge: Best practices for supporting English language learners in schools. https://openpress.usask.ca/ealbestpractices/ [CC BY]

Teaching and Learning. (n.d.). Open pedagogy. University of Saskatchewan. https://teaching.usask.ca/curriculum/open-pedagogy.php#OpenPedagogyandOurLearningCharter

 

We're Open!

Originally published in the Learning and Teaching weekly newsletter (internal publication) at Saskatchewan Polytechnic. 

You may have heard the terms open access, open scholarship, open education resources, and open pedagogy – but what does ‘open’ mean? The “concept of openness is based on the idea that knowledge should be disseminated and shared freely through the internet for the benefit of society as a whole” (Panda & Santosh, 2017, p. 90). Under the open umbrella, there is a growing community in higher education that produces, creates, uses, disseminates, adapts, and modifies materials that are made freely available to anyone, anywhere, and at any time. These materials are typically licenced using a Creative Commons (CC) option, freeing the resource from many of the traditional copyright restrictions. Therefore, open access materials remove price and permissions barriers and are largely free of restrictions on re-use​ (Suber, 2015). CC licenses allow you to use content if you provide attribution and, depending on the licence, abide by one of the other stipulations, such as non-commercial use.

Modification and use of materials are one aspect of open. However, what happens when there is a lack of resources in your discipline, or what is available is not applicable in the local context? Many faculty members choose to create their own resources, such as learning objects, textbooks, or open courses. If the thought of creating a whole textbook is overwhelming, consider creating an assessment where you work with the students to develop the resource, thus incorporating the principles of open directly into your teaching practice. Open pedagogy “is the use of open educational resources (OER) to support learning, or the open sharing of teaching practices with a goal of improving education and training at the institutional, professional, and individual level” (BCcampus, n.d., para. 1). Examples include a course assignment that tasks each student with researching and writing a portion of a larger text, website, or another open option. That resource is then openly shared and may be updated in the next iteration of the course. Open pedagogy has the potential to increase engagement, as students are responsible for a publicly available final product. This type of project increases student investment and provides them with real-world experience. Jhangiani and DeRosa (n.d.) emphasize that open pedagogy shifts the role of the students from mere passive consumers to active contributors of knowledge where teachers and students are active and equal participants in the learning process.

References and Suggested Further Reading

BCcampus. (n.d.). What is open pedagogy? [Blog entry]. https://open.bccampus.ca/what-is-open-education/what-is-open-pedagogy/

Creative Commons. (n.d.). About CC licenses. https://creativecommons.org/about/cclicenses/

Jhangiani, R., & DeRosa, R. (n.d.). Open pedagogy [Blog entry]. Open Pedagogy Notebook. http://openpedagogy.org/open-pedagogy/

Panda, S., & Santosh, S. (2017). Faculty perception of openness and attitude to open sharing at the Indian National Open University. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 18(7), 89-111.​

Suber, P. (2015, December 5). Open access overview: Focusing on open ​access to peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints [Blog entry]. http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm  ​

Sharing is Caring!

I reviewed the YouTube video 'OER Discoverability and Sharing', presented by Erin Fields (CARL).  Erin began this discussion by stating that there is no 'one size fits all' solution as discoverability can be problematic.  There are many systems and many tools, with several aggregators and various repositories.

In order to make an item open to the largest possible audience, you must consider accessibility, inclusivity, file format, as well as the licence assigned to the item.  You can help to make items truly open by: describing visuals, transcribing videos, describing hyperlinks, making text readable, and finally structuring the page using headings and other style conventions.

Other design considerations include making sure that the individual can edit the file, and that they will not require special software (i.e.: Adobe) to work with the item.  Open file formats include: HTML, ODF, RTF, SVG, PNG and CSV.  PDF can be open, if you use that text format that allows for OCR. 

When sharing items, it is important to have a standardized metadata which will allow for discovery on repositories and aggregators, and in turn allows for the creator to collect impact metrics.  Include: source type, author, title, date, URL, subjects, abstract, duration/length, audience, and copyright or licence information.  If you wish to archive your item, WikiMedia is a good choice, for archiving and aggregating, OER Commons, Open Textbook Library is an aggregator of resources and MASON OER Finder is an aggregator of repositories.  So many choices and so many decisions that need to be made before you even begin creating your OER project.

Collecting metrics are useful for grant applications, promotion and merit (universities), and for your personal records.  You can review views/downloads/saves as well as ratings of your project - dependent on what tool you use.

As for marketing and promotion: share news through your institution and professional associations, along with your personal social media channels.  Consider looking for relevant hashtags, and promote on academic social media channels as well.

Further resources:
https://open.ubc.ca/access/toolkits-access/oer-accessibility-toolkit/ - OER accessibility toolkit
http://guides.library.ubc.ca/open-education/sharing - Sharing your repository

Cascadia Open Education Summit

I attended the Cascadia Open Education Summit in Vancouver, BC on April 17-18.  For more information about the conference, you may wish to refer to https://bccampus.ca/event/cascadia-open-education-summit/.

All notes included below are my own from the presentations that I attended.  Wherever possible credit to the presenter is given in the text of the post.

Sustainability

Strategies for Scaling and Sustaining OER Initiatives

Building Awareness and Enthusiasm

Using Lumen’s Playbook for getting folks excited about OER found at: https://lumenlearning.com/champion-playbook/.  

Elevator pitch - can you explain to your grandmother what you do for a living?  If she understands, than you have a successful pitch.  Your pitch should be different depending on your audience, i.e.: students, faculty, administration

Ask the royalty question - are you writing the textbook for the royalties or are is your goal in writing a textbook to help students.  Making that textbook open will have the greatest impact on students

“Open is for faculty and free is for students”

Who is using OER? survey the bookstore, mine the syllabi, ask department administration, library (copyright office may collect that data), students

Measure impact to build enthusiasm - build enthusiasm to measure impact

Track long term - make sure to collect statistics from the beginning and more stats than you think that you will need.

Change conversation from money to impact

Calls to Action:

• Contact new faculty - ask how I can help solve your problems and get you some money?
• Reporting back - use a framework for consistency and ease of measure
• 5 steps for course curation - consider what you are trying to accomplish, take a step back
• Include students in panel - but do not prep them on what to say, feed them first, help them relax because they may be very nervous, share only what they are comfortable with, don’t share professors names if it is a bad experience
• Talk to your student union

Student Success

What We Learned: Faculty Motivation, Perceptions, Usage and Institutional Support of OER Correlated with Student Success Data

Presented by: Jaquelyn Ray and Jennifer Lantrip

Create a culture of OER in all areas of the campus.  Ask yourself is it in our marketing materials, are we talking it up to students and faculty any chance that we can?

Pathway to equity and to the community.  OER promotes inclusive, active and connected classrooms, while reducing the consumer/commodity nature of traditional teaching.  Open pedagogy is participant based learning.

Faculty who received assistance (library, Instructional Designers, Faculty Trainers, Teaching and Learning departments, etc.) were the most likely to change their teaching.

Key Takeaway: 

• Students recognized that they wanted to be more information literate because their instructor was modeling this behaviour (i.e.: shared their sources, crediting the materials correctly).  
• Students felt that their instructor cared about them, because they were concerned about the cost of textbooks, etc.

Collaborative Approaches to Open Learning Resources Development

Presented by Lin Brander and Rosario Passos

Many partners from different departments, joined in a lunch meeting to discuss key questions and develop an online resource that would be open.  

Engage the targeted community so that those individuals would drive the process, and help create the curriculum directions.  The work was based on the foundation of Kory Wilson’s work, and the fact that her content has a CC license.

Copyright and IA issues - what does it mean to be open, and can you legally make the content open?

You also need to consider using open tools.  If the tool is not open (i.e.: PDF) then it doesn’t support the parametres of open.

Very rewarding to create an open resource that can be built on and is a part of a larger open project (Kory Wilson’s work) that can be found here: https://open.bccampus.ca/browse-our-collection/find-open-textbooks/?uuid=7f5188da-50f7-4085-b97d-408e53eade17&contributor=&keyword=&subject=

Used their grant to fund external voices who worked on the project.

#AdultEd #ZedCred

#ZedCredAhead! No Tuition & No Textbook Costs - the BC Basic Adult Education Zed Cred 

Presenters: Krista Lambert, Andrew Candela, and Mary Shier

The ABE is for adult learners who are upgrading students with the goal of completing high school or enrolling in a vocational or academic program.  There is a tuition-free policy for domestic students attending this program in BC.  They received additional funding to ensure that the textbooks would be also free for students.  Initially the textbook funds concentrated on the required courses for graduation (English, Math and 3 electives).

Program effected by the constant crisis of changing governments and their support/non-support of these programs and their intermittent failure to question/consider the impact that their decisions have on the educators and students in these programs.

Flexible methods of teaching and working with students as programs work around life and employment to ensure student success.  Courses are self-paced and there is a bi-monthly intake of students.

OER can mean that instructors are not compiling and monitoring textbooks on their own.  Mary Shier mentioned that her and her colleague collected textbooks (multiple titles, used textbooks), so that students can borrow from directly from the instructors.

If we offer online textbooks, we cannot forget that not all students will be able to use technology in the same way and they might not have access to equipment or Internet access in the same way + accommodations (speech readers for example) + materials may need to be translated.  Print copies or alternatives still need to be available for some students.

K12 could be using these materials - huge untapped market of potential users of OER.

Accessible and Equitable

Dr. Karen Cangialosi

Keynote speaker in the afternoon

Make the world right through positive transformations.  Questioned if OER be that transition for education.  OER is about students and about learning. 

She will not apologize for calling out publishers (earlier comment).  Educators need to continually criticize the publishers who charge students for textbooks way above the rate of inflation.

Protocols.io - what scientists are doing, compiles their methods and notebooks, making science open

OERs are digital, multimedia, downloadable, adaptable, current, public, openly licensed, free

Open pedagogy focuses on the process, not the product.  Students can do most of their learning in that process - and they can also be the creators of the content.  If it is not perfect, than next semester’s group can fix it!  She emphasized community and collaboration over the content and the connection to the wider public.  Learner contribute to the knowledge of the field, and are not just consumers of knowledge.  This provides students with agency, courses are learner driven, and the materials are available when and where they want to learn the content.  The open movement is about access, as well as sharing, creation, participation.  None of this is possible however if you do not have access to food, childcare, or transportation.  

• Student create content in open pedagogy, but they can also be the editors on the projects. 
• When students can see what others are creating, the element of competition enters in.  They want to do a good job in front of their peers.  From picking topics for essays, to completed assignments.  Peer review
• Audience can go beyond the instructor, students can connect directly with the public
• Being out there, sharing information with the public, can impact thought.  The wider audience can be a scary thing
• Hypothes.is - web annotation for community collaboration of a peer-reviewed article
• Wikipedia Edits, etc. When you correct, edit and update content, you add value for the next person that reads it
• Students not just going on the web, but constructing it
• Social media is a tool like anything else, you need to keep practising.  A hammer can be used to break a windshield, but it can also be used to build a house.  Broadens the community for students, adding perspectives from across the world

Dr. Cangialosi recommends the book 'Why They Can’t Write' by John Warner which looks at the issue of education when we put greater value on achievement than on learning.

Final Thoughts: 

• Accessible and equitable? Open to whom?
• Keep the real life circumstances of our students at the forefront of your thoughts, take steps to help remedy further financial burdens
• Provide transformational not just transactional experiences for our students
• Students become agents of social agents

“Optimism is a discipline, not an emotion” 

Kate Bowles

Educational Mandate: the How and the What

Scaling up OER: Creating a Sustainable Program at a Polytechnic Institution

Jessica Norman

At SAIT, OER is part of the education plan in the institutional mandate, specifically on pg. 17.  When the policy supports the actual work, the basic questions of how that work is actually going to happen, is provided by the specific information within the documentation.  Individuals have a clear directive

At SAIT, as at other polytechnics across the country, the IP is owned by the institution.  When this occurs, the issues around ownership are not the same as they are at a university.  When the institution states that they support OER in policy and practice, you can go from saying no, to saying yes!

Once policy in place, a strategic plan helps to provide the larger framework, answers ‘how’ this happens.  We need to remember however, that open does not equal free and the documentation needs to assign $$ to this work in order to maintain sustainability for this project (time to create resource, technology required, maintenance, etc.).  Infrastructure is required for things like an institutional repository.

Lessons Learned:

• Start with high enrollment courses
• Start with schools with existing OERs
• Start an advisory committee, include students
• Add OER language to things that folks are already doing
• Roadshows and listening tours
• Start tracking statistics immediately, and collect more than you think you will need

Let's Work Together!

Open Educational Resources as a Campus Initiative

Panel presentation by Katie Dawson, Joshua Stockley and Will Rogers. 

To get buy-in on campus, you need to engage faculty.  The presenters started with the faculty professional development department, through a learning community.  The community met monthly and represented by 10 different academic disciplines at difference levels in their career.  Early findings indicated that many of these individuals were using OER but didn’t realize what it was or what that meant.

The presenters had moderate goals for the year.  In first semester, in one lesson in one course, use an open resource.  In second semester use OER in one course.  The final responsibility for the year was to create a professional development activity for your peers.

Joshua Stockley:

So what is it and what did it look like? Pretty much anything that you can find that is open access.  It is not just an open, free textbook.  Really anything that students do not have to pay for - open access, but also library resources.

Takeaways: 

• We need to do better for our financially distressed students
• Some disciplines are further along than others
• Cost, interactivity, format (tablet, phone, etc., mobile students) but still has pedagogical value
• Sense of community, share experiences from different perspectives
• What works online, is different than what works F2F - we have to cognizant of that

Will Rogers

Works in the digital humanities where there is already a reliance on online materials because there is no access to the original manuscripts.  He teaches Medieval Literature.

Many of his students are a car battery away from dropping out of university (in other words, the item that makes or breaks their financial planning)

When teaching educators (Department of Education, future teachers), or even other leaders, they can take the resource with them and use it in their future career, or use it to educate others.  He has students create a binder of resources throughout the semester.  He uses experimental learning, not just reading the textbook.  For example: look at this resource and come in and talk about what you discovered.  Where there errors in the text?  Did another scholar refute or support this text?  Students can help teach the concepts to their peers in class.  Opens up more information and resources than the instructor would be able to work with in class.

Key Takeaway: Teach less, but more deeply, students will be invested

From what they are seeing , if students can easily use what they have in front of them, then their grades will improve.  Generally students do not have the inclination to purchase textbooks, so they will go elsewhere.  Course work and materials should be seamless and easy.

Other options for faculty incentives: 

• Course release if creating a text
• Connect faculty with communities across the country - collaboration opportunities, network opportunity
• Libraries can be the pinnacle of change on campus - create a hub for learning, discussion and collaboration on campus

All it takes is to start with a blanket email, and then targeted follow up, and finally a directive discussion with a small group of OER leaders.

Be Tenacious!

Heather Ross from the University of Saskatchewan gave the opening keynote address at the Cascadia Open Education Forum.

Her conversation about OER started with Max Fineday, who was the USSU President for 2 years, and the issue of costly textbooks was part of his election platform. The U of S refers to their MOOCs as TOOCs or truly open online course, open, creative commons license, no registration required, keep content. Seems fitting, as it is always cold in Saskatchewan.

Heather advised the audience to get out there, talk to people in line, and be always selling the idea of open textbooks. Further, look for opportunities where you collaborate with others who are doing similar work either on your campus or with other institutions. Find and then celebrate those champions.

Money from province used to create textbooks, raise awareness and promote OER, as well as to create ancillary resources (test banks, online modules, software, teaching materials). Money goes to fund the graduate students who assist in the OER projects on campus.

Heather second piece of advice - feed people. People will come for food! Host lunches, celebrate the champions and build the community. At the U of S, the OER supports are the Gwenna Moss Centre, Instructional Designers, Bookstore (Print on Demand service, link to services of OER), USSU, Library and Media Production. Print on Demand is run by the students union, so all profit goes back to the students. This service prints OER digital items for students that would prefer a print copy. 

Educate students about the issues. They can also be your champions, but as others mentioned at the conference, once you get a good group of students they graduate.

Celebrate open textbooks through book launches. Each time a book is published, throw a party!

Lessons Learned: 

• Listen to others in the game - get instructional designers involved, treat OER like distance classes 
• Requirement of a letter of support from the department head, support the actual adoption of the OER in the course/department before they receive funding
• Funding at the beginning, and after showing partial project examples, and thorough report detailing process 
• Technology is a friend and a foe 
• Put OER on syllabus, students will be drawn to your course 

Challenges:  

• Need to discuss homework systems, which will be our next battle with publishers. Pedagogy (students can write the textbooks - ESL written by Education students for example), OER repository, major adoptions 
• Need to talk about failures: projects take too long; copyright issues with content that faculty were sharing with their students and then trying to make it open; books that are not successfully adopted, or the champion leaves the department; students didn’t realize that there was a book because there was nothing to buy at the bookstore; we need to feel that we can fail 
• Time is always the greatest barrier - faculty are always asked to do more with less; hard to dedicate the time to a new initiative 
• Look for individual champions if you are not able to entice a whole department 
• Sometimes you have to wait for retirements (RIP – retired in place) 
• The publishers are not playing fair with our students, nor is access copyright playing with educational institutions 
• This movement is about open, but more importantly, it is about student success. As educators, we do whatever we can to ensure student success!

My OER reading list

Tasked with discovering more about OER, as a librarian I obviously started by consulting the research literature.  Here are some of the wonderful articles that I discovered in my search. 

Abramovich, S., & McBride, M. (2018). Open education resources and perceptions of financial value. The Internet and Higher Education, 39, 33-38.

Anderson, T. (2013). Open access scholarly publications as OER. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 14(2), 81-95.

Hegarty, B. (2015). Attributes of open pedagogy: A model for using open educational resources. Educational Technology, 3-13.

Ives, C., & Pringle, M. M. (2013). Moving to open educational resources at Athabasca University: A case study. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 14(2), 1-13.

Panda, S., & Santosh, S. (2017). Faculty perception of openness and attitude to open sharing at the Indian National Open University. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(7), 89-111.

Soria, K. M., Nackerud, S., & Peterson, K. (2015). Socioeconomic indicators associated with first-year college students' use of academic libraries. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 41(5), 636-643.

Watson, C. E., Domizi, D. P., & Clouser, S. A. (2017). Student and faculty perceptions of OpenStax in high enrollment courses. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(5), 287-304.