Just as education cannot be reduced to learning materials alone, so open education is not focused on open educational resources alone. OEP (open educational practices) is a broad descriptor that includes the use of OER, but also open pedagogy and open sharing of teaching practices — all with the goal of improving access, enhancing learning, and empowering learners.
There are many forms of OEP that educators may use to open their curricula and their teaching. Following are just a few examples:
- Open connected courses enable students to connect with students and educators in other courses, institutions and countries, as well as interested learners who may not be enrolled in formal education (eg DS106, Equity Unbound, NetNarr)
- Open discussions in any course can be enabled through the use of course hashtags and/or open tools (eg via blogs, X (formally know as Twitter))
- Collaborative web annotation facilitates the open annotation of any web-based source text, thus engaging learners in co-construction and critique of knowledge (eg #AnnotatedSyllabus, Kalir, 2020)
- Co-creating open textbooks with students marks a move from teachers sourcing/using open textbooks to engaging students in this work, empowering all in co-creating knowledge (eg Student Created Open “Textbooks” as Course Communities, DeRosa, 2018, CC BY)
- Creating OER assignments is the process of designing assessments that ask students to produce OER that will be of interest and relevance to an audience beyond the bounds of the course/module (eg Digital Futures for Learning: An OER Assignment, Ross, 2019, CC BY)
- Student-created OER, as a form of OEP, supports students in creating open resources as part of the learning process, enabling students to engage with and share their learning with others (eg #UWinToolParade: Open Pedagogy as OER, Stewart, 2019, CC BY-NC and And Still We Rise, Beatty, et al, 2020, CC BY)
- Wikipedia editing is a specific type of student-created OER where students are supported in engaging with Wikipedia as editors (becoming Wikipedia producers rather than consumers), thereby co-creating scholarly content for the open web (eg Wikipedia in the Classroom, McAndrew, 2017 and Teaching Wikipedia, Koziura, et al, 2020, CC BY).
The examples of OEP shared here span multiple disciplines, institutions and countries, but all have been used in higher education settings. You may find it useful to explore some of the many examples above, the collections of OEP listed in the following drop down section 'OEP approaches', or the full set of 'References and Resources' for this section to delve deeper into the concepts of OEP and open pedagogy.
The next section invites you to consider how you might use OEP in your own teaching and learning.
Moving beyond the various definitions and examples of OEP and open pedagogy, Nascimbeni and Burgos (2016, CC BY) have proposed an aspirational definition of an ‘open educator’:
“...An Open Educator chooses to use open approaches, when possible and appropriate, with the aim to remove all unnecessary barriers to learning. He/she works through an open online identity and relies on online social networking to enrich and implement his/her work, understanding that collaboration bears a responsibility towards the work of others."
They pose that an open educator implements openness along four main activities:
- Design: Implements open learning design by openly sharing ideas and plans about their teaching activities with experts and with past and potential students, incorporating inputs, and transparently leaving a trace of the development process
- Content: Uses open educational content by releasing their teaching resources through open licenses, by facilitating sharing of their resources through OER repositories and other means, and by adapting, assembling and using OER produced by others in their teaching
- Teaching: Adopts open pedagogies fostering co-creation of knowledge by students through online and offline collaboration and supporting learners to contribute to public knowledge resources such as Wikipedia
- Assessment: Implements open assessment practices such as peer and collaborative evaluation, open badges and e-portfolios, engaging students as well as external stakeholders in learning assessment
Another view of the ‘open educator’ by Tur, et al (2020, CC BY) explores the transformative impact on identity in the process of becoming an open educator.
OEP may best be recognised and understood through its praxis, ie pedagogical practices employing participatory technologies and social networks for interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation, and empowerment of learners. For example, Weller (2014, CC BY) provides this description of a course that exemplifies OEP:
“…encourages learners to create daily artefacts, suggest assignments, establish their own space online and be part of a community that extends beyond the course both geographically and temporally (…) learners create their own blogs, and these are used for all their solutions. The course then automatically aggregates all these contributions into one central blog. All of this is conducted in the open."
Openness, however, is not a binary construct. Open educational practices can be considered along a continuum, where the practices adopted at any particular time may be more or less open, depending on a range of factors. The use of OEP is always complex, personal, contextual, and continually negotiated (Cronin, 2017, CC BY).
As noted earlier, examples of of OEP might include co-creating open textbooks with students, using open assessment practices such as developing OER assignments, supporting students in editing Wikipedia, encouraging students to publish their work openly, etc. If you wish to explore further approaches to OEP, following are a few excellent collections (of OEP examples and case studies), providing both practical ideas and inspiration:
- Open Pedagogy Approaches: Faculty, Library and Student Collaborations (Clifton & Hoffman, 2020, CC BY)
- A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students (Mays, Ed., 2017, CC BY)
- My open textbook: Pedagogy and practice (DeRosa, 2016, CC BY)
- Open Pedagogy Notebook (DeRosa & Jhangiani, n.d., CC BY)
- Framing Open Educational Practices from a Social Justice Perspective (Bali, et al, 2020, CC BY)
The open educators cited in this section, as well as the many signatories of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration (CC BY), advocate the potential of OER and OEP to empower students their learning and creating, and empower educators to benefit and learn from the ideas of their colleagues.
As described earlier, Nascimbeni and Burgos (2016) include the open sharing of learning designs as one of the key dimensions of the definition of the open educator. In this line, Laurillard’s (2012) approach to learning design is useful and can be considered an example of an open pedagogic model. Laurillard advocates a shift from the individual design of learning to the co-design of learning where teachers build ‘pedagogical patterns’ as part of an innovative, professional learning community, as follows:
- build on the designs of others
- articulate their pedagogy
- adopt, adapt, test and improve learning designs
- co-create and share learning designs
Projects such as Sharing Open Educational Resources using Technology encourage educators to open up about their educational practices in ways that can inspire others. Explore the videos shared by this project and reflect on your own practice. Are there any of your own educational practices that you would consider sharing?
