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OpenEd21 is happening this week and instead of tweeting I am blogging from selected sessions I am attending. These notes may be rough as the intent is to try to follow the flow of the talk and publish as soon as possible.
Session Description
In the fall of 2019, a project based on OER-enabled pedagogy, one form of Open Pedagogy, was written into the curriculum of a class taken by all first-year students at a private liberal arts college in the eastern United States. Instructors were provided training on the use of this pedagogical approach and asked to facilitate the project in their section. In 2019 and again in 2020, instructors were interviewed regarding their experience with OER-enabled pedagogy as well as their impression of how it impacted students.
This session presents findings from research with all six instructors who taught utilizing OER-enabled pedagogy first in 2019 then again in 2020 aimed at elucidating instructor experience teaching with a novel approach and how this changed over time. (full abstract)
Presenters: Eric Werth & Katherine Williams (University of Pikeville)
Session Notes
Some commonalities of OER-enabled pedagogy with other active learning techniques, but there are differences between OER pedagogy and active learning.
Some differences between OER-enabled pedagogy and active learning highlighted include;
- With OER enabled pedagogy, learners are driving content creation
- Materials live beyond student-teacher dyad
- Content has deeper relevance outside the specific learning context (e course)
- Content is licensed openly and shared to global community
- An entire course may be framed around OER as opposed to single assignment or activity.
Interviews with 23 instructors who implemented OER-enabled pedagogy (2019/2020)
Findings & barriers
- First time instructors had a difficult time seeing value of the approach
- During first classes, instructors felt they were learning with students
- After teaching first time instructors saw value of approach as they felt it empowered students and helped them develop agency and their own voice.
- Technical aspects of sharing student work is a barrier for instructors.
- It is uncommon for students to navigate high-agency encironments. Students tend to default back to wanting to know “what does the instructor want us to do?”
- Dynamics of attribution – students were unsure about having their names associated with the content they were creating
A key finding of the research is that open pedagogy is most effective when goals of assignment allow student values to be expressed. How does the assignment facilitate the integration of their own values.
Practical advice
- Be explicit with learners about what it is you are doing and why
- Don’t concentrate on shifting an entire course. Fous on smaller assignments and activities (ie shift an essay to writing an online resource/help guide)
- Consider embedding OER-enabled pedagogy directly into newly developed courses. Build-in multiple check-ins with students about the projects, which allows for increased mentorship opportunities.
The session ends with some advice on how to overcome common barriers with instructors when speaking about OER-enabled pedagogy
My Takeaway
I have always felt there was a piece missing in the student-teacher-content model when using it in the context of open education and that is a fourth participant; “the world” (for lack of a better term right now). I think there is a worthwhile modification to explore in the Anderson & Garrison model where it changes from 3 to 4 points (quad vs triad) and have that fourth point be the world as that is a relationship that needs to be considered with open pedagogy assignments/activities and will influence the other 3 points: student, teacher and content.
There are also some hints in this research that there is a lack of digital literacy/fluency skills among educators when it comes to working with technologies in the open. One of the barriers noted was that instructors had difficulty technically knowing how to share student work openly and there were technology barriers identified which could be mitigated by increasing digital literacy among educators – perhaps even being explicit and thinking of it specifically as open digital literacies as opposed to more general digital literacies.
The slides and research paper, and the OER guide that was created by the students as part of this project.
2 Comments
Regarding the missing fourth World node I will break out my old tired sawhorse that no one seems to have recognized how this was done in DS106 (I am still gobsmacked that no one has ever done any research there, sitting for some data analysis student is more than 10 years and 80,0000 syndicated posts, but that’s another story).
But what I pulled from teaching in DS106 and folded into later with Networked Narratives with Mia Zamora was the idea of making a space and opportunity for open participants to be loosely engaged with the course, the students. It was not trying to give the full experience that the official course at UMW or Kean University got, but enough of the content, activities, and connections so open participants could engage and be part of the experience.
I’m also not convinced that the technical challenges is addressed by efforts to increase digital literacy like slapping on some workshops or guides. There remains a huge barrier of inertia of fear, or lack of confidence, and maybe just an unease of trying new things that keep faculty from even getting started to share. they have been inculturated to systems and platforms that provide convenience at the cost of conceptual understanding of the systems that the tools operate on .Just tool training does not do it.
The most approachable platform for OER these days seems to be the form of a book. That makes me sad.
There are not many open courses that have done it better than ds106 in terms of being a truly open course with plenty of opportunities for that Legitimate Peripheral Participation piece baked right in. It was clear from the course that you had designed it as such, and it made ds106 all that much richer by making it available for people to just pop in and do, say, a daily create without having to commit to the entire course. Or pop on and contribute to ds106 radio. The echoes of that course still reverberate today and it would make a fascinating case study on how a course can evolve into a lifelong learning community.