Happy July, everyone! My colleague Annemarie Paikai and I are excited to co-facilitate this Thursday’s book club discussion on Chapter VI: What do you think is the biggest benefit of Open Education and what do you think is missing? As you begin your week, please consider the following discussion prompts based on our chapter reading:
Vocational Awe and OER
Ariana Santiago spoke of “vocational awe” in Open Education and how it can elevate the movement to a place beyond critique. She states:
“There’s a sense of “look at all this amazing good we do through Open Education” and having to live up to that. But can’t I just be a person trying to do my job well? Can I do my work and not try to save the world? “Can I just do my work and not try to save the world?”
- How did you respond to these statements? What has been your experience with vocational awe in Open Education?
Faculty Involvement
Tonja Conerly says a missing piece is more faculty involvement in OER, which is needed to create better resources with all the “bells and whistles” faculty expect.
- What strategies do you use to encourage more faculty involvement?
Indigenous Communities and Openness
Institutions create barriers to accessing the collections they steward, which may not truly belong to them. Preservation is prioritized over access and continued use.
Jesse Loyer says one of the biggest benefits of the Open Movement is the call to action for cultural memory institutions to engage with and be responsive to their communities. She states it is the opportunity to reunite people with “those relatives that are held in collections.”
Liliana Diaz Soludkhin described the care and respect when stewarding traditional knowledge and accepting when it should not be shared.
- How can the Open movement align with traditional knowledge transmission practices of the Indigenous communities whose knowledge we steward?
Empowering Educators and Marginalized Learners
Angela DeBarger says that Open Education gives educators and learners agency in learning through Open Practices, inviting marginalized learners to share their voices and shape the learning environment. She says that designing truly inclusive materials needs to be intentional from the beginning. According to DeBarger,
“…assuming that designing OER for the mainstream will work for every learner, if materials can be adapted. This is not at all inclusive if ʻmainstreamʻ implies white communities.”
The grassroots decentralized nature of the Open movement can be both a strength and a weakness. Liliana Diaz Solodukhin says decentralization has led to a duplication of effort, resulting in multiple open textbooks on some topics while others are missing.
- How can we design OER that is more inclusive?
- How can we manage the duplication of effort that occurs in OER development?
Assessment
Ursula Pike and Shinta Hernandez both mention that the assessment of OER outcomes is missing.
- How are you assessing OER outcomes? How might we improve?
Annemarie and I invite you to respond to the above prompts or any other topic from the chapter reading that resonated with you. We look forward to facilitating the discussion on Thursday.
Find out more about the EDI Book Club bit.ly/EDIBookClub23
Zoom Registration: bit.ly/2023EDIzoom