There is so much happening with events and sharing that no one person can see it all. Each day we will ask you here to share your day one highlight, discovery, picture, a key learning just by replying to this post. We will “pin” this call in this area of OE Connect so it is easy to find.
Let us know about your experience as a participant… imagine if everyone filled this space with stories, resources, ideas.
There are 33 events taking place in day one from 10 different countries around the world including - USA, Canada, Poland, Finland, Estonia, Switzerland, Netherlands, Moldova, and Romania.
An amazingly wide range of topics are being covered including:
Open pedagogy
Open licensing
Digital publishing projects with student authors and artists
Student PIRGS doing faculty outreach for OER advocacy
Barriers to OER adoption
Open scholarship
Creating interactive content using H5P
LibreTexts OER creation and hosting platform
UNESCO OER Recommendation and inclusivity
Open education leadership
Camerise - a French as a Second Language digital repository for OER
Libraries role in promoting open education - posters, social media, information booths with touch monitors, & training
Open Science and Open Access
Use, production, and publication of OER
Communities of Practice
Collaboration: Challenges, hurdles, successes
Activity-a-Thon making culture and heritage open
Institutional repositories
Open education practices
What an awesome kickoff to OEWeek 2022!
All these events including ways to participate can be found in the OEWeek 2022 Activity Schedule
This session offered a concrete overview and “roadmap” of Open Education / Open Pedagogy presented by Urooj Nizami from KPU. I liked the starting point of values, by affirming that Education is a Public Good.
Urooj covered barriers to open education, both for faculty and for student, and practical examples of ways to lower barriers.
I most enjoyed her responding to questions and reminding participants that the answers may not be the same everywhere, so make use of your local experts. One was about the question whether CC Non-commercial licensed materials were problematic to higher education since students pay fees. I’m fairly sure no court would ever support this claim, but did not quickly locate a specific reference – where is @poritzj ?? Urooj answered it more soundly, in that the interpretation of commercial activity is not a the institution / organization level (e.g. if they collect fees) but at the level of the act where content is used.
Still, everyone wants concrete answers to what are not exactly cut and dry situations.
Likewise came the question whether there is an issue embedding / linking to youtube content. I always read the terms of service that YouTube does not consider embedding as copying, but as was brought out in the discussion, one still needs to be cognizant of the content itself- just because it is on youtube does not mean it is necessarily “kosher” (plus the inevitable problem of what happens if the content is every removed from youtube).
Thanks Sask Polytechnic for being active in OE Week, putting Saskatchewan (where I live) well represented on the event map.
This was a nifty approach, my first time listening in to a Twitter Spaces, what the host called “All Things OER” (a nod to NPR?):
This is a place for informal audio conversation, speakers included @mmills@Shinta@rjhangiani plus other participants who joined in. There was a range of conversation, from leadership in open education, to “problematic” commercial players in the edtech space (the Course Hero dust up), and to ways in which open education is supported.
While viewing, it provides a live caption stream of the audio
The sessions I attended today got me thinking about the underlying value of open education.
Urooj Nizami, in her Engaging with Open Education Practices and Lowering Barriers for Diverse Learners session, made a couple of assertions that I found interesting. She started her talk by saying open education is values based. That alone is interesting to me. It made me wonder whether the innovation aspects of open education are sometimes quashed by being based on values different from the education system in which they are being practiced.
Urooj said that open education sees education as a public good and, as a public good, learning must make it’s way back into the community. It made me wonder - do today’s education systems see themselves as generating public good? It’s not something I see in mission statements of institutions, even those that are public education providers. Yet this is one of the things I find so exciting about open pedagogy - learners do assignments that contribute to public good.
In the Open Education Leadership session I attended it was interesting to hear Rebecca Griffiths, Principal Education Researcher at SRI Education note how challenging it can be to define the impact and benefits of open education.
The commonly cited benefits and impacts of open education are lowering costs (especially of textbooks), increasing accessibility, and making teaching and learning materials more adaptable. But as I thought about those I noted to myself how those measures of impact don’t measure public good. And while accessibility is frequently mentioned as a benefit of open education I don’t actually see attempts to measure that. Nor are there measures that show the benefits and value of having adaptable learning materials. Dollars saved by lowering textbook costs is easily the most touted benefit and I love that it is dollars saved by students. But the fact that the metrics don’t address benefits to institutions or the public is troubling.
My take away for the day. The underlying values of open education are not well aligned with the values on which current education systems operate. As a result the true value of open education is hugely under represented and under valued. To fully represent the impact and benefits of open education we need to define measures that align with the core values on which open education is based and show how that benefits, learners, educators, institutions and the public itself.
I am determined to visit at least one OE Week Resource a day. Today, I rediscovered (having first heard about it at the OE Global 2021 online conference in September) the amazing, creative Together, a collaborative open picture book. It is “[a] cross-generational picture book that talks about the values of open education. The story is about three friends who went on an adventure down the river to build a playground. On their way they meet other animals who seem to put obstacles in their way.” Beautifully illustrated with a remix of details of exhibits from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, available under CC0, and new illustrations, it is an inspiring example of global collaboration among @GinoFransman, @chrissinerantzi, Helene Pulker, Penny Bentley, @Paola, @verenanz, Frank Odysseas, @VisualThinkery, and Frank Thanassis. Read about it here: Open Education Week - Together, a collaborative open picture book.
Admittedly I might need to read a lot more before I understand it, but it’s impressive how interactive the content is. Many educators experience eye glaze when you mention Github, but the group got interested in Antonio’s description of versioning (mentioned in the book) (where I note the author is using the “Bird Hippie” version of R, I appreciate a little bit of embedded tech humor)
Apparently the book is also written in R, in a special format of Markdown (the means GitHub content is authored). More details in the project repository as well as materials like presentation slides.
Spent the day in a learning event with over 3000 public servants in the Government of Canada. We had a small session on OE, which discussed the government’s own Open Learning initiatives such as Partager – GCshare – Public Service Open Educational Resource Library (ecampusontario.ca). Perhaps more importantly, there was a strong sense that “Learning & Development” in the public service is about making it possible for everyone to contribute to meaningful learning experiences.
So, even though our own workshop was a tiny part of a large event, I honestly feel that there’s potential for true impact when we bring OE to new venues.
In my second day of OE Week Asset exploration, I have discovered the incredibly cool DigiCulture Courses online! Wow, as someone who has a Ph.D. in theatre and taught performance studies for many years, I wish I had had this resource to support my students’ digital literacy, even as what they studied is, inherently, a live “analog” form (but has become increasingly enhanced by the digital and requires digital skills for much of the creative and support work). “The DigiCulture are the Digital Skills and Social Inclusion for Creative Industries Online Courses, in MOOC style, open, online and free to all, available in English language and in Romanian, Italian, German, Danish, Lithuanian, Irish. The training program objective is to enhance the use of new digital technologies and entrepreneurship (project management) for experts in the culture and creative industries.” Thanks for this visionary and highly useful resource, Diana Andone (@diando70). See more at Open Education Week - DigiCulture Courses online.
(As this happened in February, when some of us were prepping for this very same #oeweek, it was easy to miss the drama.)
And I find the whole thing rather puzzling. “Slam Teacher” has helped some members of this movement to reflect on the impact of diverse actions. In this thread defending a decision in professional development, the DigPedLab founder had an opportunity to get people thinking about which “future” we collectively perceive as possibility. Morris may be the same “good” person as always, whatever that is. What’s strange is that there’s no space for discussing how we may act together in a partnership for Learner Agency. Despite that vociferous reaction by Goldrick-Rab, plagiarism is indeed a key part of this. Especially with a business aiding and abetting said plagiarism, with work from our colleagues.
It’s all good and well to say someone wants to change things from the inside. What’s important, when people ask the question, is to provide some explanation as to the kind of change one has in mind… instead of relying on the individual’s “good reputation”.
Like toxic positivity, transparency is the first remedy.
Urooj answered it more soundly, in that the interpretation of commercial activity is not a the institution / organization level (e.g. if they collect fees) but at the level of the act where content is used.
