Hi to all conference-goers and legitimate peripheral participants.
I’m so excited that I will be heading to Nantes very soon and seeing many old and new friends at the in person congress - I will be telling everyone I meet there about my survey (they will start running away when they see me coming) but it seems like this is also a good space to let people know about it!
If you work in higher education I am seeking your views on how your institutional policies interact with open educational practices.
This is a key part of my PhD research seeking to understand the policy landscape at the vital institutional level.
The study considers ‘open education’ in a wide sense, and ‘policy’ as what we do, as well as what we say we’ll do. Seeking grassroots opinions rather than a ‘definitive’ institutional view. You don’t need to be an expert/policymaker.
Survey link : Valuing Open: Institutional Open Education Policy Survey
Hey! Am I legitimate? I hope you get a lot of survey responses, Leo, I took the liberty of cross posting it in the Unconference area as it is a good activity for participants to do, and maybe talk about their grassroots policy view.
Its great to see this policy research happening in the open education space and I commend your foresight in moving the dial regarding policy work in OER.
I would like to submit a response, however my employer does not permit me to participate in initiatives that do not support free cultural works approved licensing. I checked the Copyright statement for the survey - I hope that’s the correct link. It says the survey is all rights reserved
I wonder if there is any way you could encourage the ‘Open’ university to make an exception in this case by applying an open license for a research project on open?
Good luck with the research and I look forward to reading the results (assuming they’re published openly )
As @Mackiwg has pointed out, this is exactly the point I wish to bring out.
How clear are the policies about publishing OERs in academia?
In Indain context they are not, unfortunately. That also makes it difficult. More on this soon, today as a separate topic.
The absolutism in the declaration appears reveal an assumption that that openness is antagonistic to academic freedom when of course we routinely understand openness in terms of the freedoms it affords. For example, at KPU our institutional intellectual property policy encourages the creation and use of OER, publication in OA outlets, and the embrace of open science practices. This is necessary even as a tool to raise awareness, but does not foreclose or prevent other possibilities. I say this knowing that the status quo (gatekeeping, elitism, false scarcity, IP theft) hardly needs any encouragement within the academy as it already runs rampant. It remains amusing to me that serious scholars who question whether openness erodes freedom don’t wish to address this question with commercial publishing (e.g., where IP is signed over without any question).
I agree with Rajiv’s comments. I have noticed that quite a lot of people associate the term policy with something regulatory, as in, a certain approach will be compelled once you have a policy, whereas I would say policy can serve various purposes (policies have been described as ‘carrots, sticks or sermons’ in some work that @igorlesko has drawn upon in his research). So while a stick policy might compel particular behaviour I tend to think open education policies might (most usefully) tend to take a more carrot and sermon type of approach!
I agree with Rajiv as well - openness in education is often about a variety of choices - rather than closed practices by “default” and no avenues to support degrees of open practices. Setting up binaries is never helpful and works against the overall growth of the knowledge commons - some of which may be behind paywalls because of the legacies which we live in. The tweet also speaks to misunderstanding of the role of policies to support practices ( open is only one example, others include EDI, decolonization etc) that need such policies to edge toward a broadening of educational practices.
As wary as I am of “feeding trolls”, there’s something in there that could spark thoughtful conversation, as demonstrated both @connieb and @rjhangiani.
Maybe the misdirection in that tweet is isolated. Yet we could expect further backlash from members of diverse groups. To my ear, it all sounds like either astroturfing or run-of-the-mill gaslighting. The part about “traditional textbooks” helps us associate this reaction to a specific context (with lobby groups). Of course, “academic freedom” is itself coded.
At some point, “policy” gets entangled in politics. Some of us spent some of our time in Nantes discussing the relative impact of policy at different levels (institutional, national, international…). As well as the reality of OE happening in the absence of policy.
As asked so kindly @GinoFransman, I’ll complete the survey @leohavemann. As I do so, I’ll think about the diversity of actors in our scene, including those with a vested interest in making OE more difficult and those whose attitude is closer to “fauxpen” or OpenWashing. As with Open Recognition, it’s important to consider everything involved in the emergence of a new system. Including visceral reactions from those who don’t recognize themselves (or their values) in the new system.
In a way, this is part of our collective #oeg-2022 debrief.
I agree about leaving the trolls hungry but felt like tossing it in here to generate some discussion, and recognize that these attitudes are out there, so always more work to be done.
Thanks to @cogdog, that post surely stirred up a discussion.
It is great to see that this topic is being discussed. That was the strong reason of my participation this year.
Entanglement with Politics is inevitable but a policy helps to overcome or atleast minimze the polarizing the impact of politics, I believe. I hope there will be a clear policy soon. A clear policy will be helpful to countries in Indian sub-continent where the awareness of OE is limited and the lobby groups are stronger.
I am looking forward to reading the oeg-2022 debrief.
Fascinating way to put it! My personal biases bring me in another direction, at least when policymaking is a top-down process. Yet I can understand the effect from the context of approaches to Public Engagement and Public Participation.
As for the diversity of South Asian contexts, it’d be great if we had deeper insight on that landscape. Sounds quite complex. During the conf itself, several of us have used the shorthand “Global South”, as it was a quick way to describe one process of polarization. Yet it sounds like there’s a lot less in common between, say, Cameroon, Ecuador, India, Tunisia, Brazil, and Vietnam than between any of these and Canada or Poland.
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