What to Tell a Graduate Education Class about Open Education

OEGlobal Plaza
15

My own reply to my topic is a bit overdue, and drawing solely from my memory of this conversations with some 20+ students in the EC&I 831 Social Media and Open Education at the University of Regina.

As promised I had no slides, but did have some browser tabs open for possible talking points (not used, but shared below). I likely came off a bit like Miss Hutchinson. We had a busy chat dialogue (guess who forgot to save)…

I cut off the intro as this session was not about me, but did mention my role at OEGlobal. I asked first for the students to share their awareness or understanding of Open Education. A good chunk was, “none that’s what I am here to learn” a few well stated general descriptions – bottom line, it’s not really part of the regular conversations and work for these teachers.

So, in no real order, I rambled about:

  • Openness a broadly, as a way of being, of access to education being a common “good” (referencing the Saskatchewan provincial mandate to provide every student an education)
  • Open Education Resources - I did try to describe as with irony that one of the top searches for the 5Rs was not the original authors, but one on Course Hero. The irony was not there. Also, mentioned the UNESCO OER Reccommendation
  • Roots in Opensource movement, the impact of MIT’s Open Courseware opening in 2001, broader area of Open Access publishing (noting that research funded by public money should not be paywalled), Open Science, Open Data, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the field of open licenses.
  • Tried to make a case of the Wikimedia Foundation (more than just the 'pedia) as the worlds largest and most successful open education.
  • The drive to provide access to education and content in parts of the world where it is scarce, describing some of the efforts to provide open content in places lacking good or any internet
  • A long discussion of the culture and motivations (or lack) in their own schools- its encouraged, but there are questions of ownership, and then much on the issues of Teachers Paying Teachers.
  • Back to licenses, and also (mine) that licenses should be seen to provide access, not necessarily protect content
  • A bit of a last swing to gauge interest/concern about AI
  • Much more I cannot remember.

The students are blogging (yay) as part of their course, I am not sure if they are syndicated anywhere like the old days, but you will find posts in Twitter tagged #eci831 . Oh, I did ask if they had concerns about the future of Twitter, not much response there.

https://lblairdueck.edublogs.org/2023/06/18/reuse-revise-retain-remix-and-redistribute/

Mike noticed OEGlobal and shared the Open Education Week resources

https://twitter.com/mikemiddleyears/status/1670288436408754176

I noticed a few of us posting links from OE Global. Here are their resources from OE Week 2023 Open Education Week #eci831

Happy to see students tweet sharing resources like

Okay, finally, these were links open in my browser tab that were standing by, a few I shared in chat