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Open educational resources (OER) are “teaching, learning, and research resources that, through permissions granted by the copyright holder, allow others to use, distribute, keep, or make changes to them.” (BCcampus Open Education Self-Publishing Guide).

In principle, I support opening education and can immediately think about the various benefits that it offers. However, examining my own practices in more detail shows that my own practices may not be as open as I’d like them to be. For example, our university has made the strategic decision to make our LMS open by default. Great! Then why do I immediately turn off the open access features when creating a new course page? For me the biggest issue is licensing. A part of the materials that I use have been created by other teachers in our team and I have then modified them to suit my own teaching style. Similarly, I have created something that others have then hopefully modified to suit their needs. Although we’ve had this culture that materials that we choose to share with others are for common use, we have not licensed those materials with creative commons. Therefore, my reservation has to do with the fact that I feel uncertain whether I can share materials that were originally created by someone else (although for common use). This is definitely something that I will pay more attention to in the future. When I create something that I share with others, I will make sure that it will have a creative commons license. Similarly, I will encourage my colleagues to do the same. Perhaps we could even make a team level decision on this.

So, does this mean that my educational practices are completely closed? Not quite. Comparing my own practice to the features discussed in Kay Oddone’s blog post “Open pedagogies: transforming and empowering learning”, I can still identify some features of open pedagogy in my own teaching.

Access and equity: I have used some OERs in my courses as source material (both by providing links to external websites and using materials available in OER repositories such as MERLOT) . I also try to ensure that the materials I use work on different devices. In addition, I pay attention to file format and provide alternatives (e.g. both word and PDF files). I do this because for years, I was told that PDF opens on any computer with a PDF file reader. Yes it does, but on some computers all you get is question marks instead of the actual text, so no, it is not necessarily accessible to everyone.

Student agency and autonomy: I often have my students set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely) goals at the beginning of the course, which allows them to focus more on certain areas and thus direct their own learning activities accordingly. I also encourage students to share useful links and resources that they find. In addition I incorporate production centered learning activities such as building field-specific, collaborative term banks. I have also involved students having them teach each other about different course topics.

Enabling active participation: Especially in online and blended courses, I put a lot of effort in creating easy-to-use communication channels. I also involve students in the learning process through regular peer review.

Tools to encourage open pedagogy: Whenever possible, I let students choose the communication tools that they want to use. However, I want to keep assessable items in the LMS, so I can easily grade them. Thus, students mainly have a choice in how they want to communicate, for example, during a group work process.

Pedagogy of kindness and believing in students: I know that my students have a life outside my course. I try to design my courses in a way that they allow a bit of freedom for when life happens.

Aesoph, Lauri (2018). Self-Publishing Guide. BCcampus Open Education. Available at https://open.bccampus.ca/browse-our-collection/find-open-textbooks/?uuid=1d31f3b7-dd9f-4f47-97eb-430afb45ead6&contributor&keyword&subject=Guides

Oddone, Kay (2019). Open Pedagogies: Transforming and Empowering Learning. Blog post, Oct 17, 2019. Available at http://www.linkinglearning.com.au/open-pedagogies/

I’m all for open education, so why is it so difficult to make my own courses open?