Openness and sharing in my own practice.

Should I worry about ‘giving away’ my intellectual property?

 

   I love lecturing. I never thought I would say that, as it has been a long sometimes frustrating journey. Maybe some of you can also relate to Aoife Monks when she says “My early career anxiety to cover as much as possible often led to students’ feeling overloaded, unable to process the material or grasp why it mattered.” (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/top-tips-how-make-your-lectures-interesting). 

I look back and am proud that I have developed my teaching skills; my goal is now to give lectures that give learners space to engage, to reflect, to think. I cover far less and rather basic concepts but engage them more, getting the impression that they actually learn something. I like the personal contact to my students, building relations and seeing immediate reactions through body language (and voice). 

But then the pandemic happened and within the last 2-3 years we have been “forced” to holding online lecturing instead. Some students cope better with flexible and open learning spaces, but others don´t and students started asking me if they were allowed to record, so they could listen to it again in their own pace. That’s when it started….my voice and content would be out there in undefined space for undefined time. I was a bit reluctant or maybe some of you say silly. But my key concern was NOT really about the concept of OER relating to ‘giving away’ intellectual property, or that others might take unfair advantage of my “intellectual property”. It masked a different anxiety – namely, that sharing educational materials will open my work to scrutiny by my peers. It was an uncomfortable feeling at first.

However, as more institutions ask their educators to share more materials under open licenses, experiences clearly demonstrate that this opening of intellectual property to peer scrutiny is having the effect of improving quality of teaching and learning materials.And I can confirm…I tend to invest much time in improving my materials before sharing them openly and feedback I receive (not so much from peers, as I was afraid of) and student scrutiny helps me to make further improvements. How do I share my OER? I still prefer to only use the institutional online repository and have so far avoided open repository and social networks like YouTube, as I tend to believe to have better control of keeping my lectures up-to-date. But I must admit that I have google-searched after existing OER in my field and I am grateful for the ones being out there, but since it is very rare to find OER that fits perfectly “as is” anyhow, I use it rather as inspiration and design my own teaching material.

The real potential educational value lies anyhow not in the content itself (which is increasingly available in large quantities online), but rather in their ability to guide students effectively via well-designed teaching and learning pathways. Good teachers should offer effective support to students (eg. in practical sessions, tutorials, individual counselling sessions, or online), and provide intelligent assessment and critical feedback to students on their performance. 

So now I feel more comfortable to open up and share, as it will benefit both learners and teachers. We are all in it as a team! 🙂