I had a very narrow understanding of what it meant to “be open” as an educator before embarking on this course. I didn’t view openness as a spectrum but rather two stark choices, either you were open (and I simply equated this with offering one’s course at a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) level) or you were not (and you therefore simply carried on your merry ways of offering one’s course per usual at the University). Given my focus at the University (legal skills), a MOOC was never high on my priorities so it was easy to not give further thought to this.
The TED talk on “Open Education and the Future” by David Wiley was aspirational in many ways. It was a reminder of the more noble purposes of education, that of sharing and being generous, and that successful educators are the ones who share the most completely with the most students, and how you can share your knowledge without losing it yourself. More importantly, education is more than just sharing expertise – other than offering a MOOC (which is still not high on my priorities), there are in fact many ways that one can share and be open about education.
The parallels between being open and the Swedish Coffee House model also resonated with me. (Ragupathi, K. (2020). Being open: drawing parallels with the Coffee House model) Particularly the idea that once we decouple learning from specific learning spaces (like university) and exclusive groups of individuals, accessibility to knowledge, content and scholarship exponentially increases. Essentially, the open exchange of ideas can lead to the betterment of everyone involved, and this is an ideal pillar of education.
The article “In Search for the Open Educator: Proposal of a Definition and a Framework to Increase Openness Adoption Among University Educators” (F Nascimbeni, D Burgos Intl Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning Vol 17, No 6) was very helpful in providing a framework for diagnosing how open I currently am as an educator, and what being an open educator on all fronts looks like. While I am far from the aspirational open educator (truth be told, I felt like the grinch of education when I first read this article), I appreciated the specific suggestions on how (and the angles from which) one can be more open such as design, content, learning and assessment. The methods for open teaching resonated the most with me and is what I believe I can incorporate most immediately into my teaching practice. For example, getting rid of disposable assignments (https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2975) and creating opportunities for more peer on peer work (https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2975). My own experience as a student on this ONL journey reinforces how it is advantageous from a student’s perspective to engage in collaborative learning, including being able to be exposed to different perspectives.
I understand that being open is better. All the same, I am mindful of the work it will take to change what I currently do in order to be more open. Inertia is certainly something to overcome. That, and feeling secure enough in my own abilities and competencies as an educator to not feel threatened by critique and other persons potentially adopting wholesale what I do to the point of outshining me. These concerns sometimes make me tepid. What has helped is being able to interact with like-minded people in my PBL group who are grappling with similar issues. It makes it easier to be brave.
