(Topic 2)

One of the Open Educational Practices presented by Bali, Cronin and Jhangiani (2020) is the open syllabus teaching process. In this process, the syllabus can be open to students to “comment or modify the contents”. As an information specialist, who teaches information retrieval to students in different subjects, this makes me interested. Despite the positive response the information retrieval lectures and workshops have received, sometimes I wonder, whether what we teach really meets the needs of the students or not.

It seems that to be able to participate in modifying the syllabus, the students need to have some kind of perception about the topic – “to pose the right questions”. For the open syllabus process to be possible, the students would need to have some kind of clue of what they need to learn about information retrieval in order to be able to formulate questions they need answers to. One way of doing this would be to give the students some information retrieval exercises in advance, which they would try to solve on their own, without the assistance of an information specialist.

Practice has shown that there are big differences in the information retrieval skills and experience between student groups and individual students. Students approach information and the tools for retrieving it from very different perspectives – some more philosophical, some more practical to their nature. An open syllabus would allow for the specific needs of the group to be taken into account in planning of the session. To be aware of the students previous experience in information retrieval would help the instructor to see the gaps that need to be filled, and to make the lecture more personalized to the needs of the specific group of students. Also presenting self-evident facts already known to everyone would be avoided. This would minimize the amount of frustration among students, as well as the amount of uncertainty of the information specialist about whether the problems being solved during the lecture are relevant or not.

This requires a channel through which the students can communicate their information needs to the information specialist, who then plans the teaching according to the needs. This could be done through an anonymous platform, e.g. a padlet, where the students could pose their questions or present their problems. Probably more than the one student that posed the question has experienced the same problem without making it known – even anonymously.

The students might need to be encouraged more than once to present their problems. Even though it can be done anonymously, a certain trust level between students and teacher and within the student group must be reached. Also if the students do not actively participate in creating the syllabus, the idea of open syllabus falls flat.

A jointly composed open syllabus certainly would help in personalizing the teaching to a group or even individual level. One could make sure to target the problems students are struggling with. But how much of the syllabus is to be for the students to decide? What can the information specialist consider as necessary knowledge for successful information retrieval, despite it being named by the students?

References:

Bali, M., Cronin, C. and Jhangiani, R.S., 2020. Framing Open Educational Practices from a Social Justice Perspective. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2020(1), p.10. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/jime.565