Among the multiple interpretations of openness, such as generosity, free access, availability, given during Maha Bali’s webinar [5], I like very much openness as “the will to share” and the fact that “the will to share” is independent if it occurs online or face-to-face.
I like this definition because teaching specifically is, in my opinion, the act of sharing one’s knowledge to contribute building (or improving) another person’s knowledge as well as developing one’s own knowledge. And the knowledge that is shared can be the content of a subject, the process to gain the knowledge about a subject, one’s opinion on a subject. As a result, the learner takes the transmitted knowledge, use it, remix it, and share it [2] so to create an everlasting flow of knowledge.
The “will to share” is also related to making the knowledge available for everyone, that is creating Open Educational Resources (OER) or Open Educational Practices [2] that everyone can freely access. This contributes to equality in terms of giving to everyone the opportunity to find and produce knowledge as if all could come to the Coffee House and take part to interesting discussions [4].
I would like indeed to be sitting in a Coffee House, taste a good cappuccino and talk with my students freely about a subject. Would it be possible to learn a subject by just discussing it? How much knowledge should one have on a subject to be able to discuss it? Are the students ready to come at the Coffee House and express their opinions?
My lectures are not yet at the Coffee House, but they are “participative” as in the Coffee House model [4], apart from the coffee. I encourage discussions on topics relevant to the course to stimulate a critical thinking based on listening the other’s perspective. I also sit with the students as a part of their group (no teacher anymore) when they do exercises in the classroom. I collect their solutions; I add to the students’ solutions the main comments from the discussions with and among the students; I share them in Canvas so to make the new knowledge created while collaborating accessible to everyone.
But “everyone” are only the students unrolled in my courses, and I share with few colleagues my teaching experiences.
In other words, “the will to share” (that is my definition of openness in this post) is limited to a restricted number of persons. The material of my courses is not published on educational web sites, and I have never written down and publicly shared my experiences and my practices of teaching. Even if I completely agree on the fact that sharing resources and practices is of great importance to build knowledge and promote accessibility and equality, I struggle finding the time and the way to create these sources of information. Indeed, creating the material to be shared is not just a matter of writing down a text but also plan a strategy for sharing it: what do I share, a lecture on a subject or the whole course? Where do I publish it, on an educational website or in my own web site? How do I publish it, as a video, a presentation, a blog, a wiki? Creating open sources of knowledge is a dedicated work that requires a lot of time. Would my university grant me the time to build open knowledge? I don’t know.
Moreover, if I ask to my students to create Wikies, for example, to make their exercises public, what should I teach them? Works published in wikies, blogs, videos are protected with copyrights [1]. Students should be aware about copyrights both when creating and using open knowledge. Also, they should have the will to share their knowledge to a broader public (broader than their classmates). Should I as a teacher in Computer Science introduce my students to these subjects and discussions? This would mean more time for the course and moving the focus from the content to the way of “promoting” it.
When it comes to my way of grasping the knowledge to be taught, I use books and research papers as well as the open sources that are available on the web. Since the subject I teach is unique in my university, in case of questions I write emails to the colleagues I know personally who work on the same subject but in different universities.
I have never created a lecture by working collaboratively with other colleagues, as we do in the PBL group. I think that it would be fun to create a lecture together with other persons, especially to experience the pleasure of leveraging the others’ knowledge and perspective to complete the work. Less and quicker work!
However, I would not prepare every lecture together with other persons. I do not think it is the most efficient way of working since it creates a tight dependency among the persons involved that may be time-consuming in terms of time spent in communication, a constraint on the way to do the work and the time one would spend to accomplish it, and a frustration in case one cannot contribute to the work for some reason.
References
ID | References |
1 | Creative Commons guide. Short overview to CC-licensing by Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand (Film) |
2 | Cronin, C. (2017). Open Education, Open Questions. EDUCAUSE Review 52, no. 6 (November/December 2017) |
3 | Oddone, K. (2016). PLE or PLN or LMS or OLN? Blog post about the ONL course. |
4 | Ragupathi, K. (2020). Being open: drawing parallels with the Coffee House model. |
5 | Bali, M. Exploring Nuances of Open Educational Practices. (Webinar) |