Openness in my own practice
My reflection in this topic is about how I use openness. I will discuss openness in my role as a teacher and as a researcher.
Discussions about openness in education often point to the fact that education is about sharing, and that openness is inherent in education. During the last decades there has been a focus on new aspects of openness which impact many areas of education -teaching, curriculum, research, policy, and others.
The literature identifies four broad interpretations of openness within the context of higher education (for an overview, see Cronin, 2017).
As a teacher
I do not have any experience of teaching with open admission, nor do I have experience with developing fee-free educational resources outside the teaching environment of my institution. I also do not have very much experience with OER. I have seen the introduction of Common license, but I have not used these resources in a teaching context. At my institution, we are not concerned about problems with OEP.
I can mention that I have on my own reflected a little about OPE. In my institution, we use Canvas as our LMS. When assignments are issued within Canvas, students do not have access to each other’s work, with the exception of function for using peer reviews on assignments. Still this function means access to a few other assignments. Therefore in those cases I think the access to other students’ assignments would contribute to their learning students have to submit their assignments also in discussions.
There can be other examples of initiatives for OPE practices taken by my colleagues; but we have not discussed these issues open yet.
It is not such a positive picture…in the end of 2021. One could assume that we should have greater insights and awareness about openness related to teaching.
Most surprising is that at my institution, to my knowledge, we do not encourage students to use Creative commons licenses. But this Autumn one of my colleagues, Pernilla Andersson from the library came with a good suggestion. We will recommend that students use Creative commons licenses for own results presented in the form of tables and figures in their project works.
As a researcher
I should admit that I have more insights and actual experience with openness in research than openness in teaching. Last summer I submitted a paper to a journal; the submission was approved and the paper was published. My reflecting on the issue of openness as a researcher is related to this publication and includes two aspects.
The first aspect is about the form of publication. I am lucky because my university offers financial help for open access publications. The article was published with open access (Guziana, 2021).
The other aspect concerns the reviewing process. During the process of publication, I had the option of making review reports available. This is quite a new option and probably it will take time until it will be used commonly. There are 7 papers published in the special issue, three of the authors have decided to not share the review reports.
What are your experiences from openness, as a teacher? as a researcher?
References
Cronin, C. (2017). Openness and praxis: Exploring the use of open educational practices in higher esducation. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning: IRRODL, 18(5), 15-34.
Guziana, B. (2021). Only for Citizens? Local Political Engagement in Sweden and Inclusiveness of Terms. Sustainability, 13(14), 7839.
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/14/7839
Interesting reading about openness:
Oppenness in the classru
https://cassierapuano.wordpress.com/2017/08/14/openness-in-the-classroom/
Why Openness in Education?
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/pathways/chapter/reading-why-openness-in-education/
Course about OPE
