Zi Hui’s reflection space

Using Krathwohl, Bloom and Masia’s (1973) taxonomy of affective learning, our group came to the consensus that as educators, our aim for students should be to get them to value openness, rather than simply responding or reacting to the needs and requirements of our courses. After all, if students can value openness, then they are more likely to transfer behaviours aligned to openness beyond the walls of our classrooms.

We settled on valuing instead of organising or characterising for pragmatic reasons; it’s not likely that we will have time and space to get students to achieve higher levels of learning on this front when we have other agendas to meet. But reading the article “Open Education, Open Questions” by Catherine Cronin (2017), I am led to believe that there are more conditions at play that affect students’ valuing, organising, and characterising openness. As Cronin rightly points out,

“the use of open practices by learners and educators is complex, personal, and contextual; it is also continually negotiated.”

Cronin cites sava saheli singh (2015), who says,

“The people calling for open are often in positions of privilege, or have reaped the benefits of being open early on — when the platform wasn’t as easily used for abuse, and when we were privileged to create the kinds of networks that included others like us.”

The important question, then, “becomes not simply whether education is more or less open, but what forms of openness are worthwhile and for whom: openness alone is not an educational virtue” (Edwards, 2015).

These points, together with my own experiences considering whether to be open or not, drive home the idea that while we can help students see the multiply varied ways in which being openness can benefit ourselves and others, ultimately, we need to ensure that students are able to critically evaluate — on a case-by-case basis — whether to share or not share. If students do not share, as educators and as members of society, we need to take a step back to consider why students make this decision — what contextual factors might there be that prevent students from being open?

As an academic developer, the implication of this thought is that it is not easy to assess whether a course with such an intended learning outcome has succeeded or not. There needs to be another way of measuring the success of this outcome that does not rely on students’ transfer of openness behaviours beyond the classrooms.

References

Cronin, C. (2017, 23 October). “Open Education, Open Questions”. EDUCAUSE Review.

Edwards, R (2015). “Knowledge Infrastructures and the Inscrutability of Openness in Education”. Learning, Media and Technology 40(3) 253.

singh, s.s. (2015, 27 June). “The Fallacy of ‘Open’, savasavasava.

I am finally writing my first post here, 2 weeks after this was supposed to be due. A large part of my hesitancy regarding posting here comes from concerns to do with self-presentation. How will people perceive me if I write this way and not another, talk about a certain aspect of an issue and not another, portray an issue in this light and not another? Maybe, I should take a bit more time to think about what and how to write.

On my personal Evernote notebook, I counted 2,386 words written for Topic 1 alone. They consist of notes, ideas, and thoughts which I could, in principle, export over to this blog site and call it a day. But I did not (and have not). Being the last cohort of millennials to be born, I might not have been this concerned about filtering my content to distill only the most impressive sides of myself online. I regularly (although less so these days as I mature) post freely written midday complaints and midnight deep thoughts on my Instagram story, to be shared with anyone who cares to follow my private account. In this way, the discrepancy in terms of such willingness when it comes to participating online as a professional is stark. I recall that as a student, my desire to engage in course materials on learning management systems were constrained to only when such participation was graded, when there was an external incentive to doing so.

What explains this difference?

I suggest that trust and psychological safety are key to explaining this difference in students’ inclinations to be a resident in online spaces in their personal capacity and in their student career.

On Instagram, my participation is among a trusted circle of friends — friends whom I allow to follow my private account. I believe that these friends have my interests at heart. They know (some critical point of) my story and identity and have cared enough to follow the trail of accounts I have created over a couple of years before I finally settled on the current one. Trust and psychological safety are present.

In an online learning space, however, especially when interactions among students are monitored and graded, both trust and psychological safety come under threat. For one, depending on the specific requirements of the course, I might not be able to care if “Bob is probably going to freak out if I disagree with him” (i.e., trust) since I may have to disagree with him to score the point. Similarly, other students might not be able to entertain the possibility that I might become unhappy if they disagree with me (i.e., psychological safety).

Taking a look at the literature, I find some work that support my view that trust and psychological safety are crucial for student engagement:

• Cranston, J. (2011). Relational trust: The glue that binds a professional learning community. Alberta journal of educational research, 57(1), 59-72.
• K. Wathne, J. Roos and G. von Krogh “Towards a theory of knowledge transfer in a cooperative context”, in G. von Krogh & J. Roos (eds.). London: Sage Publications, 1996.
• A. Edmondson, “Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams”, Administrative Science Quarterly, vol. 44, pp. 350–383, 1999.