Opening Doors to Open Digital Practice for Educators: The Open Page Project

This paper outlines the design and purpose of an open educational resource (OER) project focused on developing digital literacies and open educational practice (OEP) within a Canadian Faculty of Education. Called The Open Page, the project features a Tool Parade of videos and podcasts created with and by Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.) students). Designed to enable students to build critical and participatory digital literacies with common classroom tools, and to encourage the development of OEP, the project assesses classroom uses of specific educational technology platforms. It also engaged student creators in analysis of various platforms' implications for student data and for differentiated learning. Featured on the University of Windsor Faculty of Education's website, The Open Page and its Tool Parade of OER offer professional development resources for faculty and practicing teachers and contributes to a common conversation about digital learning between educators at all levels. This paper will overview The Open Page and its creation, and the ways in which it represents an effort to focus pre-service teachers on the participatory and production capacities of the web for digital learning.

Opening the Online Homework System: Toward Cooperation and Collaboration

One of the core tensions in open educational practice in current mathematics and physical science coursework is the use of online homework systems. Many such tools are from commercial providers and have profit to that provider as a motive. Open resources are pursued by those who, for reasons of cost or of pedagogy, seek to resist the tools of commercial providers. This pursuit is frequently made outside of the context of discussions of open educational practices; indeed, the first author of this presentation describes one such effort that started before he was even aware of open education as a discipline. It is important to ask how those faculty, particularly in the mathematics and physical science disciplines at non-elite institutions, assign homework in ways that encourage practice and skill-building, and more broadly, how such content can be shared more robustly and completely among faculty at different institutions.

Participation in OER Creation: A Trajectory of Values

This paper provides an analysis of interviews with seven faculty members who engaged in creating Open textbooks funded by government grants at a university in Canada in 2018. Using four values—access and equity, community and connection, agency and ownership, and risk and responsibility—identified by Sinkinson (2018), McAndrew (2018), and Keyek-Fransen (2018), we traced the ways in which university faculty members’ understanding of Open changed through the process of Open Educational Resource creation. As a teaching support-focused unit, we explore ways to provide our faculty and instructors with meaningful opportunities to develop their Open pedagogy. These findings reconceive the way that Open Educational Practice can be promoted at our University and others. Instead of focusing solely on OER creation, our faculty started engaging in thinking through the different conceptions of Open educational practice and identifying which concepts resonated with them. By reframing the ways in which faculty thought about Open Educational Practices, we have been better able to address the ways in which we support them.

The Open Page Project

This paper overviews an Open Educational Resource (OER) project aimed at developing digital literacies and open educational practice within a Faculty of Education. The project, titled (redacted), modelled and enacted three core digital learning principles – produsage, presence, and authentic audiences – for a broad audience of faculty and educators through the creation of videos and podcasts about educational technology tools. Designed to enable Bachelor of Education students to work towards authentic assignments and open practice, while leading professional development for faculty and practicing teachers, (redacted) also developed student literacies in assessing and evaluating educational technology platforms. The project’s video and podcast outputs, showcased on a sub-page of the official Faculty of Education website, reflect intensive student research into the classroom uses, data implications, and differentiated learning possibilities of digital classroom tools. The paper will introduce readers to the principles and pedagogy that shaped the design of (redacted), and examine its efforts to create a common conversation about digital learning between educators at all levels.

Rede académica internacional WEIWER®: um exemplo de práticas educacionais abertas

Wikipedia as an object of study and pedagogical strategy is present at different levels of education in the world. In Portugal, the Universidade Aberta (Open University), through LE@D, is pioneer by fostering its research and curricular integration. It is in this field of action that the WEIWER® International Academic Network was launched - Wikis, Educação & Investigação | Wikis, Education & Research. The conceptual framework is linked to open education and, thus, Wikipedia is perceived as an Open Educational Practice and Resource. Therefore, the WEIWER® Network integrates several perspectives that, in short, can be segmented, on the one hand, in the promotion of digital literacy and, on the other, in the implementation of didactic and technical-pedagogical resources. Both correspond to different paths, with different approaches, according to the target audience involved. These paths are associated to the axes of the Portugal INCoDe.2030 Initiative and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Social Annotation Enabling Collaboration for Open Learning

Collaboration is a conceptually ambiguous and understudied aspect of open education. Given inconsistent discussion about collaboration in the open education literature, this article suggests that collaboration be defined and studied as a distinct OEP. A theoretical stance from the discipline of computer-supported collaborative learning helps conceptualize collaboration as processes of intersubjective meaning-making. Social annotation is then presented as a genre of learning technology that can productively enable group collaboration and shared meaning-making. After introducing an open learning project utilizing social annotation for group dialogue, case study analysis of interview and annotation data details how social annotation enabled three group-level epistemic expressions delineating collaboration as intersubjective meaning-making and as an open educational practice. A summative discussion considers how the social life of documents encourages collaboration, why attention to epistemic expression is a productive means of articulating open learning, and how to extend the study of collaboration as an open educational practice.

Open Educational Practices in Australia: A First-phase National Audit of Higher Education

For fifteen years, Australian Higher Education has engaged with the openness agenda primarily through the lens of open-access research. Open educational practice (OEP), by contrast, has not been explicitly supported by federal government initiatives, funding, or policy. This has led to an environment that is disconnected, with isolated examples of good practice that have not been transferred beyond local contexts.This paper represents first-phase research in identifying the current state of OEP in Australian Higher Education. A structured desktop audit of all Australian universities was conducted, based on a range of indicators and criteria established by a review of the literature. The audit collected evidence of engagement with OEP using publicly accessible information via institutional websites. The criteria investigated were strategies and policies, open educational resources (OER), infrastructure tools/platforms, professional development and support, collaboration/partnerships, and funding.Initial findings suggest that the experience of OEP across the sector is diverse, but the underlying infrastructure to support the creation, (re)use, and dissemination of resources is present. Many Australian universities have experimented with, and continue to refine, massive open online course (MOOC) offerings, and there is increasing evidence that institutions now employ specialist positions to support OEP, and MOOCs. Professional development and staff initiatives require further work to build staff capacity sector-wide.This paper provides a contemporary view of sector-wide OEP engagement in Australia—a macro-view that is not well-represented in open research to date. It identifies core areas of capacity that could be further leveraged by a national OEP initiative or by national policy on OEP.