Not my 9x9x25 post this week, but I just read Ajar Educational Practices by Terry, and was about to comment when I thought, ‘hey, I can just blog a quick reflection and hopefully it’ll ping back’. Honestly, I’ve been frustrated with blog commenting systems for a while now. Some require login, some eat my comments, so here…I’m reclaiming commenting.
After attending two Open Ed related conferences last April, and reflecting on other events I’ve attended as well as workshops I’ve facilitated, Terry’s comment really hits home,
I think I’ve become less and less relatable to those who are not (yet… hopefully) fully on-board with Open Education.
As someone who works with OpenEd concepts regularly it can be easy to slip into talking about the aspects of Open that are exciting for you. There is something to be said about meeting your audience where they are, so in all likeliness having a generic presentation is probably not going to serve anyone very well.
Thinking back on what might be my favourite presentation about OER Tools – offered at the Alberta OER Summit 2017 – the idea was to present a range of tools from a simple and quick tool anyone could start using that day to bigger tools like Pressbooks which required a lot more effort. I think that’s a bit of what Terry was getting at with Unsplash and H5P (although the way I pitched H5P was a combination of making interactive content, and building on existing interactive content).
Many of my previous workshops began discussions about Copyright, CC, the 5Rs, etc etc etc. How many sessions have we sat through that take that approach? It might be that I grow tired of that approach because I’ve seen and done it so many times, but maybe I’m also tired of it because it’s not quite the right approach. Honestly, working with instructors, the question rarely arises in the form of “what can I do with this resource” as opposed to “I am trying to make an assignment that does this” or “I want to present this to my students this way”.
Tom Woodward from VCU wrote a bit about this recently, and I am leaning towards his approach of having two different ways to get instructors introduced to OpenEd. The Standard Approach (from licenses to Open Pedagogy) and The Less Standard Approach (diving right into tools and activities). Thinking about it now, my slide deck and SPLOT are close to this approach, but following Tom’s layout might make them even better.
Feature Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash
2 responses to “Quick Reflection – Ajar Educational Practices”
I go back and forth on this as well.
I can’t tell if the philosophy/legal elements of open is needed before the issues that it solves.
Things also seem to get more complex as Top Hat and people like that import OER behind a paywall. Is it still “open” if you have to pay to get in the door?
I’m interested in diving into that stuff but I worry the audience is more interested in getting stuff done (a highly rationale position I support).
I’ll be doing some more of these workshops in the future so I appreciate your thoughts and seeing the links.
Thanks for the comment Tom. I really am keen on the idea of the ‘getting stuff done’ approach as well. I’m pretty much out of the workshop delivery circuit, at least for the time being. Most of the support I provide comes in the form of full online course development (from scratch course development), kind of ‘course design lite’ where I help instructors create a course design plan and consult with them as they work on the course (but at much reduced interaction and capacity compared to the full dev), and brief one-on-one consults (only providing support in key areas determined by the instructor and me). It’s a much different approach than when I used to run multiple workshops with up to 50 instructors in the room and changes the conversation and approach for sure. I hope to write about how I approach that conversation about open in the one-on-one setting vs the workshop setting before 9x9x25 is out.
Thanks for posting your work as well. I always find it inspiring.