Open Education

Theory as a keel: Developing a critical framework for open education, Part 2

“If open is the answer, then what is the question?” was posed by educator and researcher Catherine Cronin (National University of Ireland, Galway) in her keynote address for the Open Education Conference 2016 in Edinburgh, UK last April. This question challenges our community to explore the why behind the how driving open education initiatives, and reveals the need for a body of critical research examining the same.

Jamison Miller, Ph.D. student in the School of Education at William & Mary, hopes to develop a framework that balances critical analysis with practical implementations, and provide the open education movement with the foundation to help move it forward in a socially responsible manner. He credits his affiliation with the Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN) with providing an invaluable support network for doctoral students studying open education. The group helped bring Jamison to Krakow last spring for the OEGlobal Conference, and will be supporting a trip to Cape Town for this year’s conference in March.

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Theory as a keel: Developing a critical framework for open education

Virginians involved in education were extremely fortunate to have the 13th Annual Open Education Conference held in Richmond, at the Great Richmond Convention Center November 2nd through 4^th, 2016. The conference, billed as the “premiere venue for sharing research, development, advocacy, design, and other work relating the open education,” offers librarians a unique opportunity to interface with researchers, technologists, publishers, and educators in a collaborative environment. While some of these connections happened during sessions on topics like inclusive design, open education policy, and licensing, many occurred between sessions. On the final day, I had the chance to eat lunch with several William & Mary faculty and student researchers interested in open education, along with Kathleen DeLaurenti, the librarian at William & Mary leading our OER initiatives. The lunch conversation afforded me great perspective on the challenges educators face when trying to access and utilize appropriate open education resources as alternatives in their classes, especially for advanced topic courses. I am excited to join deLaurenti and our Scholarly Communications Committee’s efforts to expand open education resources here at William & Mary, where we will be running a pilot of the Open Textbook Network Program beginning early next year.

Open education is not just about textbooks and materials, however. Among the presenters at the Open Ed Conference this year was a William & Mary Ph.D. student in the School of Education, Jamison Miller, who joins a growing contingent of open education scholars calling for a theoretical grounding to support the practicum, resource-focused open education movement, a component he feels will be critical to its long term success and sustainability.

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Is Open Access Enough? Strategies for Healthier OA.

I’m a salesman, and the hardest part of my job is encouraging people to buy. As a Digital Scholarship librarian I manage the Institutional Repository (IR) and peddle Open Access (OA) to students and faculty, who, despite enthusiasm in our field are sometimes skeptical about web based and OA resources. For a long time, librarians have championed OA in the light of the greater good that access will provide. We very often cite the evidence that OA increases impact factor and citation counts for our faculty, while librarians like Char Booth show the ways in which OA empowers students to publish and contribute to larger scholarly conversations. Unfortunately, in the recent past we’ve seen high profile rejections of the OA model. The most notable of these is the American Historical Association’s recommendation against OA deposit of History Theses and Dissertations. This has been debated and framed as “protecting the most vulnerable” in the academic profession. Inherent in this is a distrust of the open access model as a legitimate form of scholarship (despite arguments to the contrary). Anecdotally, I hear stories of faculty discouraged from publishing open access because of the lesser prestige associated with these journals.

Low faculty involvement in the Institutional Repository and suspicion of OA are symptoms of growing concerns surrounding the intellectual weight of OA resources. There are some in our universities who will see Char Booth’s assertion that OA is good pedagogically for students, as evidence to this point that OA journals and publishers do not have the weight that traditional “brick and mortar” journals have (ie it is good enough for students but not good enough for faculty.) For a long time I have explained the importance of OA to my faculty as a discoverability and impact issue, but, evidence has shown it is a quality issue as well. Just because availability of research increases its use, most often through FUTON (Full Text Online) bias, this is not indicative of the caliber of a resource. Therefore, Librarians shouldn’t dismiss our faculty’s concerns as a stodginess or an unwillingness to publish in web sources, but instead view them as part and parcel of larger debates of what makes research influential, impactful, and important.

I have seen this in my limited experience as a new librarian at both my graduate school and my current institution. Predatory journals and publishers work to capitalize on our enthusiasm for OA to entice our libraries to purchase, and our faculty to publish in, less than reputable journals. This is where our enthusiasm hurts the people we’re here to help, and hurts the overall image of OA. That is why I believe that librarians should encourage more than just openness in publishing; we should encourage quality. These are not mutually exclusive.

A result, perhaps, of the glut of false information on the internet we are suspicious of the quality of online sources. Open sources because of their very nature exist outside of the familiar boundaries of the expensive and locked journals of yesteryear, and so they are presumed to lack intellectual weight. How do we as librarians combat this in our efforts to encourage OA? For libraries with OA funds, we should only fund journals that appear in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and we should investigate every publisher who appears on the market. We should become well-versed in resources like Beall’s List that show predatory publishers, and we should warn each other about new and shady publishers. These sources are not set in stone so we should be open to talk with publishers about what we desire from open access publishing. We should hold our own hosted journals and monograph series to the same standard that our University Press partners and influential journals do. By doing this we do not limit who can publish or what can be published, but we ensure that OA journals and repositories will be treated with the respect that we know they should. The result would be that all open research including student research (which is often seen as unpolished or unready for the limelight) will be more impactful because of the healthier state of Open Access. We are approaching a moment where open publishing could be as accepted, especially for tenure files, as established sources.

Alas, all of this open information is useless if no one is reading it. We should make it a point to include OA resources into our database instruction. Why isn’t the Institutional Repository taught in our class sessions as a resource for students to use? Why do we always point to our paid databases rather than OA ones? There are two common sense reasons for this, one being that we pay for these resources, and two that these resources are “legitimate,” as in they are peer-reviewed and, often, backed by universities or organizations. Open Access in some ways counteracts the elitist undertones of this kind of thought. But this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Open resources are not seen as legitimate because we do not treat them as such, and legitimate resources do not use them because we do not believe them worthy. As Daniel Dorner and James Revell remarked in 2012, about IRs and OA, they: “must also be seen by information seekers as an accessible information resource whose content is useful to their needs”1 This worthiness is built not on availability but on expectations of quality. Hence, increasing the use of the IR or of OA resources will show that they are a worthy home for higher quality projects. If we expect people to submit to OA sources, we should encourage them to use the materials that are already housed in them.

OER Outreach for Newbies, Part III: Embracing the Messiness

This post is the third in a three-part series devoted to OER outreach (here are the first and second posts). I’ll use this post to advocate for more transparency from the library open education community in order to encourage OER newbies to take risks and share mistakes.

The most important thing I’m going to do moving forward is be open about my OER work—both the pretty parts and the ugly parts. Emily Drabinksi has acknowledged that the stumbling blocks of our work often don’t make the cut as conference proposals. They aren’t flashy or impressive. But they’re important. So I’d like to ask: how can we, as a community of librarians, make our OER work more open?

Many (though not all) of the OER sessions I’ve attended, particularly those that were facilitated by librarians, have been success stories. These sessions usually focus on (currently) high buy in from stakeholders and administration, high adoption rates, and increasing infrastructure. These sessions can be incredibly intimidating to someone new to OER outreach. Moreover, they privilege product over process and hide the messiness, the mistakes, and the misunderstandings—the work that I believe is most important for us to share in order to grow as a community.

As an example, Eleta Exline, the Scholarly Communication Coordinator at University of New Hampshire, shared tips and “what I wish I would have known”s with me before I started our OER stipend program and, as a result, I was able to think proactively and improve logistics before the program was even announced. Eleta encouraged me to create OER support teams for our recipients and brainstorm opportunities for the recipients to build a community and cross-pollinate by sharing successes, failures, and stumbling blocks with each other throughout the semester. Our faculty have a much more robust and thoughtful support structure in place because of her. For this reason, I’ve been explicit about what I wish I would have done differently here on ACRLog (for everyone to read!) but I also hope to continue to share moments of learning through Twitter and possibly conferences.

Perhaps one of the most important (and frankly disappointing) things I’ve learned as a new librarian is that academic librarianship can sometimes be an exclusive, impermeable club where our hiring practices enable us to swap superstars back and forth and our conference decisions mean that the same people are asked keynote again and again. We don’t always make entry and success easy for those new to the field or a specific area, like open education. I’m not yet embedded in the open education community to know if the same is true there. But I want to continually ask myself: am I making space for new voices? If I have an opportunity to lift up someone new to this area, do I? How do I privilege the same voices, knowingly or unknowingly? We need both transparency (the tools newbies need to get started) and inclusivity (the space newbies need to learn, grow, fail, and most importantly, share).

OER Outreach for Newbies, Part II: Moving Forward

This post is the second in a three-part series devoted to OER outreach. Find the first post here. I’ll use this post to reflect on my next steps for OER outreach. I’ll also suggest that OER outreach has to look different for liberal arts colleges, particularly those that aren’t using textbooks—traditional or open—in a majority of their classrooms. A quick reminder: while I am (and this post is) inextricably linked with my current place of work, I do not (and this post does not) represent Davidson College.

Two revelations are guiding my next steps: 1) an acknowledgement that our current OER landscape (which focuses heavily on textbooks and media) is not enough for the pedagogy at my institution and 2) OER outreach should be intentionally diverse, holistic, and varied to reach different audiences and stakeholders.

While our OER stipend program is a great start, it’s just that—a start. We cannot reasonably expect it to make a significant impact on one department, let alone the entire campus. All of our stipend recipients are also in STEM departments, leaving entire disciplinary gaps in our OER outreach. Implementing more stipends might be useful, but what about the faculty member that is afraid to make the switch? What about the faculty member that sees the CFP and doesn’t even know what open education is? For these reasons, we are hoping to intentionally offer a variety of programs, conversations, and incentives across campus.

This May, Robin DeRosa, an open advocate and faculty member at Plymouth State University, will be the keynote for our annual Teaching Showcase. I know that Robin will situate her talk in what makes Davidson unique (Davidson’s “ethos,” if you will)—a commitment to access to education and learning, a desire to innovate, and pedagogy that is student centered and student led. I hope that Robin’s talk will help wary faculty see that their work and values already intersect with open education and that we can help them take it a step further.

My goal is to also vary the audience of our OER outreach through other incentives. I, along with six other librarians from Furman University, Duke University, and Johnson C. Smith University, recently submitted a request for Duke Endowment Library funding. The funding would enable us to hire an OER expert who would help us create an “Intro to OER” workshop for faculty. Then, we’d create a stipend program for faculty interested in attending the workshop and reviewing a learning object for a potential course that they teach. This incentive, while smaller, would allow faculty that are more wary of OER to investigate potential open resources without making them commit to transitioning completely. We hope that this will eventually encourage more OER adoption, as a similar program from the University of Minnesota has. OER expert Ethan Senack, writing about the Minnesota program, stated that “[w]hile the original intent of the project was to build open textbook credibility through reviews, it soon became clear that when faculty engaged with open content to provide a review, they were likely to adopt the open textbook in their class” (p. 13). Our application is still pending but I’m hopeful that, if it’s accepted, it will enable us to reach new departments and faculty members.

I’m also embedded in two Digital Learning Research and Design (DLRD) projects that have an open education element. DLRD is led by friend and colleague, Kristen Eshleman, and is fairly unique to Davidson. DLRD’s goal is essentially to reimagine the liberal arts and push back on what a traditional liberal arts education is supposed to look like. It does this by asking students (yes, students!), faculty, and staff to think past the constraints of higher education (the credit hour, time constraints, a fear of failing, distribution requirements, grades, space constraints, and a need to cover content) to reimagine what inclusive pedagogy, student agency, and experiential learning, particularly outside of the confines of classroom, might look like. I am so thankful to be even a small part of this project.

Essentially, my role in both of projects is to be the “OER expert.” For example, one of the DLRD projects is to design an Asian American Studies curriculum. Asian American Studies doesn’t currently exist at Davidson and because of this gap several students have had to create their own independent studies. These students would like to come together and, with the help of experts, craft a class or curriculum (including a much-needed introductory open text or online learning tool) from scratch. Supporting a project like this has really tested my knowledge about OER repositories and tools. But I believe that being truly embedded in these two projects will make open education more visible to humanities departments and other areas we aren’t currently reaching. It has been heartening to see students advocate for openness for whatever they create from the beginning of this project. I can’t wait to see their hard work and thoughtfulness come to fruition.

Students designing the open/student-led Asian American Studies Course, photo by Kristen Eshleman

Constraints/barriers & potential experiments identified during our first design challenge

My point is that we have to be adaptable and think about OER outreach holistically—across departments and levels of familiarity. How can we maximize the number of champions on campus? How can we decrease the silos for sharing both successes and failures? How can we appeal to faculty across the spectrum of adoption that I discussed previously?

Finally, as I move forward I’m not going to settle for our current OER landscape. Anyone that skims a few OER guides can quickly discern that open textbooks dominate our repositories. I would argue that media (tutorials, lectures, videos via MERLOT or OER Commons) are close behind, though I’ve not done a formal analysis. This is okay for most R1 universities trying to make general education science lectures with 250 students open. But it doesn’t work for an institution like mine, where textbooks are not always the norm. We receive the course material list from the bookstore every semester and while textbooks are used in some of the introductory science and business courses, it isn’t the lifeblood of our classrooms. (I have argued elsewhere that creating open textbooks isn’t a radical endeavor anyway.)

My goal here is not be elitist or claim that my institution is better than textbooks. But what if we pushed back on the norm? What if we made a repository for liberal arts colleges or, better yet, for more active and inclusive forms of learning? As an example, one of our OER stipend recipients has his students create concept maps. He has them start by creating a concept map for one piece of the primary literature. Then, as they read more literature, they create higher-level concept maps that combine different pieces of literature together. This encourages students to see and question connections while better understanding how science evolves. As more literature is added, each node on the concept map becomes less granular. At the end of the semester, students create a compilation of their concept maps and submit their own “textbook” for grading.

Next Fall, we’re going to create an OER out of the best concept maps that students create. Students will intentionally curate this OER as a group. I will work with students to determine which Creative Commons license is most appropriate for the class as a whole and students will be able to decide which restrictions they’d like on their work. Then the faculty member I’m working with will provide citations to the literature they mapped (most of the literature is closed so we cannot provide the full text) and information about this exercise as a pedagogical tool. This is one of the coolest OER projects I’ve ever heard of—it pushes back on textbooks and what undergraduate learning should look like while nodding to the need for Open Access. But I have no idea where this thing should go! It isn’t a traditional textbook (OpenStax, UMN Open Textbook Library, Open SUNY Textbooks) but it doesn’t quite fit into OER Commons, MERLOT, or OpenCourseWare.

This isn’t an issue for just one OER! The same case could be made for the Asian American Studies learning object we’re trying to create. There are a lot of other awesome projects being built with Pressbooks/ Hypothes.is and Drupal that might be “textbooks,” but not in the traditional sense. Aren’t these projects—projects that actively involve students—much more interesting than textbook sprints?! What if we made an open pedagogy repository? What if we decided to change the open textbook scene to include work that asks students to interface with the literature? What would it look like? What technology would we need? How much more rich would the learning materials be? I don’t have answers. Only provocations. But I know that this needs to change. How can we get started?