Institutional mapping of open educational practices beyond use of Open Educational Resources

Abstract

Mapping openness capacities within universities beyond OER: a case study Many efforts exist to increase the use of open practices within Higher Education, but just a few of them start from the actual openness capacities of universities, mainly because mapping openness is a rather difficult exercise. This paper addresses this challenge from an original viewpoint, claiming that capacity building on openness within a university-as well as within any educational institution-should be done by building on the existing skills and on the local champions that are already fluent in open approaches. The paper builds on the Open Educators Factory methodology to map openness capacity of universities across all dimensions of open education: open design, open content, open teaching and open assessment, and presents the results of its application to a pilot case study within an Italian university. As shown by the pilot results, by using this approach it has been possible to map the existing level of openness capacity within a university and to connect it with the fluency of local educators, offering university leaders the possibility of building on the best performers to raise the overall openness capacity of their teaching staff.

Unveiling the Relationship between the Use of Open Educational Resources and the Adoption of Open Teaching Practices in Higher Education

“…Also, the results show that within a university some educators might be more inclined to adopt open teaching strategies and might be using OER as a logical support for these approaches, while others might be more thoughtful in making sure that the content they use is made available openly, in line with institutional or national copyright legislation, and by doing so they use open resources that can potentially support social learning practices. The coexistence of these categories of educators corroborates the idea that, in order to increase the adoption of OEP within a university, multiple strategies are possible [21,22]. What matters here is that the data confirms that different roads can be taken to create sustainable ecosystems where OER can be used to support high-quality and inclusive education [5].…”

Open Educational Practices Advocacy: The Instructional Designer Experience

“…While research into open educational practices has increased substantially over the past decade (e.g., Cronin, 2017;Ehlers, 2011;Nascimbeni, Burgos, Campbell & Tabacco, 2018;Weller, 2013;Weller, M., Jordan, K., DeVries, I., & Rolfe, V. 2018), adoption of open educational practices (OEP) including open educational resources (OER) more widely across the institution remains complex. For instance, challenges found in the literature include finding faculty able and willing to adopt OEPs (Childs, Axe, Veletsianos, & Webster, 2020), problems of discoverability and available support and time (Jhangiani, Pitt, Hendricks, Key, & Lalonde 2016), lack of supportive institutional cultures and strategies (Murphy, 2013), and the "diverse and often contested nature" (Cronin, 2020, p. 3) of the term "open educational practices" itself.…”

“…Campbell and Schwier (2014) note that "instructional designers and other influential contributors involved in the design and development of distributed learning programs must challenge and push boundaries of traditional practices if higher education is to maintain its relevance to students and society" (p. 370). As an important factor in adoption of OEP among faculty, Nascimbeni, Burgos, Campbell and Tabacco (2018) point to the "potential to build on the expertise of leading open practitioners to raise the overall capacity of their teaching staff" (p. 513). Ren (2019) notes that instructional designers "often serve as instructional innovators in solving teaching problems... [and] are more likely to become early adopters of new educational technologies and evaluate the usability of innovative resources" (p. 3492).…”

Performance Improvement Technology for Building a Sustainable OER Initiative in an Academic Library

“…OER are generally intended for initial digital distribution, facilitating a continually iterative process through which creators and users collaborate in strengthening current resources, cultivating innovative practices, and encouraging new ideas (Jhangiani and Biswas-Diener 2017). The digital environment of OER is potentially "exponentially larger and more diverse than that of a traditional university classroom" (Almeida 2017, p. 13), and lends itself to innovative teaching practices and creative pedagogy (Nascimbeni et al 2018).…”