Additional .pdf copy of this journal article with Hypothes.is annotations available by downloading: https://journals.sfu.ca/jalt/index.php/jalt/article/download/843/597

Recommended Resource:

I recommend adding this doctoral research article on developing open education practices (OEP) in British Columbia, Canada. The scholarly article is released by Open University, a U.K. higher education institution that promotes open education.

Paskevicius, M. & Irvine, V. (2019). Open Education and Learning Design: Open Pedagogy in Praxis. Open University, 2019(1). DOI: 10.5334/jime.51

A relevant excerpt from the article reveals the study results that show OEP enhances student learning:

"Furthermore, participants reflected on how inviting learners to work in the open increased the level of risk and/or potential reward and thereby motivated greater investment in the work. This was articulated by Patricia who suggested “the stakes might feel higher when someone is creating something that’s going to be open and accessible by a wider community” as well as Alice who stated “students will write differently, you know, if they know it’s not just going to their professor.” The practice of encouraging learners to share their work was perceived by Olivia to “add more value to their work,” by showing learners the work they do at university can “have an audience beyond their professors.”"

I still wonder to what degree open educational practices are necessarily or always tied to copyright. That is, can OEP be implemented on copyrighted texts?

Giving learners more autonomy in their learning is a great pedagogical principle, and in the context of the article focusing on learning design, I can see how this fits with "open" as it does require that the course design needs to be more "open" as in flexible to allow for this kind of learner autonomy. There is overlap here between authentic learning and open pedagogy.

In fact, Rory McGreal adamantly argues that CC-BY-NC material is too restrictive to be called “OER”. We had a short exchange about this. In Quebec’s Cégep system, NC was the rule for reasons which are probably easy to understand. So the focus is on licenses, in this scene, not on practices. Hence the whole thing about Open Textbooks. Often made me wonder if any of these people had compared textbook-based teaching to any of the other modalities. In my teaching, textbooks are a problem, even when they’re open. Sure, some of those problems can be solved when you have access to the code and can produce your own textbook from that. That’s the typical solution offered in the GitHub sphere:

Just Fork It!

But the core problem remains: if you’re teaching with a textbook, you may not really be building knowledge with learners.

(Should probably move this here.)