OE Global 2019

This communication focuses on the key findings of PRAXIS Project, an experience in the context of two public higher education institutions from Uruguay. The Project aims to explore the potential and benefits of communities for the reflection and transformation of teaching practices and the integration of digital technologies in a meaningful way into teaching, as a strategy towards fostering critical literacies, teaching innovations and open educational practices (OEP). Within academic professional learning communities (APLC) and action research, an approach based on OEP and Open Research (OR) was developed. The community involved senior and early career university educators from very diverse disciplines, in a three months course. The syllabus was organized in three modules focused on the identification, reflection and transformation of teaching practices with digital technologies, alternating face to face group meetings and reflective writing-blog posts with peer comments. These writings were openly shared through the academic social network Comunidad ProEVA. Results of the experience, analysis of the virtual interactions in the social network, and lessons learned are presented, as well as the transition to a new project, PRAXIS 2, now in progress.
Key conclusions of the #PraxisUdelar community experience emphasize the impact of combining OEP, OR, APLC approaches, and collaborative and participatory technologies for the transformation of teaching and educational research practices.
The ongoing second project proposes to deepen the work developed in PRAXIS, following and expanding its design, capitalizing the previous work and extending their reach to the teacher trainers.