OE Global 2019

‘Becoming an Open Education Influencer’ (BOEI) is an informative and practical, fully online course that supports influencers of and for Open Education. The BOEI project is included in the UNESCO Open Education for a Better World programme, an international mentorship collaboration.

The aim of the BOEI course is to support pathways for individuals and groups wishing to influence decision-makers, and who want to affect decision-making and practices through direct actions in Open education. The course covers the process of influencing, as adapted from the Contribute, Attribute, Release and Empower [CARE] framework for Open Stewards (Petrides, Levin, and Watson, 2018) as 4 of the cornerstones of influencing practice. The course includes a uniquely South African ‘humanising’ (Zinn and Rodgers, 2012) element, introducing Ubuntu as philosophy and practice of generosity.

Participants will be introduced to the BOEI course development process, lessons learned in the process, and explore the experiences of students as co-creators of knowledge. The Open Education Influencers (OEIs) project, the student-driven advocacy component of the training programme, started at Nelson Mandela University in South Africa in 2018. #OpenEdInfluencers started as an initiative to empower, capacitate and strategically deploy student advocates across university campuses, and developed into a training programme co-created by students and staff.

The #OpenEdInfluencers increase awareness of Open Educational Resources, and facilitate better adoption and creation of OER at the institution. All the while, #OpenEdInfluencers energetically advocate for the use of Open Textbooks across purpose, faculties and schools; conducting research into student experiences with OER and textbooks.

In this session: The #OpenEdInfluencers from Nelson Mandela University will present a conference presentation about the BOEI project, sharing its inclusion in the UNESCO Open Education for a Better World programme.

The #OpenEdInfluencers also present a poster sharing exploratory findings about student awareness and experiences with OER Textbooks at Mandela University.

A common thread throughout the literature on adjunct faculty is that they consistently report feeling disconnected from the institution(s) they work for. As a result, we typically see that adjunct faculty are reluctant to pursue the adoption of “radical” teaching practices, like open pedagogy, and this reluctance is exacerbated by the time and effort required to make such pedagogical shifts. This presentation will unpack and examine one adjunct’s experience of participating in a library-led OER Faculty Fellowship opportunity that was open to both full-time and adjunct faculty at a private, 4-year institution in the United States: how her participation served to create an unexpected connection with a librarian and ultimately helped integrate her into the larger campus community. As the OER and OEP communities continue to grow and diversify, we hope this presentation will help spark a dialogue about how the academic community, not just the library, can play a role in facilitating and driving the inclusion and support of adjunct faculty now, as opposed to leaving them as an afterthought.

Linked to the principles of Open Educational Practices (OEP) and Open Educational Resources (OER), open pedagogy is a trend increasingly visible in research and teaching practices, particularly in Higher Education. This pedagogical approach aims to empower learners as OER’s co-creators by following the 5R permissions: Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute. This presentation reports on an example ‘OER-enabled pedagogy’, designed as a complementary activity (non-credit bearing) for undergraduate language learners (year 2 and final year) at Manchester Metropolitan University (UK). The aim of this research project was to investigate the use of transmedia skills by current students in formal Higher Education and how to reduce the digital dissonance between informal digital learning and formal learning. The study analyses the type of OERs created by the students and the data collected in pre-questionnaires and in the learners’ reflective tasks. The qualitative analysis weighs the advantages and drawbacks. Finally, recommendations for implementing follow-up open pedagogy activities are considered.

The Hewlett funded UK Open Textbooks project (2017-2018) had two aims. First, to investigate awareness of open textbooks within UK Higher Education (HE). Second, to test two highly successful open textbook models of adoption (OpenStax; Open Textbook Network) to assess their transferability to the UK context. To better understand textbook use patterns and the issues faced by students and educators, UK Open Textbooks conducted an incentivised survey of UK educators in September 2018. This presentation will report on the findings of this survey which focused on awareness of open educational resources (OER), textbook use and rationale, awareness and use of open textbooks and open licensing.

The survey work carried out by UK Open Textbooks, and the experience of testing two methods of raising awareness and adoption through workshops and promotional activity, reveal a fertile ground for open textbook adoption with the potential to support a wide range of associated open educational practices. Our findings indicate that the same challenges are consistently experienced across the whole of the UK and indicate possible strategies for raising awareness and supporting pedagogical innovation and student access through the mainstream adoption of open textbooks.

One underexplored area of Open Pedagogy is the use of Open Educational Practices (OEP) in general education courses. This presentation will highlight an ongoing OEP project in an undergraduate science course for non-majors at Roger Williams University with goals towards a more authentic learning experience and to help students develop “content fluency” - deemphasizing details of a subject in favor of context and allows the students to gain confidence discussing or engaging with the topic, which is an important part of scientific literacy. After some inspiration from a presentation on student-created textbooks, a research paper and poster presentation project was converted into a renewable website creation project utilizing the Google sites platform. Students in a non-majors science course selected topics typically covered in the course and created websites to present sub-topics. The websites are revisited in subsequent semesters by the next cohort of students to add more content, and in the future, to develop supplemental course materials. In converting the project, certain skills were identified as needing to be scaffolded for the students, like understanding copyright and creative commons. An unexpected result of the project conversion was also an overarching change in the pedagogical design of the course to remove exams and include more reflection. The presentation will highlight the successes and missteps of the project, while also showing that open pedagogy can be utilized in general education courses to advance authentic learning and the concept of content fluency.

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.

The use of OER in the education sector is emerging, especially in higher education. With all its advantages, OER provides a new nuance for the spread of science and technology so that giving a chance for anyone to learn. This study aims to analyze the effect of perceived benefits and perceived deterrents on awareness, as well as the influence of awareness on recommendation. The research was conducted in an online learning environment, where we require all tutors to integrate OER into their online learning. With the acquisition of 234 data, the results of the study showed that perceived benefits are statistically influenced awareness and awareness are proven to influence recommendation. It also highlights that tutors have strategic roles in utilizing OER. Therefore, institution must carry out various activities in order to improve the understanding and competence of tutors in terms of OER utilization.