Openness and Teaching, Learning, and Student Success
I’m speaking at this year’s CICAN conference in a couple of weeks, and was asked to do an additional session for the Teaching, Learning, and Student Success stream. This year’s conference theme aims to “showcase the contribution of colleges and institutes in transforming communities and building a more prosperous and equitable Canada which embraces diversity and inclusion, openness and a strong sense of pride” and since I’m fresh from my fabulous #OER17 experience, I thought I’d do a session called Teaching, Learning, and Student Success in the Context of Open.
That title doesn’t really say much, so I’m framing it around these questions:
- What do we gain as institutions when we care about open?
Greater opportunities to collaborate with others – I think BCcampus and the BC higher ed sector are a good example of this in action. And of course I’ll point to our Open Ed Tech Collaborative and BC WordPress Co-Op.
Greater institutional visibility – JIBC has some measurable examples of this, but it would be nice to have stories from others.
A shift towards a different concern for students – does caring about open at an institutional level result in a different type of caring about our students? I feel like it does, but can’t put forward an example at this point.
More control over resources such as technologies, textbook publication cycles and specialized subject matter – Again, JIBC has some concrete examples of this, but it would be nice to know whether this has also been the experiences and a ‘win’ for others.
2. How does open contribute to student success?
Open textbooks do reduce costs for students and do result in equal or better outcomes – I can dive a bit into articles that address the question of better outcomes such as this one by John Hilton III and this one by Feldstein but would love some other examples, even narratives, about how it does or doesn’t contribute to student success.
Open as an ethos that students can take with them into the “real world” aka. their professional lives – this was something that I heard Clint Lalonde and Amanda Coolidge mention in a recent interview and it really resonated with me as something that could be talked about a bit more in a broader social context.
3. How are teaching and learning improved or how do they benefit from openness?
The opportunity for open pedagogy and open practices – The obvious work to point to here is Robin DeRosa’s thinking about open pedagogy, as well Robin’s and other’s examples where students create open textbooks. I’m not sure there’s any research out there that says teaching and learning is improved as a result of open but I think it could be postulated that it opens up new possibilities, which in itself is a good thing and an important step.
I can also point to this study by Jhangiani et al , in which faculty perceived “that the use of OER in the classroom benefited their students and had a positive impact on their teaching practice”.
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I’d love to be able to point to other examples, so if you have any from your own institutions I’d appreciate it if you could add a comment or send a quick tweet to @tanbob. I PROMISE I’ll compile all the info into a neat and tidy post that can be made available to everybody. Or if somebody has already done this somewhere else, I hope somebody will point me to that*. Pretty please.
*I will be pointing to the OER Knowledge Cloud and the OER Hub
