Open Educational Practices/Introduction

This lesson introduces open educational practices and course educational technology tools.

Objectives and Skills

Objectives and skills for this lesson include:

• Understand key concepts and terminology for open educational practices
• Use the course discussion forum
• Create a Wikiversity user page
• Edit the course wiki

Readings

1. Wikipedia: Open educational practices
2. Outcomes of Openness: Empirical Reports on the Implementation of OER
3. Wikipedia: Piazza (web service)

Multimedia

1. YouTube: Introduction to Open Pedagogy
2. YouTube: Piazza Q&A Platform
3. YouTube: Open Educational Resources and innovation in higher education (Cable Green)

Activities

1. Learn about open educational practices.
   • Review content from the Readings and Multimedia links above. Make note of any concepts or key terms that are new to you. Your list of new concepts and key terms will be used in a future activity below.
2. Participate in Piazza discussion forums.
   • Review the Piazza reading and/or multimedia links above. Piazza will be used as the primary communication platform for this course.
   • Follow the instructions to join the Piazza course discussion forums and review existing posts.
   • Review the Area and Discipline List post and, if necessary, respond to add your academic area(s) or discipline(s). A discussion group will be created for each area and discipline. You may join and follow as many groups as you wish.
   • Create a new note and introduce yourself to the entire class. Be sure to describe why you are taking this course and at least one topic or subject area you are looking forward to learning about. Respond to other introductory posts that interest you.
   • Create or respond to notes for one or more groups that interest you. Test the difference between Question posts and Note posts. Post any questions you have as Question posts so they may be easily identified and quickly addressed.
   • Respond to one or more of the polls that have been created. Experiment by creating a poll yourself, if you wish.
3. Create a Wikiversity user page.
   • Review Wikiversity:Why create an account.
   • Create a Wikiversity account, or use your existing account if you already have one. Your username does not need to identify you in any way, but you are welcome to use your real-world name if you wish.
   • After creating your account and logging in, you should see a red link at the top of the page with your username, which links to your user page. Follow the link and practice editing your user page to introduce yourself however you wish. Your introduction may be completely anonymous, or it may include your institutional affiliation(s) and/or academic areas of interest, etc. Review Help:Wikitext quick reference for hints on how to format Wikitext.
4. Create your course checklist page.
   • Use the Create Checklist page to copy the course Checklist and save it under your username as User:<your username>/OEP . Your checklist will be reviewed at the end of the course to document completion.
5. Edit this page.
   • Review Wikiversity:Be bold. Wikis only work if people are bold.
   • Review your notes of new concepts or key terms from this lesson and compare them to the Lesson Summary and Key Terms listed below.
   • Be bold by improving this course wiki page using the Edit tab. For the Lesson Summary and Key Terms, include references for any content you add. If the Lesson Summary and Key Terms sections seem complete to you, review the Readings and Multimedia links for opportunities for improvement. But note, improving a wiki does not always mean adding to the wiki. Consider how much content you, yourself, are willing to view. Add, edit, update, delete, replace with links to better resources, etc. Your guide should always be to leave the wiki better than you found it.
6. Reflect on open educational practices.
   • Reflect on what you learned in this introduction to open educational practices. What surprised you? What have you learned so far that you can apply to your own learning environment(s)? Post your reflection in the Piazza discussion forum, sharing it with either the entire class or one or more of the available discussion groups.
   • Review other reflection posts and respond to at least two that interest you. Post any questions you have that you would like others to address.

Lesson Summary

Additional items will be contributed by course participants

• Open Educational Practices (OEP) use Open Educational Resources (OER) for teaching and learning in order to innovate the learning process.
  • Part of this innovation is to shift from a single-flow, instructor-centric model of imparting knowledge to one that offers learners and instructors the ability to collaborate on the creation of OER materials that better suit the instructional needs of today's lifelong learners. The advantage of OER materials shared between instructors is that they are able to learn from one another through the process of adopting, adapting, and molding content to the ways that are relevant to their course and their students.
  • While OER often refers to a category or type of learning material, OEP represents a set of skills related to collaboration, content creation, and resource curation.
• Open pedagogy is an ethos that has two major components:
  • A belief in the potential of openness and sharing to improve learning
  • A social justice orientation – caring about equity, with openness as one way to achieve this

Key Terms

Additional items will be contributed by course participants

attribution

Concept in copyright law requiring an author to be credited.

creative commons licenses

Crucial component to making educational content available for remixing, redistribution, re-use, and for allowing others to create derivative works. Creative commons licenses are an agreement between the author(s) and the general public, allowing them to make use of the work according to the license without first asking for permission and without violating copyright.

open educational practices (OEP)

The use of open educational resources to enhance teaching or learning. These kinds of strategies and assignments clearly use "the reuse, revise, remix, redistribute permissions of open educational resources in order to enable students to extend and improve the official instructional materials required for the course".

open educational resources (OER)

Freely available and openly licensed educational materials that can be used for teaching, learning, research, and other purposes.

open pedagogy

A meeting of theories about learning, technology, teaching, access, inclusivity, and social justice overlap and influence the development of education. Also described as an "access-oriented commitment to learner-driven education"—"learner-driven" denotes an active role for students.

open scholarship

Open Scholarship is an umbrella term used to describe developments such as open access, open science, open education and other “open” initiatives. It reflects the increasingly open nature of access to information, research collaboration, and sharing and re-use of research data.

See Also

• Piazza
• Google Sites: Harper College Copyright Tutorial
• Weller, Martin. The Battle for Open: How Openness Won and Why It Doesn’t Feel Like Victory. ubiquity press: London, 2014.

References

Open Educational Practices

Open Educational Resources →