Articulate motivations for Open Pedagogy adoptions and use
Describe the benefits of Open Pedagogy for students
Describe the benefits of Open Pedagogy for faculty
Explore further benefits Open Pedagogy supports, such as equity and inclusion
Open Education encompasses resources, tools and practices that are free of legal, financial and technical barriers and can be fully used, shared and adapted in the digital environment.
For too long, our educational systems have operated with a fundamental disconnect between practices left over from the analog world, and the vast potential of technology and the Internet to support more affordable, effective teaching and learning. The movement for Open Education seeks to close this gap.
The foundation of Open Education is Open Educational Resources (OER), which are teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers, and which also carry legal permission for open use. Generally, this permission is granted by use of an open license (for example, Creative Commons licenses) which allows anyone to freely use, adapt and share the resource—anytime, anywhere. “Open” permissions are typically defined in terms of the “5R’s”: users are free to Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute these educational materials.
Textbook costs should not be a barrier to education. The price of textbooks has skyrocketed more than three times the rate of inflation for decades. College students face steep price tags that can top $200 per book, and K-12 schools use books many years out of date because they are too expensive to replace. Using OER solves this problem because the material is free online, affordable in print, and can be saved forever. Resources that would otherwise go to purchasing textbooks can be redirected toward technology, improving instruction, or reducing debt.
Students learn more when they have access to quality materials. The rapidly rising cost of textbooks in higher education has left many students without access to the materials they need to succeed. Studies show that 93% of students who use OER do as well or better than those using traditional materials, since they have easy access to the content starting day one of the course.
Technology holds boundless potential to improve teaching and learning. Open Education ensures that teachers, learners and institutions can fully explore this potential. Imagine an American History textbook with the latest news from the run-up to the 2018 election, or a math tutorial that incorporates local landmarks into word problems. Imagine a lecture attended by hundreds of thousands of people across the globe, or a peer-to-peer exchange between Canadian students learning Mandarin with Chinese students learning English or French. All of this and more is possible when the pathways for technology in education are fully open.
Better education means a better future. Education is the key to advancing society’s greatest goals, from a building a strong economy to leading healthy lives. By increasing access to education and creating a platform for more effective teaching and learning, Open Education benefits us all.
One key component of Open Pedagogy might be that it sees access, broadly writ, as fundamental to learning and to teaching, and agency as an important way of broadening that access. OERs are licensed with open licenses, which reflects not just a commitment to access in terms of the cost of knowledge, but also access in terms of the creation of knowledge. Embedded in the social justice commitment to making college affordable for all students is a related belief that knowledge should not be an elite domain. Knowledge consumption and knowledge creation are not separate but parallel processes, as knowledge is co-constructed, contextualized, cumulative, iterative, and recursive.
In this way, Open Pedagogy invites us to focus on how we can increase access to higher education and how we can increase access to knowledge–both its reception and its creation. This is, fundamentally, about the dream of a public learning commons, where learners are empowered to shape the world as they encounter it. With the open license at the heart of our work, we care both about “free” and about “freedom,” about resources and practices, about access and about accessibility, about content and about contribution. This is not a magical thinking[16] approach to digital pedagogy. It’s an honest appraisal of the barriers that exist in our educational systems and a refusal to abdicate responsibility for those barriers.
You’ll notice that this module contains a video Open Dialogues: How to Engage and Support Students in Open Pedagogy. After watching the video take time to reflect and think about any questions you might have after viewing it.
The Why OER section has been sourced from Why it Matters: Open Education, a page by SPARC which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License CC BY 2020.
Why Open Pedagogy? is from The Open Pedagogy Notebook licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
“Open Dialogues: How to engage and support students in open pedagogies” by Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, University of British Columbia is licensed CC BY 3.0.