Open Education 2016

What if faculty co-constructed their course syllabi with their students, allowing them more control over learning outcomes, policies, required readings, assignments, and even grading? What if students were encouraged to engage in public scholarship and tasked with producing or refining open resources for the commons? And what if universities collaboratively developed their courses with radical transparency? Would rethinking education in this fashion prompt students, faculty, and administrators to recoil in fear or give in to territoriality? Or are there ways that open pedagogy can contribute to a new and relevant vision for education, one built on an ethos of sharing?

Post-secondary institutions frequently claim to be student-centered; however, they are often hard-pressed to offer any truly compelling ways in which their students (not faculty, course content, accreditation or testing requirements, or budgetary concerns) actually drive the learning process. Open education advocates routinely describe OER as "beyond free"; however, faculty who reuse, redistribute, and retain OER (themselves a minority) vastly outnumber those who revise and remix OER (let alone those few who involve their students in the process). Taken together this begs the question of whether "student-centered" and "permissions" are just soothing ideas or marketing ploys that are rarely implemented? In other words, are we are merely paying lip service to the pedagogical potential of open?

At OpenEd15, spirited conversations began about the role of open pedagogy in the OER community and the question of whether "free" is truly a gateway to "freedom." This presentation considers how "open" can manifest a learner-driven educational philosophy and how its practice can enhance our classrooms, our courses, and even our advocacy. We will offer a broad definition of "open pedagogy," explore it in practice (including providing specific examples from a range of academic fields and levels), and then raise questions about the potential benefits and pitfalls of widening the focus of open education advocacy and scholarship from open textbooks and cost-savings to include pedagogy and the value of the open license. Embedded in this presentation is our belief that the power of "open" is being underutilized, and that we as advocates should be thinking more broadly about access and more ambitiously about how the big tent of "open" can contribute to a critically needed, sustainable, and aspirational vision for education by and for the public.