2 Becoming an Open Educator

2.1. What Is an Open Educator?

Most definitions of an open educator seem to focus on the idea that an open educator is simply defined as one who uses open educational resources (OER). This aligns with early definitions of open pedagogy as well (see Chapter 5). However, as the open education movement has matured, the opportunities for adopting and expanding open practices have also evolved beyond simply utilizing OER.

Nascimbeni and Burgos (2016) believe that using OER is only the beginning of being an open educator. They have identified four main activities of an open educator. According to their research, an open educator is one who:

• implements open learning design by openly sharing ideas and plans about their teaching activities with experts and with past and potential students, incorporating inputs and transparently leaving a trace of the development process;
• uses open educational content by releasing their teaching resources through open licenses; by facilitating the sharing of their resources through OER repositories and other means; and by adapting, assembling, and using OER produced by others in their teaching;
• adopts open pedagogies that foster the co-creation of knowledge by students through online and offline collaboration and allowing learners to contribute to public-knowledge resources such as Wikipedia; and
• implements open assessment practices such as peer and collaborative evaluation, open badges, and e-portfolios—engaging students as well as external stakeholders in learning assessment.

“Openness is not like a light switch that is either ‘on’ or ‘off.’ Rather, it is like a dimmer switch with varying degrees of openness” (Hilton et al., 2010). This is a great way to think about open. As you develop your identity as an open educator, there will be areas that are comfortable for you and some that will be challenging. Depending on the course, the format, and your comfort level with teaching and learning, your degree of openness will likely change regularly throughout your career.

2.2. Establishing Yourself as an Open Educator

If you are considering a career in academia after completing your degree, now is the time to start developing your scholarly identity and establishing yourself as an open educator. It will be much easier to incorporate open practices from the start than to try to change your approach later in your career. Depending on where you are in your program, you might already be teaching, in which case you may have the opportunity to experiment with open educational practices (OEP) while still a student.

Not teaching yet? There are plenty of opportunities to start exploring open scholarly practices while you’re still a student. For example, you can turn research papers, essays, meta-analyses, and other academic work into open educational resources. Some suggestions:

• Consider applying a Creative Commons license to your work, which makes it more shareable (see Chapter 3).
• Submit a copy of or a link to your openly licensed work to an OER repository (see Section 4.5).
• Make your openly licensed work easy to download or take apart for remixing.
• Publish about your work on a blog or wiki, with an open license.
• If you take photos or create images or other media, especially if you do so in the course of your studies, consider uploading them to a sharing platform like Unsplash or YouTube that allows you to license them openly.

Publishing and sharing your work is a key part of scholarship and academic life, and there are many options for graduate students to participate in this process.

2.3. The Benefits of Open Scholarship

Martin Weller, in his open access book The Battle for Open, describes some of the motivations that scholars may have for adopting open approaches. These include:

• Increased audience through the removal of barriers to people accessing a resource, be it an article, book, course, service, video, or presentation. This means it has to be free, easily shareable, online, and openly licensed.
• Increased reuse by allowing others to take what you have created and combine it with other elements, adapt it, and republish. The same considerations are required as above, but with an extra emphasis on minimal rights and also creating the resource in convenient chunks that can be adapted. Whereas increasing audiences means releasing an article online, increasing reuse might lead someone to share the data that underlies it.
• Increased access with the intention to support particular groups who may be disadvantaged. This may mean incorporating a social justice approach to scholarship or developing strategies such as open access admission for courses such that no formal entry qualifications are required to study.
• Increased experimentation through the use of different media or approaches that would not fit within the normal constraints of standard practice.
• Increased reputation by being networked and online can help improve an individual scholar’s or an institution’s profile. As an academic, operating in the open—publishing openly, creating online resources, being active in social media, and establishing an online identity as an open scholar—can be a good way to achieve peer recognition, which can lead to tangible outputs such as invites to present or participate in research collaborations.
• Increased participation and input through open practices, such as via crowdsourcing in research or getting feedback on a book or research proposal. Being open allows others to access your research and then provide the input required.

Additionally, open scholarship can make research and other academic processes more efficient: greater access to scientific inputs and outputs can improve the effectiveness and productivity of the research system by reducing duplication and the costs of creating, transferring, and reusing data; allowing more research from the same data; and multiplying opportunities for domestic and global participation in the research process. Open approaches can also improve the quality and integrity of scholarship: open access to scientific outputs, data, and other assets that support the research process offer the opportunity of a wider evaluation and scrutiny by the scientific community, thus allowing a greater and more accurate replication and validation of research results.

Finally, by making the processes and outputs of scholarship open, researchers and educators promote awareness, knowledge, and learning among the public writ large. Openness evidences the outcomes of publicly funded research, and can help to build trust and support for public policies and investments. Moreover, it promotes citizens’ engagement and even active participation in scientific experiments and data collection. This engagement can promote collaborative efforts and faster knowledge transfer. This allows for a better understanding of global challenges that require coordinated international actions, such as climate change or the aging population, and also could help identify solutions more effectively.

2.4. Making Professional Connections

The open sharing of information and knowledge not only allows for greater access, but also supports collaboration and innovation. The idea of free and open sharing in education is not new. In fact, education is the sharing of information and ideas upon which new knowledge, skills, and understanding can be built. Sharing information allows for greater retention as it becomes part of a collective repository that many can access. It helps to break down silos and allows for new ideas—or thoughts—to germinate.

A study by Sapire and Reed (2011) shows that sharing and collaboration in open education improves the quality and depth of learning resources. Those who engage in open collaborative projects are more likely to collaborate in the future (Petrides et al., 2011). Furthermore, educators who co-create OER are more likely to continue creating and sharing content online on a consistent and ongoing basis (Petrides et al., 2008). This suggests that once educators engage in a community, they see the benefits of it, which makes this process more sustainable.

The benefits of sharing are great and have an impact on all stakeholders in open education. Through open sharing, undergraduate and graduate students have a richer and more engaging learning experience—as they have greater access to information, perspectives, and materials to help them to succeed. Open educators can draw on resources from all around the world—and researchers can share data and develop new networks. People can connect with others they would not otherwise meet to share ideas and information. Materials can be translated, mixed together, broken apart, and openly shared again—increasing access and inviting fresh approaches.

By establishing yourself as an open educator, you are joining a robust community of higher education practitioners with a shared interest in all things open. This community has evolved over the past two decades to include faculty, academic librarians, administrators, student organizations, instructional designers, entrepreneurs, and many others. So how do you find these folks? There are organizations devoted to open education advocacy, as well as a plethora of regional, national, and international conferences. Discipline-specific professional organizations often have committees or task forces that focus on aspects of open education or scholarship as well. And your campus may well have open education initiatives already underway, centered around students or faculty, or both.

At the national level in the United States, SPARC is a nonprofit advocacy organization that promotes open education and access via various initiatives. It issues frequent updates about open education and maintains an active email listserv and community calls where open educators can network and discuss various issues. Although the SPARC listserv LibOER is intended for academic and research libraries, it is likely to be of interest to others in academia as well. Recent posts have included calls for survey participation from researchers, questions about relevant technology and open licensing, and more. SPARC, Creative Commons, and the Student PIRGs offer a free monthly newsletter called OER Digest. It includes news about relevant federal and state legislation, professional development opportunities, new OER, and more.

The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) maintains an email listserv and Google Group to share ideas, resources, and best practices for OER. While primarily intended for community college educators, it is an active list with a national scope and its participants have a wide range of expertise in open education. Recent posts have included announcements of new open resources, professional development opportunities like webinars and conferences, government policy updates, and questions about specific aspects of OER and open licenses.

Attending or presenting at conferences can be a great way to build your professional presence and network, and there are many that focus on OER and open education. For example, the Open Education Conference, often referred to simply as Open Ed, is a large, international, annual conference that explores various aspects of open, from OER to open pedagogy. This conference has run for nearly 20 years and has established itself as a high-quality gathering with a diverse array of learning opportunities. In recent years it has shifted to a virtual format. Other international OER conferences include the CC Global Summit sponsored by Creative Commons and the OEGlobal Conference sponsored by the nonprofit organization Open Education Global. Many U.S. OER conferences tend to be regional (e.g., CAL OER and the Northeast OER Summit) or discipline-specific (e.g., the Language OER Conference).

2.5. Open Education Practices and the Academic Job Search

When you enter the job market, highlighting your open practices in your CV and ancillary material—such as statements of teaching philosophy or diversity, equity, and inclusion—can help you stand out in the crowd of applicants and make it clear that you center students in your pedagogy. For example, if you can draw a clear connection between your implementation of open pedagogy and student success, or if you can point out that your utilization of OER helps you incorporate timely, relevant, and diverse perspectives in your course material, you are differentiating yourself from candidates who have not yet thought through these aspects of their scholarly identity.

In addition, if you have published your work with an open license, such as via research articles in OA journals or article preprints in an online repository, you can easily link directly to that material in your CV without having to worry about how hiring committee members will access it.

2.6. Open Education Practices and the Tenure and Promotion Process

It may seem too early to start thinking about tenure and promotion, but taking the time now to understand a little about the process and plan ahead will help ensure that you know what is expected of you so you can take the necessary steps to increase your chances of success. While institutional guidelines for tenure and promotion vary widely, U.S. faculty are typically assessed in the areas of research, teaching, and service. OEP can fit into all three categories, so you will need consider where your own work in open education best fits. For example, using OER in your courses, revising it to be more relevant to students’ needs and the course learning outcomes, and designing assignments that guide and inform students to create new OER from scratch are all activities that could align well with tenure and promotion standards for excellence in teaching.

In a study commissioned by eCampusOntario, authors James M. Skidmore and Myrto Provida (2019) argue that without institutional support for the recognition of OEP in the tenure process, faculty may be reluctant to undertake the work. They write:

The largest barrier to participation in OEP is the lack of professional recognition. Tenured and tenure-track faculty members who evince interest in becoming involved in OEP worry about the amount of time needed to do it properly. Those concerns are compounded if the faculty member thinks that the time and effort expended on OEP will not be recognized in the normal career progression processes, namely tenure and promotion. (p. 10)

Sometimes research is weighted more heavily than teaching and service in the tenure and promotion process. While OEP would seem to fit most naturally under teaching, the creation of new OER, especially peer-reviewed materials, is starting to be counted as research at some institutions. Other open activities, such as contributing to the scholarship of teaching and learning, presenting at open education conferences, and writing grants for OER support are beginning to emerge as research activities for the purposes of promotion and tenure, although this is far from common practice.

Whether arguing for retention, tenure, or promotion, it will be important to clearly demonstrate how your work as an open educator aligns with the institution’s strategic plan. For example, OER adoption, modification, and creation can connect with institutional goals related to:

• Student success, including recruitment and retention.
• Diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice.
• Effective and engaging pedagogy.
• Community engagement.
• Affordability and access to education.

Plan to provide clear evidence from the literature and/or local data for the impact of OER on institutional priorities. A few examples are provided below:

• Students in a course using an open textbook are more likely to do better in the course and less likely to withdraw from the course.
• OER adoption supports access and affordability, saving students an average of more than $100 per course. Multiply that by the number of students enrolled in your course each semester, and it becomes clear that you are making a demonstrable cost-savings impact.
• Leverage any local data, such as student surveys about textbook affordability concerns and the relationship with academic success.

For more information on how OEP can fit into your plans for tenure and promotion, see OER in Tenure and Promotion by the Driving OER Sustainability for Student Success (DOERS3) Collaborative.

References

Hilton III, J., Wiley, D., Stein, J., & Johnson, A. (2010). The four ‘R’s of openness and ALMS analysis: Frameworks for open educational resources. Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 25(1), 37–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680510903482132

Nascimbeni, F., & Burgos, D. (2016). In search for the open educator: Proposal of a definition and a framework to increase openness adoption among university educators. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 17(6), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v17i6.2736

Petrides, L., Jimes, C., Middleton-Detzner, C., Walling, J., & Weiss, S. (2011). Open textbook adoption and use: Implications for teachers and learners. Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 26(1), 39–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2011.538563

Petrides, L., Nguyen, L., Jimes, C., & Karaglani, A. (2008). Open educational resources: Inquiring into author use and reuse. International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, 1(1-2), 98–117. https://doi.org/10.1504/IJTEL.2008.020233

Sapire, I., & Reed, Y. (2011). Collaborative design and use of open educational resources: A case study of a mathematics teacher education project in South Africa. Distance Learning, 32(2), 195–211. https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2011.584847

Skidmore, J. M., & Provida, M. (2019, March). A place for policy: The role of policy in supporting open educational resources and practices at Ontario’s colleges and universities. eCampusOntario, https://www.ecampusontario.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/2019-08-07-skimore-oe-policy-report.pdf