Open Access Week 2021: Conversations About Open Education

It’s Open Access Week—an opportunity to share academic research (and to advance open research year-round). When information lives behind paywalls, it become inaccessible to those who benefit most. This year’s theme focuses on how open access provides a structure for equity—a common theme in education throughout 2021.

I used Open Access Week to reflect on the open education conversations I participated in over years.

An open experience for learners

Open access to research belongs in the larger conversation about open educational resources (OER). OER includes textbooks, pedagogy, courseware, learning management systems (LMS), learning objects, repositories, tools, and more.

In Defining the “Open” in Open Content and Open Educational Resources, David Wiley defines OER as the “5 R’s”: Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, and Redistribute including resources in the public domain and published under Creative Commons licenses. With OER, we’re all learners. We can create, share, and build upon each other’s work to create quality resources for others. 

My OER journey started with a team presentation at MI OER Summit 2017. We developed a module around plagiarism using OER resources and tools. The practice gave our team experience to discuss OER with our subject matter experts.

In 2018, I wrote the Open Educational Resources series for our team blog, Model eLearning. The series renewed my interest in OER, and I’m amazed by the continued engagement by the community in it. Later that year, we created an accessible syllabus template—which we plan to publish as OER after we iterate with our community.

This year, I attended three open education events—and these experience will continue to shape how I see my role as an educator and student.

OER Sprint

In May, I attended the four-day virtual OER Sprint (it’s running again November 1-4, and organizer Judith Dutill intends to continue to offer it as part of OLT Faculty Development). It applied agile to the OER creation process to produce an OER prototype or product. It also leaned into the instructional design model ADDIE (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate). 

Each day focused on a project milestone: design, development, peer review, and publishing. I appreciated the worksheets provided to guide the OER project. The OER Sprint provided guidance to understanding Creative Commons licenses. We also looked at evaluating content through Mike Caulfield’s SIFT method (stop, investigate the source, find better coverage, and trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context). We had opportunities to join synchronous sessions to discuss our progress and provide suggestions to others on their projects.

MI OER Summit 2021

When I attended the MI OER Summit in 2017, I focused on our presentation. I don’t remember much besides Robin DeRosa‘s keynote and Regina Gong infectious OER enthusiasm.

With MI OER Summit 2021 virtual conference, the word that comes to mind is community—which continues to broaden as participants joined from around the United States and the world.

In the opening keynote, Angela DeBarger shared her vision, “I want the open education program to be the shining examples of what equitable and inclusive instruction looks like so that students feel empowered through school. I want schools and institutions to resource and support open ed policies and research.” With rising costs, open makes sense to improve learning outcomes.

On Day 1, Regina Gong and her team shared how they work with faculty at Michigan State University to publish OER. Tina Ulrich’s session provided rich resources for finding quality OER. In the student panel, we heard invaluable stories about the student experience. 

In the Day 2 keynote, Lisa Petrides gave an overview of the past 20 years of OER. She identified notable turning points in the past and showed us we can shape the future of OER. Other sessions that day spoke into OER as professional development and how we can partner across campus to make meaningful strides toward OER adoption.

The MI OER Summit 2021 felt intimate. I loved the virtual sessions—so flexible and well planned. The session I attended were fantastic, and I’m looking forward to seeing what next year brings. 

Open Education Conference 2021

It’s been a week since Open Education Conference 2021 (#OpenEd21) ended—and I’m still thinking about the experience. With the student pricing, I got my money’s worth and more. By the end of the week, I had serious content (and choice) overload. I need another month to go back and review it all.

Each day’s keynote gave a different perspective of where equity fits in the OER conversation. I attended sessions where instructors converted courses to OER to meet administrative mandates; librarians created an OER Boot Camp to support faculty training; instructors took on high technology learning curves to co-create OER with their students; an instructor shared how she uses Wikidata to teach student to use open data for research creation, curation, and extraction; graduate students shared how they’re openly sharing their research; and so much more.

The most meaningful session I attended involved a discussion lead by post-doctoral researcher Maya Hey. We usually think of OER as a faculty or student undertaking. After a brief introduction, we discussed where OER advocates and supporters belong in the conversation. 

Where do we go from here?

Open education enriches how we understand, learn, and adapt to the future. So, as we look at 2022 (and beyond), we have so many opportunities to continue to improve how we use open research, open pedagogy, and open educational resources. Who else can we invite to the conversation? After all, if we limit OER, we miss the point of open.

Have you used OER in your course design? Or what benefits did you find in a class using OER? Are you an OER advocate? I’d love to hear about your OER experiences.