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Description
Updated Session Content
Original Session Description
How can we build sustainable open education programs that nurture a growing community of faculty participants? How can we model the unique power of open-enabled pedagogy in the face of publishers’ co-option of textbook affordability with inclusive access programs? How can we introduce and support emerging models of open education that center faculty expertise and student agency in an environment of shrinking budgets and precarity? At our institution, one answer has been the Open Pedagogy Incubator.
This session introduces the Open Pedagogy Incubator, a semester-long program designed to incentivize faculty to go beyond the first step in open education – adopting open course materials – to engagement with open pedagogy: a practice that takes many forms (Open Pedagogy Notebook; Stommel, 2014) and has been variously compared to a conversation (DeRosa & Jhangiani, 2017), to lifting an airplane off of a highway (Wiley, 2013), and to hatching dragon eggs (Poritz, 2019). Modeled on our successful Alt-Textbook program and the 2019 pilot of our OPEN Incubator, the Open Pedagogy Incubator brings together a cohort of faculty instructors to develop competencies in open pedagogy through a series of hands-on workshops, curated readings, and cohort discussions.
The Incubator supports explicit engagement with open pedagogy in each participant’s courses, reducing costs and empowering students in innovative ways. By developing a cohort, the Incubator also builds a community of learning so that instructors can share ideas, offer feedback, and explore cross- and interdisciplinary approaches to pedagogy. In addition, the Incubator produces a set of public, locally-tailored models for open pedagogy to inspire other instructors with grounded, concrete examples of what “open pedagogy” can mean on our campus.
This session will introduce the Incubator and situate it in the broader context of open education and open pedagogy. We will discuss the design and aims of this project and the way that the initial cohort offers a promising model for sustainable open education work. We will also offer reflections on the successes and challenges we encountered in our pilot season and suggest strategies for bringing this model to other institutions in a way that reflects local needs and experiences.
By reflecting critically on the need for sustainable communities, participatory practices, and civic engagement and the ways a program like the Incubator can support this work, we believe that this session can offer a well-scoped and sustainable model for encouraging engagement with emerging open education practices as well as developing the critical mass of support and exemplary work needed to make the care-based work of open pedagogy as widespread as the adoption of open educational resources is today.
References
Jhangiani, R. and DeRosa, R. (2017). Open Pedagogy and Social Justice. Digital Pedagogy Lab. Available at: http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/open-pedagogy-social-justice/.
Open Pedagogy Notebook, Available at: http://openpedagogy.org/
Poritz, J. (2019). Today’s Context Demands Use of OER. Inside Higher Education. Available at: https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/views/2019/02/27/using-open-education-isnt-just-nice-have-when-students-are
Stommel, J., (2014) Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Definition, Digital Pedagogy Lab, Available at: http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/hybridped/critical-digital-pedagogy-definition/
Wiley, D., (2013). What is Open Pedagogy?. Interating Towards Openness. Available at: https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2975
