Post #12 Reflection: Open Educational Practices

I am a participant in a research program for a dissertation on OER and OEP. I have to respond in writing to three sets of questions and will be interviewed next Friday by the researcher. I am going to share some of my reflections in answer to the questions here.  The question had to do with 

I wanted to get a little more insight in OEP; I had a sense of its meaning but resorted to Wikipedia, and the article cites Catherine Cronin, Iain McClaren, and others from the scholarly literature:  “OEP is a broad concept which can be characterised by a range of collaborative pedagogical practices that include the use, reuse, and creation of OER and that often employ social and participatory technologies for interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation and sharing, empowerment of learners, and open sharing of teaching practices.” That’s what I thought, but it did give me a basis.

So to answer the question, in this particular class, I would say I am empowering learners by creating and using OERs (in the sense only that I am not using a standard publisher’s textbook) but I do not have the students engaging in knowledge creation in the sense that they are not “publishing” (putting in public places) any materials for others to use or doing undergraduate research, or anything like that.  All the work they are doing is very egocentric, really, that is, only for private consumption.

Nor am I, except to the extent I have shared some materials with colleagues if they ask. My use of OEP and OER in this particular class is only for these students.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reflecting on Reflection in Learning

Reflection is the subject of my next couple of presentations, so here are my recent jottings. Hopefully a reader can make some sense of them;however, the whole point of this post is that reflection can follow a structure but will not necessarily create a structured record. The reflection record will need to be reshaped to be palatable for a "judge" or "critic" or "instructor." Reflection tends to be framed negatively. If we dig too deep we will only find bad stuff; if we reflect on teaching practice, we will focus on what failed rather than succeeded. Why? Assessment focuses on finding the nonlearners and changing to get more learners, but it ignores that most of the students did learn, so why were there successes? Leads to burnout. Boud & Walker’s idea of validation not well developed but relevant. It is most close to critical thinking—testing it against other knowledge, theories, internal consistency, other data (other learner’s data) Ref...
Read more

Calling all College Instructors

I had an interesting experience last semester. In a lecture on perception, I mentioned (because I had been reading so) that people with autism (my brother has it) do not perceive less than others, but they perceive more and that their behaviors are to block out or filter or deal with the overload. One boy in the back of the room said, "I know that's true because I'm autistic and .... " That's one of those "moments of truth." I often do not handle them well, but this one I did. Since the young man had not done anything that indicated autism to me (other than being nerdy), after he talked about himself I said, "Do you have Asperger's?" to which he said, "Yes, and ADD." Another young man in the class was giving me signals that he was in the same boat. There is something ironic and yet appropriate about this incident--only a student with Asperger's or Austism Spectrum Disorder would just announce it so boldly in class. ...
Read more

First Generation Students: Be aware

 I confess to not having blogged here for quite a while.  I will be in the future--I'm doing some relevant writing. My current research interest is gratitude, in general, in communication, in spiritual development, and in higher education. Although not quite linked to that, this article is thoughtful and reminds us of "the secret life of college students." https://diverseeducation.com/article/138698/?utm_campaign=DIV1902%20DAILY%20NEWSLETTER%20FEB15&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Eloqua
Read more