After listening to the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast with Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani, I went looking for a definition of ‘open pedagogy.’ Though I wasn’t able to find one clear definition, it seems to me that the goals of open pedagogy are to engage students in their own learning, and to overcome barriers to education (e.g. cost).
In a TEDx talk, David Wiley says “teachers who are the best teachers, are the ones who share the most completely with the most students.” His point here is that educators should be open in sharing their expertise and experiences. After all, you can “share [your expertise]… without losing it.” Education is about openly sharing ideas back and forth, and collaboratively creating new ideas.
The use of open educational resources (OER), including open textbooks and open access journal articles, can substantially reduce costs of students. Students may find themselves asking: “After paying the high price of tuition, why is the information I’m supposed to be getting still behind a $1000 paywall?” Even worse, the additional cost may prohibit some students from being able to afford to enroll.
Traditional textbooks often get updated every 5-or-so years. Often for introductory textbooks, the new edition of a book might simply rearrange the order of the chapters, or add a few new figures– which probably isn’t worth the $150 price tag. I realize the need for updates can vary by field and sub-field. For fields that are rapidly changing, open textbooks may also be advantageous because they can be revised by experts right away instead of waiting five years for a new book to be published.
November 5, 2018 @ 7:14 pm
Hi Medha,
Thanks for sharing the 5 R’s of Open Education graphic by David Wiley; it shares a lot of information in one drawing. I remember we talked about that crazy-expensive textbook right after the start of the semester, so I’m glad that you found and cited an article about how prohibitive high costs of textbooks has such a large impact on students. I followed the link and read it, and to be honest, I’m a little sad that Hansen’s takeaway message was something like an assessment of academic’s attitudes about textbooks and not more about how to actually fix the problem. So my take on the article was this: yes, books are expensive, and professors seem to be pretty well aligned behind the least-cost option, but that doesn’t align with open education, accessibility, and inclusion values that we’ve been discussing. I think it’s up to us (the incoming professoriate) to do more to change this conversation by actually implementing what we’re talking about in our classrooms and courses.
For Hansen article, see: “$1000 paywall” link above or https://www.chronicle.com/article/Hard-Copy-or-Electronic/244425
November 6, 2018 @ 10:18 pm
I like the graph! My past research project was related to OER. We built a computing educational portal site http://computingportal.org/ to gather all the open education resources from multiple places on the Internet. Ensemble is a NSF funded project and a distributed portal for computing education. This portal provides access to a broad range of existing educational resources for computing while preserving the collections and their associated curation processes.
November 7, 2018 @ 3:37 pm
I agree that there’s still a fair amount of confusion around the definition of many of the “opens” (Open Pedagogy, OER, etc.) Personally, I’ve decided not to get too hung up on identifying an orthodox position — instead I’m committed to a set of practices and ideas, some of which I set out here a couple years ago: https://siriusreflections.org/open-learning17/reflections-on-openlearning17/
November 7, 2018 @ 8:42 pm
Thank you for the sharing this creative graphic, Medha! I agree with David Wiley’s point about sharing one’s expertise does not undermine one’s role as an expert. Expertise comes from experience; no one can take that from anyone else.
I will try to be mindful of the 5 R’s of open education as I move forward through my career.
P.S. I’ve found that new editions of textbooks are *not* worth the cost difference.
November 7, 2018 @ 10:16 pm
As you said, sometimes students have access to a previous version of a book but end up paying considerable costs for a new version which only has a few changes, and that’s where open pedagogy becomes important. I was not aware of OER as well. Thanks for mentioning it, I’m interested to check it in detail.
November 7, 2018 @ 10:29 pm
I love the 5 R’s graphic! Very useful and makes it easy to remember! As a writing instructor, I too have been irritated with the cost for most introductory textbooks and have kept price in mind while assigning texts.
November 8, 2018 @ 2:47 am
In engineering it’s a bit funny to think about the new edition of textbooks. Some policies and methods that were used before and were regarded as the standards become updated and change completely. However, during the time-span that they were effective hundreds of designs may have used that standard to implement expensive infrastructure that is now not to code but has proven to hold up over the last x number of years. A pretty interesting dilemma.