By Matt Martin, BCC Coordinator of Learning Experience Design

As someone who enjoys a good metaphor (some might say “over-enjoys?”), perhaps it’s fitting that I’ve come to an institution with an implicit metaphor as its slogan. On promotional materials, on the podium before a speaker, and even in block letters on the side of the Field building, you can find the following quote:

 

“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.”

-Robert Louis Stevenson

 

 

From a philosophical, mountain-top perspective, I love this quote. It reminds me that learning, at its best, is both an end and a means. It reminds me to enjoy the process of teaching and learning, and not get too hung up on the final outcome.

But from a day-to-day, instructional design perspective, this mindset isn’t always an easy one to maintain. After all, we encourage instructors to always think carefully about student outcomes, and then design backward from those end goals. We want our students to arrive, and we want to see them arriving!

My sincere hope for all who have taken this particular journey with us as part of the OER Awareness workshop is that you have emerged more hopeful and inspired, even if you haven’t quite “arrived” at some specific destination yet. Perhaps you found entire textbooks or course packs that you are now wondering about incorporating or adopting. Perhaps you found new materials to incorporate into your existing classes, from ancillary materials to multimedia. Perhaps you encountered, like me, examples of open pedagogy that leave you simultaneously excited and a bit uncertain of the path forward to make it real in your own practice. And perhaps you found that the OER landscape for your particular course or subject area is still a bit too sparse, or are seeing the roadblocks more prominently than pathways forward.

No matter what your experience so far, though, I am excited to hear the tales of your travels so far, and to continue the journey together. With that spirit in mind, I’ll share here a curated list of my open education takeaways, in the TAG (Take, Ask, Give) format suggested for these posts:

 

An Open Education Takeaway

• David Wiley’s concept of the renewable assignment has been stuck in my head since I encountered it, in both a good and frustrating way. (I don’t really want to think about the extent of the “disposable” assignments I’ve used on students over the years-sometimes due to curricular pressures, sometimes due to sheer lack of time or creativity on my part.) But this concept challenged me to get out of my comfort zone, and think about ways to make learning experiences more authentic, and more constructionist, even if it means doing new things like setting up a WordPress site!

An Open Education Question

• My biggest questions about open pedagogy, and practices such as “renewable assignments” are practical ones: how can these kinds of approaches work in survey courses that require a large amount of content to be covered? How can we craft not just “capstone” kinds of renewable assignments, but smaller, day-to-day versions that are sustainable for both students and instructors? One possible answer seems to be not getting too hung up on formal definitions of “open pedagogy” (e.g., that if students aren’t creating public-facing, Creative Commons licensed materials, then it doesn’t count as Open Pedagogy). Curation and contribution activities seem like promising approaches, but there are still plenty of details to get worked out here. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to discover and pioneer even more examples of “renewable assignments” that can work even in the most challenging courses.

An Open Education “Gift”

• The gift that I would share with others from all of my OER research in helping to build this workshop? It’s actually a very simple one: the Creative Commons License Chooser. I share this straightforward tool because it’s helped me make a transition. Before this workshop, I had only made my own materials with open licensing a vanishingly small number of times. This was definitely not because I wanted to retain my copyright or make lots of money off of my materials–I just hadn’t been in the habit of doing it. Now, my default has switched from openly licensing my materials only occasionally to making open the norm. Instead of asking, “Should I make this resource open?” I’m more often asking “Why shouldn’t I make this resource open?”

 

If you’ve made it this far, I want to thank you for coming this far on the journey with us (and think you should absolutely count this as a kind of arrival as well!). I’m excited to hear your own thoughts about OER and open educational practices, as well as what those of us supporting faculty at BCC can do to continue to support you along the way.

 

BCC Campus photo All Rights Reserved by BCC via Flickr https://flic.kr/p/2ha4rH8

 

Featured Image: CC0 by Dino Reichmuth on Unsplash

All materials except BCC image: “To Travel Hopefully…” by Matthew Martin is licensed under CC BY 4.0