I thought I was being Open? Discovering new opportunities for Openness in workshop development
Since joining the Learning Development team a little over two years ago, I have been involved in the transition of My Research Essentials (MRE), the Library’s researcher development programme, to sit under the governance of our Teaching, Learning and Students (TLS) division. We have worked hard to incorporate learning development and evaluation expertise into the programme, together with embedding a community and wellbeing element. Research has illustrated a significant level of wellbeing and mental health issues amongst Postgraduate Researchers (PGRs), and yet support across the University is too often tailored to ‘students-’ or ‘staff-only’. PGRs consistently report that they do not associate themselves with these cohorts, facing often unique challenges and experiences. We therefore wanted MRE to mirror My Learning Essentials (MLE) in aligning academic skills provision with appropriate wellbeing support, acknowledging that both are vital to academic success. One wellbeing offer I am working on for MRE is a PGR Resilience workshop.
TLS is widely known and respected for its MLE programme, which shares Open Educational Resources (OERs) including workshop plans and online resources which can be reused, remixed, revised or redistributed under Creative Commons licenses. To follow this lead and work as openly as possible on the Resilience workshop, we are collaborating closely with PGR members of the Library Student Team to co-create the workshop, ensuring it is researcher-centred, and relevant and useful to them. We are also combining our pedagogical expertise with that of a senior clinical lecturer in psychology at the University with an interest in teaching around resilience and student mental health. Once finalised, we aim to write up what we have learnt as a case study, and share the resources openly for anyone who may wish to utilise or build upon it.
I therefore believed that we were taking a very open approach to the development of a new workshop. Yet, here I am studying the Open Knowledge in HE module of the PGCertHE, and I am suddenly afforded the time to dip into an almost overwhelming diversity of literature on openness. There are so many definitions and methods on how you can be ‘more open’ in your practice, and just as many opinions on what is considered important and what is less so. It got me questioning the principles and methods I had adopted as best practice from my division, even though my colleagues are well experienced in this area (and even teach a certain OKHE module in it!) Was I really being as ‘open’ as I could, or should be, in the development of this new workshop?
The fact that we are co-creating the workshop and plan to share our ultimate findings openly means that we are ticking some of those ‘open practice’ boxes. We will be disseminating our work for others to use - an altruistic aspect at the heart of academia holding the potential to increase others’ efficiency. It may also even raise the profile and academic identity of our team. However, in developing the workshop ‘behind closed doors’ until it is finished and we are ‘ready’ to share, we could be missing out on some of the other really useful benefits of open practice, as identified by Weller, including easy collaboration and innovation. Formal collaboration, even with those in your own institution as we have done, requires a great deal of organisation and effort, yet in the open space much of this collaboration ‘just happens’. This could help the formation of our ideas by receiving contributions and critique from others, and enabling new connections in the field to develop — a form of open scholarship. ‘Open Innovation’ requires us to acknowledge that not all expertise in a particular field is within our own team, and that we must tap into the knowledge and expertise of others to ‘see’ the best ideas and opportunities. This can be seen in Wenger’s Communities of Practice (CoP).
To take advantage of these additional benefits, I could have been sharing the development of the workshop in a blog, and encouraging engagement with relevant CoPs. This would have enabled progress made to date to be shared so that others could contribute ideas, expertise and critique, or perhaps share experience of doing similar things in this area. It would have exposed it to many additional insights, increasing the chances of creating an innovative workshop resource. Others would also have had the opportunity to take what had been learned so far to use in their own contexts and practice, thereby increasing efficiency.
There are however a couple of barriers to adopting this approach ‘as standard’ in workshop development. The main one of these is inevitably time. Although it could increase efficiency for others, it would inevitably take more time out of my day to write the blog as well as that of my team’s to ensure quality assurance. It would have to be considered against a backdrop of other work commitments and priorities. Another barrier could be that staff could find it more difficult to share ‘in-progress’ work openly, as opposed to finished products. We know that a lot of staff in academia suffer from Imposter Syndrome (IS). Sharing unfinished work openly would deliberately open these colleagues up to critique and debate on their work, which could be a significant cause of anxiety as Padma explores in OKHE1. Being relatively new to Learning Development and experiencing IS myself from time to time, I can definitely empathise with this. However I have learned that the best way to build confidence and address IS is to push myself to be open to feedback, and to collaborate and seek support from my team as much as possible — something I am lucky to have in abundance.
In line with us teaching in a way that encourages researchers to learn in community with each other, we should remember that we are also a community of learners. Libraries and Learning Development CoPs are extremely supportive and open to sharing ideas, and are committed to collective learning. This community aspect is vital to addressing concerns we might have about sharing our work (finished or unfinished) openly online. We may also need to ask ourselves if being open in this way is appropriate or feasible for all instances of workshop development, due to the extra time cost involved. It would inevitably decrease the efficiency of their development, yet would benefit the quality in terms of potential for innovative ideas.
If we are striving in the Library to produce the highest quality resources for our learners, and to share them openly for others to re-use, should it be the case that we should only be asked to justify why we are not working as openly as possible, rather than why we are, and endeavour as much as possible to adopt this as default from now on as part of our standard workshop development processes?
