Topic 1: Open practice (2020/1)

What can ‘Open’ mean in Higher Education?

[Image: A ladder leaning against a wall]. If ‘open practice’ is about opening windows, do we need to put up a ladder too? Photo by Lance Grandahl on Unsplash

PG Cert HE participants: This topic relates the session on 3 Feb 2021. You can use this page to prepare/catch up/review. Please access the Prepare and Reflect tool in Blackboard before and after the session to track your progress.

💬 New: we have published a write-up of the panel session.

In this first topic we encourage you to consider what open practice can mean in Higher Education. We know that you may be facing many pressures right now; if you are pushed for time, please head to the essential preparation.

In the scheduled session there was time to explore the topic further with other participants, and to meet our invited guests in a panel discussion. We heard from Louise Drumm (Edinburgh Napier University) and two recent graduates of OKHE: Lianne Smith and Simon Abbott. You can read more about our invited contributors on our Guests page.

Topic 1 guests (left to right): Louise Drumm, Lianne Smith, and Simon Abbott. Full bios.

You also met the course team — Sam Aston, Craig Morley, Chris Millson (OKHE tutors) and Simone Malekar from the Library Student Team.

Essential preparation

All we ask is that before the session, if you are able, you read one blog post, watch/read the slides of one presentation, and comment with your response to one question.

• Post: How can theories of open education help us to understand the personal dimension of open practice? by Lianne Smith (OKHE 2019/0, guest in the session)
• Question: “What makes something open? What are the criteria for open?” — please comment on this post, or anonymously via the box below.

If you can’t access the comment box, please write a response to this post instead.

Further reading/viewing

• Article: Framing Open Educational Practices from a Social Justice Perspective by Maha Bali, Catherine Cronin and Rajiv S. Jhangiani
• Presentation: Considering Open Education by Catherine Cronin — OKHE session recording from 2018: Slides with text | Lecture capture*

*Due to the way this recording was created, we are sorry that we are unable to make it open access; it is only available to EDUC66092 participants. The full slides with text, however, are available to all.

What do you think?

Consider your response to this question:

What makes something open? What are the criteria for open?

Leave a comment

After reading and thinking about this topic, please comment below to share an idea or response. You may find Creating a Medium account useful. Alternatively you can use the anonymous comment box on this page.

Any questions, you can contact the course leaders via Blackboard.

Panel write-up

We have written up the panel session as a blog post, with many thanks to our guests for their engaging talks.

Panel notes: Open practice (2020/1)