Topic 1: Open practice (2022/3)
A session outline for PG Cert HE participants on the Open Knowledge in Higher Education unit
PG Cert HE participants: This topic relates to the session on Wednesday 8th February. You can use this page to prepare/catch up/review. The topic will be updated after the session has taken place to include any recorded content from guest speakers or tutors and any shared resources we create during the sessions.
You can find interviews with past participants of the unit here
What can ‘Open’ mean in Higher Education?
In this topic we encourage you to consider what open practice can mean in Higher Education.
In the scheduled session, you will explore the topic further with other participants, and meet our invited guests in a panel discussion.
You will also meet the course team — Chris Milson, Jess Napthine-Hodgkinson and Michael Stevenson (OKHE tutors).
Reading and thinking about openness
You may want to engage with this suggested reading and contribute your thoughts. If you don’t have time to look at this prior to the session, you may want to return to this later in the unit:
Suggested reading: Be More Bamboo: Is Flexibility the key to ‘Openness’? by 2021/22 participant Kathryn Simms, which covers several interesting aspects of openness, which we hope may spark some ideas.
Openness and Praxis: Exploring the Use of Open Educational Practices in Higher Education by Catherine Cronin, 2017. This provides an overview of many of the themes we will touch on throughout this unit.
💬 Contribute
During the course, we will ask you to share ideas and experiences and hear from your peers through 💬 Contribute activities like this one. Read the following prompt then add your contribution in the box below. All comments are anonymous. Please be civil and don’t share personal identifying information.
What do you want to know about openness?
What is openness?
A general starting point for what we mean by open knowledge could be: knowledge that is free to use, reuse and redistribute without legal, social or technological restrictions.
Its underlying mission is to increase access, participation and collaboration.
However, there lots of different variations and perspectives beyond these definitions.
“resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness world-wide”
Richard Edwards (2015, p. 253)
“Openness is not the opposite of closed-ness, nor is there simply a continuum between the two…An important question therefore becomes not simply whether education is more or less open, but what forms of openness are worthwhile and for whom; openness alone is not an educational virtue.”
Aaron Swartz (Guerilla Open Access Manifesto)
“Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world.”
Catherine Cronin (2017, p. 2)
“The qualifier ‘open’ is variously used to describe resources, learning and teaching practices, institutional practices, the use of educational technologies, and the values underlying educational endeavours.”
You may want to reflect on which of these definitions resonates with your own experience of open practice but also think about which provides a new perspective. There is no single definition that will be agreed on by everyone, but each definition brings interesting points for discussion
Discussion with past participant
Our discussion with past OKHE participant, Kathryn Simms, is available to EDUC66092 participants on the video portal (Manchester login required).
The 5 Rs of Openness
We will also look at the 5 Rs of Openness as outlined by David Wiley:
RETAIN — the right to make, own, and control copies of the content
REUSE — the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
REVISE — the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
REMIX — the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
REDISTRIBUTE — the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)
💬 Contribute
Read the following prompt then add your contribution in the box below. All comments are anonymous. Please be civil and don’t share personal identifying information.
Which of the 5 Rs of Openness do you think is the most important and why?
Next steps
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.
If you have time beyond the above, you might want to look at the course materials on Medium, where you can read about assessment on the unit, and read hundreds of blog posts from past participants (the above being one): medium.com/open-knowledge-in-he (click OKHE1 / OKHE2 to read assessed posts, and OKHE to read other posts).
References
Cronin, C. (2017). “Openness and Praxis: Exploring the Use of Open Educational Practices in Higher Education”, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(5)
Edwards, R. (2015). “Knowledge, Infrastructure and the Inscrutability of Openness in Education”, Learning, Media and Technology, 40(3).
