Topic 2: Open teaching and learning (2020/1)

How can learning, teaching and pedagogy be open?

[Image: a curved pedestrian bridge in greyscale] What needs to be built to support learning? Can it be built openly? Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

PG Cert HE participants: This topic relates the session on 5 Mar 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 session.

Topic 2 guests: April McMahon (photo used with permission) (bio), and members of the Library Student Team (not pictured) (read some of their work).

In our second topic, we will consider the role of openness in teaching and learning (T&L). We are lucky to be joined by our Vice President for Teaching, Learning and Students, Professor April McMahon, and by a panel of current students from the Library Student Team, who will be happy to answer your questions, and share their perspectives on openness.

We are very grateful to April and to the Library Student Team for their time.

Essential preparation

All we ask is that before the session, you write two questions about open T&L, comment with your response to one more, and set up a hypothes.is account.

• Ask two questions: Write at least one question for April, and one for the Library Student Team, in the boxes below. You can ask questions in the session, and we may not cover all of them, but it will get us all thinking in advance, and our guests may be able to answer more afterwards.

Questions for April

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

Questions for Library Student Team

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

• Answer one question (OK, maybe it’s two): “Where does my role exist/intersect within open teaching practices at the University? Where could my role intersect within open teaching practices at the University?” — 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.

• Sign up for hypothe.is: please create an account using your University email address; we will use this tool in the session. If you do not wish to create an account, that is fine; you will still be able to take part.

Further reading

• Post: Exploring the benefits of open CPD for staff development in HE, by Cath Wasiuk (Co-founder #1minuteCPD, OKHE 2017/8).
• The idea of information privilege arises when we discuss openness in education — see Char Booth’s article. Char champions Wikipedia assignments — allowing learners to experience and use this privilege.
• Has the element of social justice disappeared from the conversations around Open Education since 2002? asks Sarah Roslyn Lambert in this review of texts over time that also draws on the 3 principles of social justice: redistributive, recognitive and representational.
• Find your own reading: explore OKHE graduates’ responses to the assessment briefs via the OKHE1 and OKHE2 tags; general contributions to this publication on the OKHE tag; posts in the Open Research Forum — or look further afield for openly available writing, comment and media.

What do you think?

Consider your response to this question:

Where does my role exist/intersect within open teaching practices at the University? Where could my role intersect within open teaching practices at the University?

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.

Session write-up

We have written up the session as a blog post, with many thanks to our guests.

Session notes: Open teaching and learning (2020/1)