I am today finishing the final course in the Professional Program in Open Education I have been taking, through Kwantlen Polytechnic University, for the past year. This course was to create a field project, and I decided to create an Open Education Advocacy plan for my institution. I am not sharing a link to this plan yet as it still needs some refinement, and I am hoping to work on it with my VP in the next year as she is also dedicated to creating and Open Ed framework in the next year.

But, that being said, my final piece for this course and program is a reflection, and I am to reflect on the following three questions:

• What are at least three things I learned throughout the program that I incorporated into my field project plan, and how did they add to or change my perspectives? If you wish to use another method please contact the instructor.
• What readings or other resources (e.g. videos, articles, websites) provided a particular insight that I either found helpful and learned from or alternatively found unhelpful with reasons why. List at least three readings or other resources. 
• As the course winds to a close, you should leave here equipped to plan for implementing your field project in your real-world context. 

Three things I learned. Well, how to think about a work plan and how to organize it. That was huge, and I know I have a lot more in the document than my VP may need to see, but it’s better to have too much! Second, in our first course I began to think a lot about what Open Ed really means and about the flexibility we need to consider when defining it. Not everything needs to be CC-BY to be open, and if we are thinking about equity, ZTC is also an important component of any Open framework. Finally, in the Leadership course I was exposed to many different ways of what Open Ed leadership can be, how complicated it is to be a leader in a post-secondary institution, and why policies are not necessarily the way to go when building an Open Ed framework.

I think Cronin’s article  Open education: Walking a critical path was so important in making me stop and really consider what Open means, and how it vitally needs to be able to mean different things to different people. If we only talk about the good Open Education can do, we forget the harm that it can also do – like anything else. It reminded me how important it is to meet people where they are at and to find flexible solutions so we can all support our work and our students in whatever way works best in our circumstances.

In addition, in Cox and Trotter’s Institutional Culture and OER Policy: How Structure, Culture, and Agency Mediate OER Policy Potential in South African Universities, the question of institutional policy and how different institutions approach policies was really important to me in considering if I should be advocating for an Open Ed policy at my institution. I have decided, no.

Finally, in Morgan et al. (2021) How Are We Doing with Open Education Practice Initiatives? I found myself really thinking about where my institution is now with Open Educational Practices, and how I can work with others to develop a self-assessment tool that we can use moving forward to measure how we progress.

And yes, with the support of my VP looming on the horizon that is the Fall term, and with the help of this course and program, I do feel equipped to put this plan in motion! Thanks to all who developed, supported, facilitated, and participated in this program!

This week for the Open Ed Policy and Leadership course, the assignment is: “In your final blog post, you will contribute 750-1000 words that express your views on the policy and leadership challenges of launching a social justice approach in complex educational contexts. Draw on examples from your experience and support your writing with examples from the course content (readings, videos, forums etc.) In addition to the written component of this final assignment, you are asked to provide an accompanying graphic, infographic, image, or other media that represents the associated complexities of social justice approaches.

Full disclaimer: as I begin writing this post, I am completely at sea about what kind of graphic I will offer to supplement this piece. I like visuals to supplement my own learning, but am horrible at conceptualizing and creating them to supplement my own work. So, let me begin my writing first, as that is definitely where I feel most comfortable.

When I think about this question of the policy and leadership challenges of launching social justice initiatives, and here I am thinking specifically of Open Education initiatives, in an educational context (which are all complex and hierarchical even when they pretend to be otherwise), I wonder first: what do we mean by leadership, and second: do we really need policy specific to Open Education to ensure equity?

When we think of leadership at a post-secondary institution, we typically think of presidents, vice-presidents, and deans. But in my experience, the people leading Open Education are often students and faculty (Williams and Werth place students as the main leaders), as well as librarians and people in teaching and learning centres (like me). As also noted by Ossiannilsson, et. al., the experiences students have had over the last three years since COVID shut down institutions has seen a rise in OER adoption and an increased demand amongst students to have both more flexible learning opportunities and lower cost course resources. But at the same time, we need to engage more with students and their student societies to support their understanding of and advocacy for OER.

The challenge with this kind of “leading from the middle (or bottom)” is how to engage with the people who actually make decisions and policy. No matter how consultative admin purports to be when creating policy, there are generally very few voices at the table when final policy decisions are made. For example, at my institution, Open Textbooks have become a measure in our new strategic plan, and policy makers have been contacting me asking for information on how many Open Textbooks are being used because they don’t know…no one in admin knows. I count myself lucky that at least someone told them I have been doing this work and that they didn’t just hire someone to find out what I already know, a scenario that is all too common in post-secondary (hiring people to do work that is already being done).

Regarding policy, do we really need one around Open Education? Will having said policy address issues of social justice? Policy can be limiting, and I think the perspective at my institution is that we don’t need policies for everything, but need to recognize how existing policy supports initiatives. I tend to agree, although sometimes the lines are blurry. What I would not like to see is an Open Education policy that limits – Open Education cannot be limited meaning there are too many considerations to put into a policy that is only revised every ten years. Much better to be clear about how existing policies support Open Education, policies such as EDI, Code of Conduct, and Acceptable Technology Use, as well as some of the teaching and learning policies, such as Program Quality Assurance and Evaluation of Student Learning.

When people lead from the bottom, it can be a lonely journey. When people lead top-down, there can be resistance. What we need is a common understanding of Open Education and how it can support students through the entire spectrum of leadership. That means having conversations and being open to listen and accept that moving into the Open, while challenging, can be liberating. But that also means supporting those who are ready to do the work now – and I mean support not just by leaders, but also by peers who may be attached to traditional textbooks and fearful of being forced to let go of that comfort. I don’t want to be critical, but I have worked with faculty who struggle to integrate OER into their teaching because they are told by their peers that they are “not allowed to”. But at the same time, we need to be encouraging, not forcing people to move into the open before they are ready. In other words, we need to think of the equity and inclusion piece of Open not only as it applies to students, but also as it applies to instructors.

I found it challenging to come up with a graphic to represent some of the ideas I wrote about but thought something simple to begin with that could be fleshed out in time could suffice. Here we see a simple image, with Leading Open Education in the middle, as central to post secondary education (in my ideal world). Leading Open Education comes from above and below, if we take the hierarchical model of post-secondary as a given (which I do). From the top we have presidents, vice-presidents, deans and associate deans, and people who develop policy. From below we have faculty and students, as well as librarians and teaching and learning centre support.

I leave this post asking: who else needs to be leading Open Education, and from what direction(s)?

References

Ossiannilsson, E., Zhang, X., Wetzler, J., Gusmão, C., Aydin, C. H., Jhangiani, R., Glapa-Grossklag, J., Makoe, M., & Harichandan, D. (2020). From Open Educational Resources to Open Educational Practices. Distances et médiations des savoirs. Distance and Mediation of Knowledge (31). https://doi.org/10.4000/dms.5393

Williams, K., & Werth, E. (2021). A Case Study in Mitigating COVID-19 Inequities through Free Textbook Implementation in the U.S. (1). https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.650

This week for the Open Ed Policy and Leadership course, I am asked to contribute 300-500 words that express my views on the role of collaboration to sustain open education. I am supposed to draw on examples from my experience and support my writing with examples from the course content (readings, videos, forums etc.) 

The first thing that strikes me about the role of collaboration to sustain open education is the breadth of meaning collaboration can have, as well as the complex nature of collaboration in general. In Week 3, we discussed “open collaboration”, and I wondered if we meant collaboration about Open or collaboration that WAS open. Of course, both interpretations are possible including the most encompassing: openly collaborating about Open.

Now, I think collaborating is the way to go when working on almost anything. Even if I am the one doing the lion’s share of the work, as in writing blog posts or tutorials, I almost always ask for input/feedback if I am not actually working WITH a group to create the documents. But how open can collaboration about Open (or anything) reasonably go?

When defining open collaboration, we should be looking for the opportunity for anyone and everyone to weigh in. But does someone not have to create parameters for this kind of work? And if so, who is that and how can decisions like this be made if everyone is weighing in on them too? The point is, for most initiatives, someone decides to launch it (maybe a small group of someones). Typically we don’t wait for everyone to weigh in on every parameter or goal. Sometimes though we start with something and then once we begin to collaborate and bring diverse voices in, that’s when the parameters or goals evolve.

But when does collaboration become too open? The OER World Map is a great example, to me, of a great collaborative open initiative that quickly became too lofty to be sustained, or even created to begin with. The idea of having a world map plotting OER use sounds amazing, but considering that even in my small institution we have no idea of who is doing what with Open – even determining how to find out who is doing what is an enormous task which would be daunting even if we had someone dedicated to it. And the goal of having every country contribute its OER use to such a world map? Well, maybe some countries keep records, but I wonder how they could ever keep tabs on everything, what their methods would be for finding out about OER use, and whose voices would be excluded from that discovery. Impossible! Even if a ruling government pledged to make the effort, there is no way to assure the next would keep it up. Even in Canada we don’t have a national strategy around Open Education. Nor are there provincial-level strategies (although B.C. does a a decent job of collecting information about post-secondary adoptions). No, it seems to me that while these global aspirations for open collaborations around Open are well-meaning, the reality is that they are doomed before they begin.

So, what then is reasonable, given that I do believe collaboration is vital to Open Education? Well, small projects where people work together towards common goals. Take my institution. When faculty come to me for help, I pull in librarians, the copyright officer, other instructional designers, other faculty, students – whoever I think might need to be at the table. And to prevent me from being the one making all those decisions, we then can ensure, as a group, that we aren’t leaving out others who need to be at the table (like UDL support, or Indigenization expertise.)

I think another great way to collaborate on OER is to engage in collaborative writing. According to Czerniewicz, collaborative writing ensures that you actually do the work because you have obligations to other people so it is harder to give up; it improves quality, because there is so much more brainpower and a wider variety of expertise to draw on; and it allows everyone to be a co-creator – a most Open Education practice!

In the end, for me the power behind of collaboration is that no one person has to know it all or do it all, and even if one person is charged with managing the project (someone has to keep things on track…) the final product will be stronger for the diversity of voices involved.

Czerniewicz, L. (2021, June 8). Writing collaboratively [Blog]. https://czernie.weebly.com/blog/writing-collaboratively

Neumann & Farrow (n.d.) The World OER Map. https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid%3A65db838b-decf-4e29-b2dd-665ee5a0e5b0

Here I am, April 2023, starting my second last course in the open education program and here is my first assignment blog post for the course, on Open Ed Policy and Leadership.

This week I am asked to contribute 300-500 words that express my views on the role of policy in fostering open education. I need to draw on examples from my experience and support my writing with examples from the course content (readings, videos, forums etc.)

What to say about institutional policy? I agree with Cox and Trotter (in Institutional Culture and OER Policy: How Structure, Culture, and Agency Mediate OER Policy Potential in South African Universities) that institutional culture is key in understanding not only the potential role policy could have with regards to the uptake of Open Education but also key in understanding what “policy” actually is and what it is not at the institution. For example, at my institution the definition of “policy” is limited – anything that steps outside of that definition might be a Policy Informed Directive, or just a recommended or Director-approved process within a unit. While we have a limited number of policies (in fact, we have recently been told that we have enough policies) there are a LOT of them and they govern very specific, but at the same time kind of general, things. For example, we have a set of policies for Governance (example, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion policy), for Education (example Quality Assurance and Final Grade Appeals), and for Operations (example, Respect in the Workplace).

What I see potentially happening at my institution is what is recommended by Cox and Trotter for some institutions: that Open Ed becomes a part of existing policy, either overtly or in interpretation. For example, in the Education Approvals policy, I could see a piece being added about flexibility or openness of the course, referring to the way a program could support students in achieving the credential.

At my institution (which I see as Bureaucratic, with Managerial tendencies, masquerading as Collegial, in the terms laid out by Cox and Trotter), policy is generally seen as top down, and even in an institution like mine that “consults” on policy, SO many voices are left out of the consultation to make it lip service. That is my point of view, although I have heard this sentiment from others. The problem I see if Open Ed becomes policy at my institution, then faculty may see it as something else that they HAVE to do (in addition to Indigenization, Accommodation, Equity/Diversity/Inclusion, etc.), and if there is no support built into the initiatives listed in the policy, then how on earth do faculty do the work and who helps them? Creating policy does not mean everyone will line up to do the work, even if they are able to.

What I think needs to be done to foster Open Ed initiatives at my institution is for leadership to LISTEN to and TALK to others at the institution already doing the work, and think carefully about the challenges those people have faced and continue to face before making sweeping policy and expectations around increasing the #s of courses using Open Textbooks, for example. There needs to be a consulting group consisting of people from across the college from all levels – from staff to faculty to students to leadership, and even the board.

But most importantly there needs to be at least one person who is dedicated to supporting Open Education at the institution, who has the ear and support of leadership for collaborating across the college, promoting and creating Open Ed initiatives, and organizing support for faculty and students for the Open Ed work they want to do. If you don’t have at least one person with a clear vision and strong support from leadership, initiatives will come and go, will start and peter out, will stay with one small group of people who want to do the work and then die when those people leave the institution. It must rest with a position NOT a person, although the person in that position needs to be passionate about what Open Ed can do for the institution and everyone associated with it.

And now it’s time for my third and final assignment blog post for my course on open educational technologies.

“For this final assignment, select at least three motivational factors and three barriers for your own practice or setting from the provided bar graphs, and, if applicable, from Thankachan and Moore (2017). With this information, you will Identify an open educational technology for your setting or interest, possible barriers to uptake, and possible motivators for uptake. Feel free to include motivational factors and barriers from your own experience if they’re not included in the resources named here.”

I started this journey by thinking of motivational factors and came up with: provide something no other tool has, customizable, and freedom from vendor reliance. And then considered the barriers: lack of technical and institutional support, finding the right application, and resistance to change. But maybe, I thought, I should first consider what tool I would want to identify and investigate. Then I thought about Office365 and Teams, the corner they have on the institutional market, so to speak, the lack of access for many of the tools to students, and the privacy implications these large proprietary systems have for everyone at an institution.

I decided to go big and look for an open source something that would allow people to collaborate and communicate, include space for small group activities, file storage, and tools for creation of projects and presentations. And so I began with a simple Google search for open collaboration software. There were several listed, you know, in those “top 10 open collaboration tools” kind of lists, and as I checked those lists out, I found one that matched the criteria I was looking for: A product called OpenPaas.

I was told that “OpenPaas is a free and open source collaboration suite that helps teams to stay connected and work together with ease. It allows secure file sharing, video conferencing, scheduling and maintaining calendars, and many more facilities that enable faster, efficient, and smarter team collaboration. It is known as the best open source alternative to Microsoft 365 and Google Suite. If you plan to create a smart digital work environment, deploying OpenPaas would be the right decision. As its on-premises license is free, you can host it on your server and have full control over your data’s security.” https://www.goodfirms.co/collaboration-software/blog/best-free-open-source-collaboration-softwarehttps://open-paas.org/

Hmmm, I thought. If OpenPaas does everything it says it does: email, file sharing, video conferencing, this could be a winner. Of course, I had lots of questions, for example, are the documents created in it’s office suite compatible with WORD and Google Docs, since people will likely be collaborating with others using those platforms. is the video conferencing platform usable on all devices and for people with lower Internet capabilities. How accessible are all the tools in the suite? And who else in the land of post-secondary is using it?

I wanted to know more, but was reticent to send my personal information to OpenPaas in order to receive it. My feeling is that all the information anyone would need should be openly available, and not dependent on filling in a form to request it. Also, where were the demos? Again, having spent one too many meetings with a vendor trying to hawk their wares, i do not want to be requesting open vendor demos for a product I am only interested in seeing more about not to recommend to my institution.

I began to search for more information on OpenPaas, but was stymied. It seemed to have been released maybe in 2011 or 2013, but its Facebook page’s last post was from 2019 and its last Twitter post from 2020. Alarm bells began to ring!

You see, this is one reason I am reticent to lead a charge institutionally to replace enterprise systems with open ones. You find one that looks great when you head to the website, but then it turns out to be defunct. Why is information still out there on this product? What happened to it? Did anyone invest into it only to discover it shut down one day? I spent a lot of time trying to find out, and finally clicked on the developer page.

I checked out the list on the developer page and while there was no information anywhere to assure me, I believe OpenPaas is now something called Twake, although Twake is billed as only an alternative to Microsoft Teams. Maybe now I can find out more. Yup – here are some actual reviews, but still, no demos, no list of who is actually using Twake, nothing to help me really understand what its capabilities are, or if large post-secondary institutions are taking the leap and investing in it.

My opinion is that if you really want to show off an open source product and get people engaged with it, you need to be better at actually, well showing it off. Regular folks at institutions or organizations want to see demos, want to read comments and testimonials from people using the tools, and want to be able to contact them to find out more. We do not want to go down rabbit holes trying desperately to find information that will be robust enough for us to make a case at our institutions to invest in a product. And while I am ranting, if you are truly being open, don’t use language and provide information that only caters to those already in the know – I don’t want all the technology decisions at my institutions being made by techies who may or may not know what the average person really needs. Plus, I support Ed tech and I need to be able to find basic information in order to make recommendations or to inform faculty I am working with.

In the end, after spending several hours searching and clicking and grimacing, I was hugely disappointed that information about something with such potential seemed completely inaccessible to me. I don’t think I actually followed the letter of the assignment law, but perhaps, revisiting motivational factors and barriers, all the motivation in the world will not overcome the barrier of not being able to find the information you need.

References

United Nations University (2011). Free and open source software in sub-Saharan Africa. https://unu.edu/publications/articles/free-and-open-source-software-in-sub-saharan-africa.html

And now it’s time for my second assignment blog post for my course on open educational technologies.

This week we are to take some time to study a provided graphic (not CC licensed so I can’t include it here), and choose one or more sections to focus on. Consider what relevant issues are taking place in your own context.

The points on the image in question that stuck out to me the most were the monitoring of students and surveillance culture, both seriously concerning in our current post-secondary world. But I asked myself, what about monitoring and surveillance of faculty?

As I considered this, I thought about the question asked in the podcast Between the Chapters: Ed Tech’s Dystopian Turn – 25 Years of Ed Tech: The Serialized Audio Version is: Where does the responsibility for the use of educational technologies lie? Often it seems like that responsibility ends up in the laps of faculty and those of us who support them.

Finally, the ALT Ethical Framework recommends mindfulness, awareness, and acting with integrity when making decisions about educational technologies. But who is making those decisions at institutions, and who is being consulted, considered, and collaborated with around these decisions.

And finally, related to all of this, what has been on my mind most lately is who has access to online course sites in our LMS, and how is this managed?

In my institution, we have a code of conduct and various institutional policies (only those high-level officially sanctioned creations can be referred to as policy) that discuss basic use of technology institutionally, but nothing around educational technologies meaning that issues of student privacy when using cloud-based tech to support teaching and learning, especially those technologies requiring students to provide personal information, is not addressed institutionally, nor I suspect by many faculty asking student to use said technology. And now with the fairly recent changes in FIPPA in BC, we cannot even rely on provincial law to have those conversations with faculty and others. But one issue on my mind just this last week Involves the question of who has the right to access LMS course sites.

As a result of a situation where someone gained access to a course site without permission of the instructor or knowledge of the students in the course site, we now have a policy-informed directive around LMS access, meaning that the only person who can give permission for access is the instructor, or “owner”, of the course (with a note that the instructor should be discussing with their students who is accessing the course and why). Not administrators, not support personnel, no one (except for the eLearning group who provide direct support to faculty and students) is allowed in without permission of the instructor. After all, if someone visits an in-person class, everyone knows they are there. Why should an online classroom allow for someone to lurk in the background?

But now we are faced with new considerations as we bring faculty into our unit to back-fill people on secondment, and think forward to the future when we might bring faculty in as visiting educational developers. How do we manage expectations around privacy in these cases? For example, if a faculty member is supporting a faculty colleague from their own program with their online course design, or with student support are we creating potential bias or conflict of interest? Something I confess I hadn’t considered until someone mentioned that their school does not allow for sharing of student information between faculty.

Therefore, we are looking at creating Confidentiality statements for everyone coming into our unit, statements that we can show to others across the institution to reassure people that our role is to support, not to generate bias or conflicts because we can see inside courses without others’ knowledge. If we expect others to adhere to ethical standards around access to online courses and student information, I think it’s imperative we model that behaviour ourselves.

I wonder why we spend so much time creating high-level institutional policies and new strategic plans every five years instead of engaging in ongoing meaningful conversations around ethical implications of not just educational technology, but post-secondary eduction in general. Perhaps in the future, out institutions, our faculty, students, leadership, supporting staff, should be adapting the ALT model to better understand what our responsibilities are in the world of teaching and learning.

References

Association for Learning Technology. (2020, October 29). ALT’s Framework for Ethical Learning Technology. https://www.alt.ac.uk/about-alt/what-we-do/alts-ethical-framework-learning-technology

Between the Chapters: Ed Tech’s Dystopian Turn – 25 Years of Ed Tech: The Serialized Audio Version. (2020). Retrieved January 4, 2023, from https://25years.opened.ca/2021/04/30/between-the-chapters-ed-techs-dystopian-turn/