29.1 Systems for supportive open teaching  (Page 2/6)

What has been less obvious is discussion about open teaching and that is what I want to focus on for the rest of this piece.

So what might constitute open teaching? Is it about creating teaching experiences that eliminate barriers to students taking part in those experiences or is it about (re)using OERs that are available to all? While we could have interesting debates about such definitions as with all aspects of openness, I think it more valuable to think about how openness changes the basic praxis of teaching from an essentially individual activity to a shared activity. Stereotypically most teachers work alone in constructing and delivering their teaching experiences.

They may draw upon others similar work in this process and they may involve their students in co-creation or delivery of the experiences, but fundamentally they alone decide on a chosen path or lay out a new route map of resources and activities that constitute the educational experience. However, the arrival of OERs has meant that both teachers and students are able to view in greater depth the teaching and learning experiences of others to inform their own praxis. They are also able to ‘teach’ more easily (and effectively?) around someone else’s resources and maybe activities. But even more than that, it is becoming possible to rework other people’s material and to even co-create such material with colleagues around the world.

The co-creation of educational resources and courses is a major feature of open and distance learning where teams of academics (supported by media professionals) develop and deliver the teaching and learning experiences, including our associate Lecturers who do ‘teach’ around the main, carefully crafted, proscribed educational materials. At the Open University there may be as many as a dozen academics writing for and commenting on other’s work in the same course team to develop these carefully crafted educational materials and associated activities.

This is team teaching that can seriously challenge your thinking and has encompassed some of the most heated academic discussions I have ever witnessed! But it does produce high quality materials, albeit at high cost and in a clear institutional framework. So, can such synchronous or even asynchronous collaboration and co-operation occur between institutions and across borders and will (open) teaching become more of a collective than an individual activity in future?

Of course there are many barriers to open teaching or any changes in teaching practice as well discussed around Cole’s contribution and also discussed by Diane Harley in the Opening Up Education book I mentioned earlier, not least the lack of recognition of teaching compared to research in promotion and tenure. Nevertheless, just as much research has steadily moved from individual to team efforts and still been accounted for largely through peer review by their community of practice, open, collective teaching can be accounted for in similar ways.

The openly published nature of the resources means that such scholarship is as evident as any research publication and the more open nature of the reviews of the resources and associated experiences means there is potentially more feedback than for most research and more ways to assess impact and contribution. In other words the very openness of teaching makes it more accountable than much research, it is just that we have to work out the ways that citation (e.g. numbers of reuse, numbers of reworking. etc), peer and user reviews can be factored into the rewards and recognition that academics receive (and of course eliminating the shameless self citation I did at the beginning of this piece!).