Homo Bloggus (Open Ed.)

I am coming from the practical point of view of a faculty support staff at a large research university where the charge is to support mainstream faculty tech integration efforts. My faculty clients vary in their pedagogical skills, technology competencies, and digital fluency and across disciplines. So I need to choose whatever tools and approaches best suit the individual instructor.

As far back as 2000, I was interested in helping faculty find good learning resources to use in their courses and drew on services such as Merlot. More recently, I had made it a goal of my job to help faculty adoption of social software tools and services — a step forward in empowering them to be able to have access to useful, easy-to-use tools that foster social interaction and to use more “constructivist” or open learning approaches, and to integrate and create learning resources etc. My initial efforts to introduce and train faculty on the affordances of social software tools immediately bumped up against copyright concerns and became a serious conversation stopper for social software adoption. I therefore adjusted my strategy to deal with copyright viz a viz Creative Commons licensing, for example, and discovered OER movement, where I now see all this nicely dovetailing. The open education movement has a much longer history and preceded the emergence of “Web 2.0″ phenomenon ( I think the Open University began in late 80s?).

Still, all my efforts are kind of naive. I learn from the Week 3 reading that the kind of Ed innovations I am working towards are stymied by my University’s institutional culture, and require significant changes at that level to stimulate the kinds of policy and cultural changes that will incentivize faculty to give more consideration to the kinds of educational innovations contained in the OCLOS Roadmap. And the Roadmap makes the case for the potential of OERs to supply an important difference in improving teaching and learning practices, and then identifies the inhibitors, drivers, and enablers of that potential.

With respect to critical inhibitors is the lack of incentives for research faculty to adopt these ed. innovations. Moreover, at my institution, the state has so much copyright over much faculty (and staff) products that even the Creative Commons licensing approach by individuals is rendered in applicable. In other words, even one of the OpenEd enablers is inhibited since we don’t have the authority to assign CC licensing rights as the state owns all but a few kinds of things that a faculty produces. I think technically this means simple things like assignments, syllabi, instructional guides, etc. and most certainly course content and whole courses. (I will save further discussion of this issue for the course week on copyright, but I think this is a serious obstacle for many U.S. university faculty ).