Tags
OER, open educational resources, open learning and teaching, sharing, university teaching, visual literacy today
How to think about openness and open resources in education? Am I able to, as a teacher who spends hours preparing the teaching materials, stop screaming “mine!” like a child?
Education is a relationship of sharing. We share our knowledge and experience with students while their share their ideas with us. The exchange of thoughts works only in an open environment that provides room for reflection on the learning process. Thus, education is per se about sharing and openness. However, those of us who are working in academia, know how vulnerable our work is toward the sharing practices — the constant fear of when to share and with whom my research ideas, plans, preliminary results that they will not be stolen. Is this the same case with the educational material that we produce? Or can they be shared to inspire others?
I am now thinking about my learning and growing process as a teacher. Many of the ideas I have implemented in the classroom were inspired by the work of others. And I am still searching for the new ideas, activities and learning materials that I can adapt for my teaching. Education is about sharing, which does not mean to give away. Each student group will react differently to the same material, and each teacher will apply the same activity in a slightly different way. Thus, by sharing our educational practices and materials as teachers, we do not need to worry that we give them away. They are staying we us, we can still use them. However, and what is more important, there are other teachers and learners who can benefit from our work and enjoy the learning process in a novel ways.
In this place, I want to mention a great initiative, supported by the International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA), of open educational resources (OER) in the area of visual literacy — a place where teachers across disciplines and levels of education can find lesson plans and share teaching ideas related to visual literacy. This is a recent initiative, but extremely important, and I think it is the time that I am going to contribute to it as well. You can find more about it here.
In teaching and learning we should keep all windows open for the new refreshing wind to come in.
Joanna Łucja Kędra 
Joanna thank you for sharing your ideas and the link to VLT. Such initiatives could be created as well in university level. And then make that publicly accessible. Instead, everyone is talking about Open learning and then the universities come with their copyright experts to caution teachers on this and the other aspect of sharing our materials. Students also get entangled in such procedures. If these initiatives are ever to become mainstream, I believe, we need to get institutional support from our employers. At least in my case, I see the legal issues, that are kind of known to me, curtailing any desire I may have to share teaching material publicly.
Thank you, Michail, for your comment. I think that one way to overcome the “ownership” issues when sharing our teaching materials is to share them as a publication. In this way, university should not have any legal issues toward our practices. The Visual Literacy Today initiative is exactly such place, where we can freely share/publish course or activity designs and it’s for all levels of education, including universities. Each submission undergoes review by the IVLA board members, but it’s freely available after that – so it’s like publishing open access, which I think our institutions should appreciate. In my discipline there are a few journals, which have a special section for publishing teaching materials, but of course, these are not freely available. I think there is a number of ways to go and especially we should support each other in sharing teaching materials – to get new inspiration.
I, too, have been thinking about this with teaching materials and sharing. But only partly because of spending a lot of time preparing mine – another reason is that I am quite new in what I am doing and I have “inherited” a lot of teaching materials (powerpoint presentations, questionaries for students etc) from my predecessor and my colleague, which have saved me from the situation where I would rebuild everything from scratch. I am very grateful for this sharing, but sometimes I wonder what it would have looked like, if I would have built up the material from nothing instead on building on the foundation of others? Then again, that is how knowledge is cumulated, so why not do it with teaching materials too. I do still reconstruct the material to fit myself, I don’t feel comfortable using it directly as it was.
I agree, we always adapt the teaching materials, because each of us is different as a teacher and we encounter various groups of students. Myself, I’m very much for sharing teaching materials and ideas, because in this way we learn from the experience of others. I personally need inspiration. I think there is still scant attention given in our work to sharing experience in teaching and to support each other in looking for solutions and better working approaches (activities, exercises, course designs).
I certainly agree with you that our principle role as a teacher is to share and it is beneficial if we could share more among colleagues as well.