The rigors and rewards of open education advocacy

Editor's Notes

1. Copyright Librarian at Langara College, in Vancouver B.C. since 2013. In November 2016, Open Education was added to my portfolio and I now serve as Co-Lead for Langara’s Open Education Advisory Committee, Open Langara.
2. The purposes of this session is to continue a conversation from the 2016 ABC Copyright Conference. In the session entitled “The Intersection of OER Advocacy and Academic Copyright Management,” Martin Warkentin (University of the Fraser Valley) identified how copyright management and OER advocacy roles intersect in higher education. For some (though perhaps excluding those present), this pairing may seem contradictory: Open ed gives away for free what copyright seeks to protect. But in fact, a portfolio including copyright management and OER advocacy makes a lot of sense. At the heart of both of these roles lie user and creator rights. Today, I’d like to build off of Martin’s talk and speak about the rigors and rewards I’ve experienced working at this place of intersection over the past eight months. Some of you likely attended the OER Librarians event at Centennial College in early June. The panel discussion in particular illustrated that these challenges are real and often universal. Before I jump in, I also want to acknowledge that I come to this conversation from a place of middle class privilege, as someone who completed two degrees with minor financial hardship. In a recent blog post entitled “Open Pedagogy and Social Justice”, Robin DeRosa and Rajiv Jhangiani (two of my open education heroes) insightfully note that: “For those of us who work in Higher Ed, it’s likely that we have been casually aware of the link between family income and college enrolment, attendance, persistence, and completion. But for those of us who teach, it’s likely that the pedagogies and processes that inflect our daily work are several steps removed from the economic challenges that our students face.”
3. It’s likely that many of you are by now familiar with Open Education and Open Educational Resources. I raise the terms again here to call attention to an interesting aspect of the SPARC definition. SPARC defines Open Education as “resources, tools and practices that are free of legal, financial and technical barriers and can be fully used, shared and adapted in the digital environment.” I think the emphasis on “free of legal, financial, and technical barriers” here is intriguing and somewhat fraught. In March, Langara had the honour of hosting open education scholar and advocate Robin DeRosa. In her keynote, she insightfully noted that “Open is not a panacea…It fixes [some problems], and raises other[s].” Part of our job as open education advocates is to “make…these barriers as highly visible as we can.”
4. We tend to think of OER in terms of price tag –or, more specifically, the lack thereof. But to be considered truly open, a resource must be more than just freely available online. It must be free for users to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. Together, these constitute the 5 Rs of Open.
5. We achieve the 5 Rs through open licensing. Creative Commons licenses, of course, allow creators to waive some rights within their bundle of copyrights, while retaining others. As Robin argues, a movement that centers on free textbooks alone is uninspiring. What does inspire though is the potential for open resources to reinvigorate and reimagine the ways in which we teach and learn by virtue of the 5 Rs. As Robin and Rajiv write in the blog post I alluded to earlier: “Just as the open license allows for the remixing and revision of OER, it also opens the gate into a particular way of thinking about learning…With the open license at the heart of our work, we care both about “free” and about “freedom,” about resources and practices, about access and about accessibility, about content and about contribution” (DeRosa and Jhangiani, 2017).
6. As we segue into the ‘rigors’, I’d like to contextualize the discussion by giving you a brief overview of Langara. Langara is a small community college, specializing in 2-year university-transfer. It has approx. 8,300 full-time enrolled students in regular studies. 28% of the student body is comprised of international students from 80 different countries, the largest number of whom come from Northern India. Anecdotally, these students tell us that their immediate and extended families have made real sacrifices for them to study in Vancouver, one of the most expensive cities in North America. But, it’s seen as an investment in their futures, as many hope to bridge from their studies into permanent residency in Canada.
7. The majority of open textbooks adopted by Langara instructors come from BCcampus’ Open Textbook Project. This is where I hit peak impostor syndrome, since my co-presenter David helped spearhead the events I’m about to outline during his tenure as Director of BCcampus. In 2012, the B.C. Ministry of Advanced Education announced that it would provide $1 million in funding to the create open textbooks for the 40 highest enrolled post-secondary subject areas in B.C. In 2014, the government announced another $1 million in funding to develop 20 open textbooks for skills and training, in alignment with the BC Jobs Plan. Since its launch, the project has saved over 41,000 students in B.C. approximately $4 million dollars. This is an excellent proof of concept for the Province of Ontario, which announced funding for it own Open Textbook Initiative earlier this month. Still, in spite of these cost savings, an estimated 54% of college and university students in B.C. cannot afford to purchase at least one of their required course textbooks (as cited in DeRosa and Jhangiani, 2017).
8. In November 2016, Langara founded an Open Education Advisory Committee, called Open Langara, with representation from across the college. Prior to this, open education activities on campus had been largely grassroots. The purpose of the committee is to: Create formal supports for faculty seeking to adopt, adapt, or create OER or explore open pedagogy; To facilitate communication about open education; And—on the broadest level—to promote a culture of openness at Langara.
9. But, as we’ve noted, “open is not a panacea.” It solves some problems and raises others. When open education was added to my portfolio, I assumed—based on the number of open textbook adoptions alone—that Langara was rich with open ed advocates. However, conversations with faculty who had adopted open textbooks often told a different story. When I asked about their reasons for adopting open textbooks, I was often surprised by the answers I received; It wasn’t uncommon to hear things like: “Well, if I don’t use an open textbook, my students won’t do the readings”, or; “All of my colleagues teaching other sections of this course adopted open textbooks so I had to as well.” These sentiments are not unique to Langara, and open ed librarian Anita Walz explores the roots of what she calls “faculty indifference” in her chapter for Rajiv and Robert Biswas-Diener new book Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science. This is not to place blame. Faculty experience a number of pressures themselves, not the least of which are time constraints, adjunct status at multiple institutions etc., to which we must be sensitive.
10. As Farhad Dastur points out in a chapter for Rajiv and Robert’s book, the earliest universities were founded in the Middle Ages. While curricula have evolved, “universities’ fundamental structures, governance models, and isolationist tendencies persist.” These are the institutional barriers open education advocates on post-secondary campuses often find themselves up against.
11. Because OER are free to use, we often forget that they are not free to create. OER do carry a cost in the form of real, but invisible, academic labor. In a 2016 BCcampus research report, 39% of faculty respondents cited lack of time as a significant barrier to using OER (Jhangiani et al., 2016, p. 19). “Lack of institutional support for the use of OER was reported as a more significant barrier by faculty at colleges/institutes than faculty at either teaching-intensive universities or research-intensive universities” (5). According to the researchers, with less time and fewer resources to locate relevant and high-quality OER, faculty may not be in a position to take advantage of the permissions to update and otherwise adapt OER to their courses (p. 31). Langara currently provides only offer two avenues to faculty interested in OER. They can either: (1) dedicate part of their annual non-instructional term to exploring OER (however, this would only allow for a project with a small scope; for example, peer-review of an open textbook or revise a few chapters), or; (2) take a year’s educational leave at 80% of their regular salary to undertake a larger project. Many of the faculty I spoke with supported open on a philosophical level, but neither of these options were particularly appealing to them in terms of implementation.
12. So now that we’ve identified the rigors, how to we move on to rewards? I acknowledge that organizational culture varies widely from institution to institution. Though one size therefore never fits all, I’d like to outline four approaches I’ve found helpful in my work at Langara, lest they prove helpful to you too.
13. First, Take time to build shared values among stakeholders. I love this quote from Fred Allen that Farhad Dastur includes in his chapter for Rajiv’s and Robert’s book (which may ring true to some of us in the room!) Open Langara held its first meeting in February 2017 and we ran this meeting in the traditional fashion. Soon after, I realized I failed to ask a simple but important question: What reasons did the participants have for accepting our invitation to join the Committee, beyond being ‘voluntold’? For this reason, we decided to take a step back and facilitate our second meeting using Liberating Structures. Liberating Structures offers an alternative to traditional meeting structures, and uses 33 activities designed to engage all team members. We used an activity called Purpose-to-Practice which, among other things, asks team members why the work is important to them and the larger community. Responses included: “to create good global citizens”, “to make a culture of openness and sharing the norm at Langara”, “to reinvent post-secondary education” and to “reinvigorate faculty” Needless to say, this was far more powerful than the Terms of Reference we drafted and circulated prior to the meeting.
14. Secondly, I’ve found it useful to temper my expectations, set realistic goals, and celebrate even small successes.
15. This is the Study of Knowledge Management in Education’s (ISKME’s) Open Education Practice Rubric, which I’ve adapted here as a graph. The rubric “define[s] a set of open educational practices that help educators to advance a classroom and school culture of open education and to advocate for the potential benefits of open educational resources (OER) in the context of continuous improvement.” I commenced my open education role expecting faculty to be at levels F or G, when most were at levels A and B. It turns out levels A and B are a pretty good place to be. BCcampus’ 2016 research report found that awareness and adoption of OER are a gateway. Faculty who had used OER were more likely to adapt and create OER than those who hadn’t.
16. Thirdly, institutional recognition is vital. Work can happen at the grassroots level, but it needs to be seen, valued, and resourced by those at the top. In 2017, Langara’s Director of Academic Innovation secured a separate budget for Open Langara. Prior to this, we had been paying for open education initiatives on campus from the Copyright budget, with the idea that we were supporting a shift on campus from commercial to openly licensed content. However, my concern with this over the long term was that it would mask the Committee’s work. One way that were able to make the case for a separate budget was to connect open education to three of the five priorities outlined in Langara’s Academic Plan. With our small operating budget, we plan to create an Open Education Grant program, which other institutions in B.C such as SFU and BCIT have had great success with. According to Nicole Finkbeiner of OpenStax, faculty say that “presentations on open education with a carrot” (for example, grant funding opportunities) are more impactful than general open education presentations. I’m hoping the grants program at Langara will be a powerful messaging tool on campus moving forward.
17. Lastly, tap into communities of open ed practitioners outside of your home institution, both in person and online. For example, BC has an active Open Education Librarians group and many of its members have been working in open ed for much longer than I have. They’ve generously shared both their failures and successes in open ed, which, as Anita Walz notes, is the only way we continue to move forward (final page).