Open educational resources, open online courses (eventually “massive”) and open tools like blog, twitter and open forums offer a potentially rich source to use in education. It enables active learning and a more tailor-made approach of education. When teachers are aware of the opportunities open online education can offer, they are able to make an informed choice to use them optimal when designing a course. To enable this, basic knowledge of the many manifestations of openness in education is needed. In the end, their range of teaching methods is enlarged.
To realize this, together with Martijn Ouwehand (Delft University of Technology) under the umbrella of the SURF SIG Open Education, we have developed a workshop targeted at teachers who are interested in applying forms of openness into their lectures.
The objectives of the workshop are to raise awareness of the opportunities of openness and how to integrate them to achieve the optimal learning experience for the students. Open educational practices offers a base to connect openness to the daily practice of a teacher; this workshop tries to give the ideas more flesh and blood.
The workshop offers two approaches of how to use forms of openness in course design:
- Reuse of open learning materials or open courses. This reuse can range from just reusing the idea behind a specific OER (not all 5R rights are necessary for this aim) to reusing reworked and remixed OER (all 5R rights are necessary)
- Expand openness to open tools and open platforms, using an open pedagogy. For this workshop we have adopted a revised version of the definition of open pedagogy by Hegarty.
This workshop was organized twice in 2016 under the umbrella of SURFacademy. Feedback from the participants was used to improve the resources of the workshop. This has resulted in a toolkit. The toolkit can be used by those interested in organizing this workshop in their own institution.
The toolkit consists of the following resources:
- A script. This contains all information needed to organize the workshop (available as .pdf, .docx and .odt)
- A course manual “Basics of open”. This manual is intended for self-study a basic course on openness in education (available as .pdf, .docx and .odt)
- Slides “Workshop Implementing open education”. These slides can be used in the workshop (available as .pptx)
- Two inspirational models.
All resources are published under a CC BY license. The toolkit is available in both Dutch and English and can be downloaded from here.
We intend to regularly update the toolkit, based on feedback of users. Feedback can be provided using this form.
We hope this workshop will add to widening adoption of forms of open online education by teachers.