Abstract
<p class="3">The paper explores the change process that university teachers need to go through in order to become fluent with Open Education approaches. Based on a literature review and a set of interviews with a number of leading experts in the field of Open Educational Resources and Open Education, the paper puts forward an original definition of Open Educator which takes into account all the components of teachers’ work: learning design, teaching resources, pedagogical approaches and assessment methods- of teachers’ activities. Subsequently, to help the development of teachers’ openness capacity, the definition is further developed into a holistic framework for teachers, which takes into account all the dimensions of openness included in the definition and which provides teachers with self-development paths along each dimension. By working on the definition and on the framework with the interviewed experts, the paper concludes that a strong relation exists between the use of open approaches and the networking and collaboration attitude of university teachers, and that in order to overcome the technical and cultural barriers that hinder the use of open approaches in Higher Education, it is important to work on the transition phases – in terms of awareness and of capacity building - that teachers have to go through in their journey towards openness.</p>
Highlights
The Realised and Unmet Potential of Open EducationOpen Education has the potential to increase quality, access, and attractiveness of Higher Education, fostering “a more democratic and competitive higher education system, with the potential to improve access to education, develop and localize open educational services to suit local contexts, and enhance the integration of education into everyday lives as part of lifelong learning” (Butcher & Hoosen, 2014, p. 9)
Research shows In Search for the Open Educator: Proposal of a Definition and a Framework to Increase Openness Adoption Among University Educators Nascimbeni and Burgos that OER, Open Educational Practices (OEP), Open Textbooks and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are increasingly being adopted by universities around the world (Esposito, 2013; European Commission, 2013; Grodecka & Śliwowski, 2014), but on the other hand many observers agree that the outreach of the openness in education is still far from its potential impact (Glennie, Harley, Butcher, & Van Wyk, 2012; Hollands & Tirthali, 2014; Kortemeyer, 2013; Okada, Mikroyannidis, Meister, & Little, 2012; Rohs & Ganz, 2015)
We have developed the definition into a practical framework that presents development paths for Higher Education teachers along four dimensions: learning design, teaching resources, teaching strategies, and assessment methods
Summary
Open Education has the potential to increase quality, access, and attractiveness of Higher Education, fostering “a more democratic and competitive higher education system, with the potential to improve access to education, develop and localize open educational services to suit local contexts, and enhance the integration of education into everyday lives as part of lifelong learning” (Butcher & Hoosen, 2014, p. 9). To fill the gap given by the absence of an holistic definition that can represent a clear target for the transformation of teachers into open educators, we created a definition which takes into account both the objects, teaching content and tools, and the practices, learning design, pedagogical, and assessment approaches, of teachers’ activities As said before, this definition is grounded on our literature review and has been worked out in collaboration with the interviewed experts, whose specific contributions are mentioned later in the analysis of the definition. Instead of focusing on OER as the necessary first step of openness, the Open Educator definition proposed above provides a number of entry points into openness (learning design, content, methods, and research) since this would motivate a teacher that is already used to think openly in one of these areas of activity to explore and adopt open approaches in the other areas
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