OTNSI 2019 Breakout Sessions

At the heart of the OTN is a commitment to share questions, insights, and experiences so together we can enhance and develop open education programs. In that spirit, we invited members of our community to facilitate breakout sessions at the OTN Summit on Friday, July 26th.

We received some fantastic proposals, and are happy to share these videos from the facilitators describing their sessions.

Karen Lauritsen, Open Textbook Network

There are many ways to publish open textbooks, and, unsurprisingly, each way involves tradeoffs. It’s useful to determine which way will best meet local needs. At the same time, it’s worthwhile to consider how open textbooks published locally represent and reflect your faculty and institutional contributions in the broader higher ed landscape.

Jonathan Lashley, Boise State University

Supporting OER initiatives is difficult enough, never mind trying to do it alone. In turn, collaborating with others is so often necessary for scaling and sustaining our work in this area. Considering the competing priorities, workloads, and expectations of those we partner with, however, it should not surprise us when interest wanes among allies across campus. As leaders of open education initiatives at our respective institutions, we must find ways to both identify collaborators and keep them engaged in our efforts.

Anita Walz, Virginia Tech

Collaboration is a key feature of OER, but it requires a lot of coordination to develop discipline-specific communities to collaboratively author, create ancillaries, meet up to discuss practices that are working well. Are OTN folks interested in developing discipline-specific and collaborative OER communities, and if so, what have OTN people already done in this area and how could we build on it?

A lot of OER authors choose to “go it on their own” and end up burned out and with a book that is not as good as it could be if were working in a team (teams bring diverse perspectives, challenges to methods, different strengths, etc.). Solo authors also learn a lot less from peers and lose out on the encouragement of a team and the opportunity to learn/think through different ways of teaching their course. Those of us who are working with authors who want to publish are working to ensure rigor and high quality learning resources, and also see needs for talking about pedagogy in the development process. I think that the OTN could make substantive contributions in this area and would like to know about others’ thoughts and experiences on this topic… and if people want to work together.

Ariana Santiago, University of Houston

“What is your institution’s service model for supporting OER implementation?” by Ariana E. Santiago is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 International License. Transcript available at: bit.ly/otn19servicemodels

You’ve engaged in successful outreach and have instructors on board to use OER – now what? How do you actually support them in implementing OER? In this discussion about OER service models, we’ll learn about a variety of approaches to supporting OER implementation and explore the following topics: OER services that your institution offers, as well as those that are not offered, and why; staff roles and responsibilities; change management; and local contexts that impact service model development.

Sarah Cohen, Open Textbook Network

With so many new consortia in the OTN, what does it mean to take a system view (rather than a campus view) of open education?

Dragan Gill, Rhode Island College

While it is exciting to share the number of books or OERs created, students reached, courses flipped, dollars saved, our work to get to these results is often not described with numerical data. We are often engaging in political and strategic efforts to explain the value of open to our campuses. How do we tell this story – to the public, to our administrators and for ourselves to assess and evaluate our work?

Dustin Fife, Western Colorado University

With Meg Brown-Sica, Colorado State University

OER is just one step in creating an actual equitable system. It needs to always be put in a larger framework of changes.

Amy Hofer, Open Oregon Educational Resources

The OER community is great at sharing information in order to help others not reinvent the wheel, but we also know that what works at one institution may be all wrong for another. There are many approaches to research that emphasize local context. I’m interested in how we can make a case for many valid data reporting methods by applying theories that prioritize local viewpoints.

Mark Sheaves, Open Textbook Network

Twitter probably houses the biggest network of people working on open education in the world. But the open Twitter community can transcend some traditional barriers to collaborations including departments, institutions, membership organisations, closed networks, nations, and sectors. Twitter, then, offer us all opportunities to ask questions, share resources, hear new perspectives, celebrate wins, commiserate in challenges and build friendships and professional communities. Are we putting enough energy into leveraging its potential for our aims? How could we use the platform more strategically? And what are the concerns with putting our energy into a privately run platform?

Monica Brown, Boise State University

While open licenses have potential for creating more inclusive course materials, without direct concerted effort, OER will not make progress in a timely way. As such, I believe this question to be of vital importance to the open education community if we wish to integrate equity into our processes and practices holistically. By proposing this question, I hope to create avenues for ongoing conversations about what inclusive practices might look like as we assist faculty in revising and remixing resources for their courses.

Matt DeCarlo, Radford University

Across service professions, almost OER focus on in-school education, rather than continuing education and professional development. Practitioner-focused OER have the potential to disrupt current models and break down barriers between academia and practice realms.