OpenEd20

How can we build sustainable open education programs that nurtures a growing community of faculty participants? How can we model the unique power of open-enabled pedagogy in the face of publishers’ co-option of textbook affordability with inclusive access programs? How can we introduce and support emerging models of open education that center faculty expertise and student agency in an environment of shrinking budgets and precarity? And how can we do all those things in the middle of a global pandemic? At our institution, one answer has been the Open Pedagogy Incubator - a Libraries program that brings together a cohort of faculty instructors to develop competencies in open pedagogy through a series of hands-on workshops, curated readings, and cohort discussions.

As a window into these questions about openness, community, and shared agency, a team of two librarian facilitators and two faculty participants will introduce the Incubator and situate it in the broader context of open education and open pedagogy. We will discuss the design and aims of this project and offer the Incubator as one promising model for sustainable open education work. We will also offer reflections on the successes and challenges we encountered in our pilot season and suggest strategies for bringing this model to other institutions in a way that reflects local needs and experiences.

With one model on the table, and more in the works, we will lead a discussion about different experiences of introducing and supporting open pedagogy as well as how to build open communities online. We will begin with small group breakout rooms where we will facilitate discussion about these issues and invite other models and approaches. These ideas and questions will be gathered in Padlet and shared with the full group. Next we will use those to frame a full group conversation about how the open community can engage with these models as a way to reimagine open education as a values-driven community of practice.

Participants will leave with new models for supporting open pedagogy as well as critical discussion on the opportunities and challenges of those models. After this discussion we hope we all will be better prepared to explore and evaluate open pedagogy as a set of practices and values that can be applied any time as well as tools for building a community that reflects local context and shared values of agency, equity, and openness.



Learning Outcomes:
Our attendees will be introduced to and invited to learn from the first iteration of our Open Pedagogy Incubator model as a precursor for a wider critical discussion about working with faculty to implement similar open pedagogical practices into their courses. Our session attendees will learn from our panel’s and other attendees unique experiences of stimulating and facilitating local interest in order to build a sustainable values-driven community.