A tale of two OEPs? Looking at open educational practices from a policy viewpoint

Havemann, Leo; Atenas, Javiera and Nascimbeni, Fabio (2021). A tale of two OEPs? Looking at open educational practices from a policy viewpoint. In: OERxDomains21, 19-27 Apr 2021, Online.

Abstract

This workshop will engage participants in a discussion of the apparent “understanding gap” between the two OEPs of open educational practices and open education policies, with the aim of ensuring the recognition of existing, successful open practices within appropriate open policies. The starting point of the workshop is the recognition of the distance between much open education policy discourse (often focused on OER, as shown for example by the UNESCO 2019 Recommendation on OER), the research communities working to categorise, replicate and promote a range of grassroots open educational practices (OEP), and the rich variety of actual practices undertaken by educators.

OEP, which were initially understood as teaching approaches that are closely connected to the creation and use of OER (Ehlers 2011), are increasingly being defined more widely, taking in aspects other than open content such as inclusive pedagogies (Havemann 2020), sharing-based approaches (Cronin 2017), care-based teaching methods (Bali, Cronin and Jhangiani 2019) and accessibility dynamics (Tlili et al 2020). In order to explore the different way of understanding openness of the Open Education policy community and the OEP research community, the workshop will engage participants in discussing definitions and perspectives and in co-designing a “policy-sensitive” and “policy-relevant” way to look at OEP, which means classifying OEP from a policy point of view.

Furthermore, we will look at key strategies to support the adoption of the principles of OEP within wider policy and strategic environments in the HE sector, such as digital education, e-learning and open access policies, to ensure that open practices are embedded, supported, enabled and rewarded in line with the academic development programmes, career progression criteria and innovation and teaching excellence schemes. We will invite participants to co-create an action plan and a roadmap following the OE policy co-creation recommendations outlined by Atenas, Havemann, Neumann & Stefanelli (2020), using Mentimeter to crowdsource ideas that can be used to draft guidelines for the inclusion of OEP in HE at policy and strategic levels.