What does it take to establish Openness as an institutional value? [O-076] Members : OER19

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Wed, Apr 10 2019, 10:30am – 11:30am

Authors: David White, and Kate Lindsay

Room: Lecture Theatre

Theme: Geopolitics

Type: Open spaces (30mins)

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Description

Session Description

The value of open practice at an individual or curriculum level has been well established and the story of the Open Educational Practice movement, beyond OER, is predominantly grassroots. This Open Space session will facilitate thinking and discussion exploring the challenges of establishing ‘Open Values’ at the centre of the intuition – of encouraging the institution to acknowledge and support the ideology of Open in a manner which influences a range of policy, and a myriad of practices.

These institutional-level values can support Open Educational Practice (Cronin 2017) but can also reach beyond teaching and learning to express existing forms of openness in areas such as research and knowledge exchange. This is a recentering of Open, away from individual narratives, towards the character and culture of the institution. In this sense the session resonates with the Geopolitics, Context and Sustainability themes.

The session will draw upon work undertaken at the University of the Arts London in collaboratively establishing a set of Open Values (White 2018) and the methods used in attempting to secure those values at a high level within the institution. The narrative of this work will be briefly presented to frame activity in which participants consider how to present the value of Openness in institutional terms and, importantly, how to navigate institutional structures and governance in a positive manner to preserve the principle of Open Values as distinct from traditional prestige economies (Stewart 2015).

The session will be reflected on via a post-conference blog post which will incorporate some of the session’s outputs (with permission)

Session content

Activity in the session will be designed to foster critical reflection on the institutional context and encourage discussion. This will take the form of card-sorting and mapping exercises which draw on the University of the Arts London experience but can be modified to respond to participant’s institutions. By the end of the session participants will have developed pieces of a strategy to embed Open within their institutions. They will gain confidence in articulating the value of Open Values to senior management by navigating a path between high-level vision statements and day-to-day operational concerns.

The session will run for 60 minutes, is designed for between 15 and 50 participants and requires a ‘cabaret’ style room layout. Aspects of the activities will be made openly available with the participants permission.

Introduction 10mins
Framing the activities 10mins
Card-sorting and mapping 15mins
Discussion/reflection (scaffolded by a shared online document) 20mins
Wrap-up and next steps 5mins

References

Cronin, C., 2017. Openness and praxis: Exploring the use of open educational practices in higher education. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(5).

Stewart, B.E., 2015. In abundance: Networked participatory practices as scholarship. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 16(3).

White, D., 2018. Open Values. [Blog] Digital – Learning – Culture. Available at: http://daveowhite.com/openvalues/ [Accessed 30 Nov. 2018].

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