In Search for the Open Educator: Proposal of a Definition and a Framework to Increase Openness Adoption Among University Educators

Abstract

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 selfdevelopment 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.

Openness and Praxis: Exploring the Use of Open Educational Practices in Higher Education

“…Some focus primarily on the OER aspects of OEP (Armellini & Nie, 2013;Atenas, Havemann, & Priego, 2014;Hogan, Carlson, & Kirk, 2015;Karunanayaka, Naidu, Rajendra, & Ratnayake, 2015;Murphy, 2013;Schreurs et al, 2014). Other studies explore broader aspects of OEP such as open pedagogies and learning in open networks (Casey & Evans, 2011;Nascimbeni & Burgos, 2016; …”

Conceptualising OEP: A review of theoretical and empirical literature in Open Educational Practices

“…The main OPAL project report (Andrade et al, 2011) and related papers by Ehlers and Conole (noted above) continue to be cited widely by researchers in OEP (see Armellini & Nie, 2013;Atenas, Havemann & Priego, 2014;Carey, Davis, Ferreras & Porter, 2015;Casey & Evans, 2011;Coughlan & Perryman, 2015;Cronin, 2017;Czerniewicz et al, 2017aCzerniewicz et al, , 2017bHogan et al, 2015;Karunanayaka, Naidu, Rajendra & Ratnayake, 2015;Masterman, 2016;Murphy, 2013;Nascimbeni & Burgos, 2016;Paskevicius, 2017;Smyth, Bossu & Stagg, 2016).…”

“…These studies move beyond a focus on OER-related activities and in some cases, recommend considering OEP separately from OER. Nascimbeni and Burgos (2016) take such an approach in their study of "the Open Educator":…”

Higher Education Lecturers’ Lived Experience of Going Public in MOOCs

“…Students can make their voices heard, of course, but standardized course evaluations are often collected without a credible analysis. Sharing and awareness of course material is not as common as could be expected despite the growing use of open educational resources (OER) (Belikov & Bodily, 2016;Cronin, 2017;Nascimbeni & Burgos, 2016). OER is described by Wiley, Bliss and Mary (2014, p. 781) as "educational materials either licensed under an open copyright license or in the public domain."…”

“…Lecturers' willingness to teach online courses has been examined in many studies (Pundak & Dvir, 2014), but few studies have taken this perspective when studying MOOCs and open courses (Janssen, Nyström Claesson & Lindqvist, 2016;Lang, Zhang, Li & Sun, 2016;Nascimbeni & Burgos, 2016;Ross et al, 2014;Siemens, Gasevic & Dawson, 2015). A recent review of theses and dissertations has been conducted by Bozkurt, Keskin and de Ward (2016) where similar results were found.…”