The Education for Sustainability Swirl.

In this topic you will be exploring the meaning of sustainability for your teaching practice and for your learners. This includes thinking about the 'greening' of education, and how to create a lot out with the smallest possible a footprint. Sustainable approaches influence student and teacher workloads and are strongly linked to open education resources (OER) and practices (OEP). You need to figure out how you can be a more sustainable educator. It is also about using teaching approaches that support effective pedagogy and action competence: Co-operative learning, Inquiry learning, Experiential learning and Reflection. Some principles are general to all teachers (e.g., workloads and definitions of OER) and others will be specific to your context (e.g., embedding principles of sustainability specific to your discipline, and using open resources).  Read more on the course wiki.

Look for a summary of participants' activities - coming soon.

Freedom-Quilts-02 by The Confluence

This week I have chosen the symbol of the freedom quilts to represent the topic of open education resources and pracitces. My question to you all is: Is open education freeing us from the restrictions of the classroom, or introducing another set of conflicting factors?

Somehow I managed to skip a week in my posts - last week was a focus on you thinking about your plan for flexible learning. All the resources can be found under the topic:  Planning. I will be looking at your blogs to give feedback on your initial ideas. This week, we are taking a look at open education resources and practices. A web conference ( Adobe Connect) is scheduled for Tuesday 8 May 13:00-14:00.

During the early years of the 2000s, the words "open education" were only heard in the context of the broader phrase "open educational resources." This usage pattern unfortunately focused the minds of people almost exclusively on content, subtly nudging them away from considering the broader potential for the application of the principle of openness in education generally. And while OER are a critically important portion of modern educational infrastructure, they are only that - infrastructure.
Across a variety of contexts, the development and availability of high quality infrastructure is important for enabling valuable services and facilitating innovation. Education is no different. As OER became more widely available in the mid-2000s, thinking began to extend to open education itself - the practices, policies, and pedagogies that enable the sharing of OER as well as the new practices, policies, and pedagogies enabled by OER (Wiley, 2011).

The book from which this excerpt is taken - Open Education Practices: A User Guide for Organisations - describes some of these practices and policies. The Guide is based on practices at Otago Polytechnic.


Activity Seven - Open Education Resources and Philosophies.

• Explore Open Education Practices: A User Guide for Organisations.
• Listen to the recording of the web conference presentation by Leigh Blackall about Open Education practices.
• Explore Open Education Resource Foundation at Otago Polytechnic and Wikieducator to find out more about the vision for free education to all.
• Discuss on your blog:
  • a definition of open education practices;
  • some strategies you could use; and
  • why you believe open education resources and philosophies are important for teaching and learning.

Easter bunny by somewhereintheworldtoday

I hope you all had a relaxing Easter. We are exploring the meaning of open education this week, a very important subject for Otago Polytechnic and many educational organisations around the world.

I am very pleased to announce that Leigh Blackall is our speaker this week for the web conference.  Leigh used to teach this course at Otago Polytechnic, and now works in Sport Studies and the Faculty of Health at the University of Canberra. He will be talking about the principles and practices of Open Education. This is a great opportunity to hear about this subject direct from someone who has worked in this area for a long time, and is really passionate about the practice of open education. You can read all about his activities on his blog.

Date and time: Thursday 5 May: 15:00-16:30.
Venue: the usual web conference link for the course. Remember to have a microphone and speakers (or headset) so you can join in the conversation.

Leigh is the author of this wonderful resource: Open Education Practices: A User Guide for Organisations
Activities this week include exploring the resource and attending the web conference. As well as:
Discuss on your blog:

• a definition of open education practices;
• some strategies you could use; and
• why you believe open education resources and philosophies are important for teaching and learning. 

Remember to explore the Open Education Resource Foundation at Otago Polytechnic and Wikieducator to find out more about the vision for free education to all.