Institutional mapping of open educational practices beyond use of Open Educational Resources

ABSTRACT

Many initiatives exist to increase the adoption of open educational practices (OEP) within universities, but few initiatives start by exploring the capacity of educators to adopt open approaches. This paper addresses this challenge, suggesting that in order to build OEP capacity, universities should build on the existing skills of local champions who are familiar with open approaches. The paper builds on the Open Educators’ Factory methodology to map the capacities of university teachers across four areas: open design, open content, open teaching and open assessment and presents the results of its application to a case study within an Italian university. The pilot demonstrates that by using this approach, it is possible to map universities’ existing OEP and connect them with the capability of local educators. This enables university managers to build on the expertise of open education practitioners to raise the overall capacity of their staff to adopt open approaches.

KEYWORDS:

• Open education
• higher education
• open educational resources
• open educational practices
• teacher training

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research is partially funded by the Universidad Internacional de la Rioja (UNIR) (http://www.unir.net), through the Research Institute for Innovation, Technology & Education (UNIR iTED, http://ited.unir.net), the UNESCO-UNIR Chair on eLearning and the ICDE-UNIR Chair in Open Educational Resources (http://research.unir.net/unesco).

Notes on contributors

Fabio Nascimbeni

Fabio Nascimbeni works as an assistant professor at the Universidad Internacional de la Rioja, where he holds the Telefonica Chair on Digital Society and Education. He is a Senior Fellow of the European Distance and eLearning Network. His research interests are open education, learning innovation, digital literacy, and digital inclusion.

Daniel Burgos

Daniel Burgos works as Vice-rector for Knowledge Transfer & Technology, Director of UNIR iTED (http://ited.unir.net), UNESCO Chair on eLearning, and ICDE Chair in Open Educational Resources, at the Universidad Internacional de La Rioja. He has worked in over 50 research and development and innovation projects and published over 120 scientific papers.

Lorna M. Campbell

Lorna M. Campbell works for the OER Service within the University of Edinburgh’s Information Services Group. She has a long-standing commitment to supporting open education technology, policy and practice, and is a founder of the Open Scotland initiative. Lorna is also a Trustee of Wikimedia UK and the Association for Learning Technology.

Anita Tabacco

Anita Tabacco has been a full professor of mathematical analysis since 2002 at the Department of Mathematical Sciences of the Politecnico di Torino. She has been Vice Rector for teaching (2012–2018), and Vice Rector for recruitment (2008–2012). She is currently the Rector’s delegate for simplification of university procedures.