Lesson 10 - Trends in Open Learning

There is a close connection between networking, social media such as blogs and wikis, which enable students to create open educational resources, and open pedagogy.

Jon Beasley-Murray’s course where students created a Wikipedia entry on Latin American literature is a good example, as is the Math Exam Resources created by graduate students at UBC. This approach is particularly valuable for partly redressing cultural and historical bias, through the organization of Wikipedia edit-a-thons. For two examples, see Women in Red/Indigenous Women. and Indigenous Literature Edit-a-Thon.

The Universidad de Guadalajara (Mexico) has an interesting web site (in English) that provides a number of examples of open pedagogy from around the world, related to its Agora project.

Another practice of open pedagogy is textbook-free degrees, called Zed Creds or Z-degrees but also ZTC (zero textbook cost). Royal Roads University’s Masters of Arts in Learning and Technology is the first master of arts degree in Canada to go textbook-free. Students can access all of the course materials through open educational resources, e-books, journal articles and other free digital resources. These types of courses aim to improve access to education and enhance student outcomes.

Many more examples of open pedagogy in practice can be found in Jhangiani and Biswas-Diener (2017) and in the Open Pedagogy Notebook.

Lastly, there is a related movement around open educational infrastructure and technology that challenges educational institutions and students to think about who owns the technology and data being used for teaching and learning and how open education practices can be enabled by open educational technologies (see, for example OpenETC.)