Rethinking the Learning Design for Open Education: Designing to Blur the Boundaries of OERs
The Learning Design Problem
Traditional ways to present content through open educational resources (OERs) tend to reduce the practice of education to a set of techniques and static and monolithic resources, by means of which the educational process is standardized in a sterile and bureaucratic operation. Likewise, in open educational approaches to teaching and learning many practices are still tied to existing traditional artifacts and sometimes archaic systems.
Even the open textbooks and associated technologies can feel static, closed, and sterile. Freire (2005, p. 100) would argue that:
If knowledge were static and consciousness empty, merely occupying a certain space in the body, this kind of educational practice would be valid. But this is not the case. Knowledge is not something that is made and finished. And consciousness is an ‘intention’ toward the World.
Freire describes a world that is not a static and monolithic entity but instead, an open and dynamic system. Education and the practices mediating it, should be fluid and permeable, enabling knowledge to be emergent, organic, local, and geared towards social change.
In addition, educational resources tend to be generic and mainly created by scholars and institutions from the Global North. As a consequence, many of the marginal worldviews and alternative positionalities are excluded. Lambert (2018) considers this and proposes using a social justice lens based on Nancy Fraser tripartite model of justice whereby justice is seen as complex and layered phenomena that include redistributive justice (the economic dimension), recognitive justice (cultural dimension) and representational justice (political dimension). The work of Taskeen Adams (EdTechHub blog) is relevant for thinking about these issues).
Given this context, I ask how we can better open learning spaces to student voices, to encourage more equitable practices, and to expand our own conceptions of the possibilities of what OERs can do. In short, I am curious to find out how we can design learning approaches that take advantage of the open and organic nature of OERs and open educational practices (OEP) so that we are more inclusive of different worldviews and/or other social realities. In this way OER recreation and implementation can bring about a flourishing of local knowledge systems, as Taskeen Adams so rightly suggests us to do.
In this proposal, I offer to explore a current OER, DataPraxis, which is the outcome of a research project that was aimed at strengthening educators’ critical data literacy. DataPraxis is a WordPress site that includes five modules with content relevant to critical data literacy. Each module contains activities, multimedia resources, a glossary of terms, and a reading list. It also includes a variety of interactive tools that can be used to explore social issues regarding the political dimension of data. This OER is what is offered so that others can remix, reuse, redistribute, revise and moreover, regenerate any element of the material.
In so doing, I argue, different pathways to learning can be offered to a broader audience, including, most likely, putting marginal voices and positionalities into the educational discourse. This opening up of DataPraxis to other voices, lenses, and settings can make it a fluid canvas that is shaped by people who have a different understanding of social reality, different ways of knowing, and that are not necessarily positioned in formal HE institutions nor in the Global North. In doing so, I hope that underrepresented communities can produce knowledge that is meaningful to them.
The principles that are underlying this learning design proposal foreground the unpredictable and generative qualities of educational processes and invite educators/learning designers to value that which is unexpected, not yet there, and/or beyond their control, and is thus complex. The idea of not-yetness has been explored by Valetsianos, Amy Collier, and Jen Ross, you can read this post to know more about it.
The Educational Proposition
The proposal is to open the DataPraxis OER to be re-mixed and re-used, integrating different lenses and settings by students and teachers. In this way, this resource contributes to making the OER a more open, creative, community-developed, and -maintained resource that advances theory and practice in critical instructional/learning design.
The possibilities for students and teachers are twofold. First, they can use DataPraxis as a way to work through the design problems stated above. This means that students and practitioners will use the OER to open the learning spaces to student voices to encourage more equitable practices, and expand their own conceptions of the possibilities of what OERs can do. In this case, the task is to think about how we can reuse, revise, remix and regenerate any of the already created content and tools (lessons, modules, podcasts, activities, reading lists, glossary of terms, toolbox) that mediate critical data literacy and open space for a more critical thinking/design.
Second, offer students and teachers the topic of critical data literacy as a generative theme, as Freire called these, upon which to focus to develop different activities. For example, consider case studies for teaching purposes; that is, creating an OER that has as its focus, issues on critical data literacy (e.g., cases on gender bias in data). This is an example of how to use critical data literacy as the generative theme to design an OER. The case study might well be documenting the perspective of an Indigenous community around data sovereignty, for example. Or work from a feminist perspective addressing issues of open geolocation data that will put women in danger (an example is a case from Latin America that tracked clandestine abortion clinics). This is an interesting issue that challenges the discourse that opening data is always a good thing.
Below are some sample activities for ideas, but they are not the only ones that can be integrated into your teaching.
Activities Using Different Lenses and Settings
Lenses
Given the DataPraxis OER aims to foster critical data literacy in educators (as originally envisioned), choose one lesson from one of the 5 modules and as well as a lens (decolonization, historical justice, feminism, anti-racism) that centers on alternative narratives to those more present in dominant cultures (maybe Western European or more generally the Global North). By working with a specific lens, you can research issues from a social justice perspective. In addition, the use of lenses can also encourage a focus on transdisciplinary approaches. You are encouraged to work on the content as such, that is the content of the lessons and modules, the examples that are included in each lesson, and the activities (these you could change as initial challenges to prompt the learning of that lesson), the glossary of terms, the key readings, additional resources). You can, for example, interview an expert in one of the areas that you are working on that might be from an Indigenous, or a transgender community and add that as a podcast to the lesson as part of the new resources you create.
For example, perhaps you have chosen module 4: data justice. This module has 4 lessons (4.1. Understanding data justice; 4.2. Different interpretations of data justice; 4.3. Data justice frameworks; 4.4. How to make data justice actionable in the classroom). Begin by choosing one of these lessons and rethink it (the whole module or just an aspect of it) from your chosen lens. For example, you can take the glossary of terms that is part of each module and use that as the material to re-create using the lens you have chosen (e.g. ecofeminism, a decolonial lens, etc.).
You could also choose to connect with a community or a person that has a different perspective than you have on social reality, ways of knowing, researching, and so on, and check with them your biases and assumptions. What can be recreated from that combination? Once the new OER is ready you can adapt and share the rethought OER with others using the right license.
Further Reading
Lambert, S. (2018). Changing Our (Dis)Course: A Distinctive Social Justice Aligned Definition of Open Education. Journal of Learning for Development, 5(3), 225–244. https://jl4d.org/index.php/ejl4d/article/view/290/334
Hodgkinson-Williams, C., & Trotter, H. (2018). A Social Justice Framework for Understanding Open Educational Resources and Practices in the Global South. In Journal of Learning for Development – JL4D (Vol. 5, Issue 3). http://www.jl4d.org/index.php/ejl4d/article/view/312
Settings/ Contexts
Many learning experiences in higher education include various forms of experiential learning intended to integrate workplace or community-based learning with formal education. Focusing on a specific setting can help focus the learning on that specific setting. You may come to your studies from, or with ambitions toward, a particular industry or workplace, community setting, within education or a profession, corporate or public sector, or any of many possible disciplines (e.g. a farmer, a weaver). For instance, learning design in higher education is often quite different from the corporate world or within the government. These settings may have an influence on the perspectives you bring and/or would like to bring to your research and coursework.
Possible Activities using the OER DataPraxis Lens
Could you devise a learning experience (it can be a small research project) about data justice (this is one example, you can choose amongst 5 modules) that integrates your learning setting, e.g. formal learning setting and informal learning settings, a rural community/Indigenous community, a grassroots movement, a community of marginalized women/transgender/gay?
Can you choose one module and within it one lesson and maybe find a challenge in the community that relates to an issue with data and takes that as a challenge that both settings will help to solve?
The possibilities are many, these examples are only suggestions, but you don’t have to confine yourself to them. Explore the DataPraxis OER and its tools and resources to find out all that can be revised, remixed, reused, regenerated, and redistributed.
References
Freire, P. (2005). Teachers as cultural workers. Routledge.