Open educational practices (OEP) are part of the broader open education landscape, including the openness movement in general. It is a term with multiple layers and dimensions and is often used interchangeably with open pedagogy or open practices. OEP represent teaching and learning techniques that draw upon open and participatory technologies and high-quality open educational resources (OER) in order to facilitate collaborative and flexible learning. Because OEP emerged from the study of OER, there is a strong connection between the two concepts. OEP, for example, often, but not always, involve the application of OER to the teaching and learning process. Open educational practices aim to take the focus beyond building further access to OER and consider how in practice, such resources support education and promote quality and innovation in teaching and learning. The focus in OEP is on reproduction/understanding, connecting information, application, competence, and responsibility rather than the availability of good resources. OEP is a broad concept which can be characterised by a range of collaborative pedagogical practices that include the use, reuse, and creation of OER and that often employ social and participatory technologies for interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation and sharing, empowerment of learners, and open sharing of teaching practices.
OEP may involve students participating in online, peer production communities within activities intended to support learning or more broadly, any context where access to educational opportunity through freely available online content and services is the norm. Such activities may include (but are not limited to), the creation, use and repurposing of open educational resources and their adaptation to the contextual setting. OEP can also include the open sharing of teaching practices and aim "to raise the quality of education and training and innovate educational practices on an institutional, professional and individual level." The OEP community includes educational professionals (i.e. teachers, educational developers, researchers), policy makers, managers/administrators of organisations, and learners. OER are often created as part of an OEP strategy, and viewed as a contribution to the transformation of 21st century learning and learners.
Scope of open educational practices Open educational practices fall under the broader movement of openness in education, which is an evolving concept shaped by the shifting needs and available resources of societies, cultures, geographies, and economies. Developing a precise definition, thus, is a challenge. OEP are sometimes used interchangeably with the term open educational pedagogies. While OEP are inclusive of open pedagogies represented by teaching techniques, OEP can also incorporate open scholarship, open course design, open educational advocacy, social justice, open data, ethics, and copyright." Creating a database or repository of open educational resources is not open educational practice (Ehlers 2011) but can be part of an open teaching strategy.
OEP can be grounded in the concept of open pedagogies as described by Hegarty which include:
Participatory Technologies People, Openness, Trust Innovation and Creativity Sharing Ideas and Resources Connected Community Learner-Generated Reflective Practice Peer Review
Nascimbeni & Burgos (2016) offer a definition that identifies activities such as course design, content creation, pedagogy, and assessment design as areas for infusing OEP. Paskevicius provides an alternative definition:Teaching and learning practices where openness is enacted within all aspects of instructional practice; including the design of learning outcomes, the selection of teaching resources, and the planning of activities and assessment. OEP engage both faculty and students with the use and creation of OER, draw attention to the potential afforded by open licences, facilitate open peer-review, and support participatory student-directed projects.
Definitions While a canonical definition of open educational practice does not exist, various groups and scholars have provided their interpretation or viewpoint. A definition used by others either in its entirety or as basis for further development is provided by the Ehlers, who defines OEP "as practices which support the (re)use and production of OER through institutional policies, promote innovative pedagogical models, and respect and empower learners as co-producers on their lifelong learning path". Here is a list of some other OEP definitions.
The Open Educational Quality (OPAL) Initiative define open educational practices as "the use of Open Educational Resources to raise the quality of education and training and innovate educational practices on institutional, professional and individual level". The International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE): "Open Educational Practices are defined as practices which support the production, use and reuse of high quality open educational resources (OER) through institutional policies, which promote innovative pedagogical models, and respect and empower learners as co-producers on their lifelong learning path". The UK OER support and evaluation team suggest that (compared to ICDE) "a broader definition would encompass all activities that open up access to educational opportunity, in a context where freely available online content and services (whether 'open', 'educational' or not) are taken as the norm". The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) defines Open Educational Practices (OEP) as comprising a set of skills in collaboration, curation, curricular design, and leadership around the use of Open Educational Resources. OEP build educator capacity for using OER to improve curriculum, instruction, and pedagogy, and to gain skills in digital resource curation and curriculum creation, and to actively collaborate around and advocate for innovative approaches to open education and OER. ISKME developed the Open Educational Practice Rubric to articulate key learning objectives for integrating OER and open educational practice into teaching and learning improvement and leadership. The Center for Open Learning and Teaching (University of Mississippi) state that "Open Educational Practices (OEP) are teaching techniques that introduce students to online peer production communities. Such communities (for instance, Wikipedia, YouTube, Open Street Map) host dynamic communities and offer rich learning environments". The European Foundation for Quality in e-Learning (EFQUEL) write that Open Educational Practices are "the next phase in OER development which will see a shift from a focus on resources to a focus on open educational practices being a combination of open resources use and open learning architectures to transform learning into 21st century learning environments in which universities’, adult learners and citizens are provided with opportunities to shape their lifelong learning pathways in an autonomous and self-guided way". The Cape Town Open Education Declaration (with over 2,500 signatories) reads: "open education is not limited to just open educational resources. It also draws upon open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues. It may also grow to include new approaches to assessment, accreditation and collaborative learning".
OEP areas Best practice case studies identify a number of OEP areas.
These areas surround the following topics, with other studies identifying categories and elements of open educational practices.
Topics Using OER Innovation Learning Improving Quality Something Else
Categories open educational resources open/public pedagogies open learning open scholarship open sharing (of teaching practice) open technologies
Elements Infrastructure (tools) OER Use Open Design Adoption Policy
Impact Some scholars claim that the breadth of definitions through which OEP are described impairs researchers' ability to measure the impact of OEP. Others, however, have undertaken projects exploring and documenting OEP which demonstrate potential areas of impact. For instance, adopting OEP can lead to opportunities for collaborative learning through the affordances of Web 2.0 tools. OEP can support innovative pedagogy as an extension of teaching and learning practices. In this context, open also refers to the learning environment where learner's set their own objectives rather than being restricted by those set externally (a closed environment). Additionally, OEP has shown potential for use in addressing social justice issues through provision of increased access, modification for inclusion of diverse voices, and democratization of scholarly conversations.
OEP and collaborative learning The presence of a shared knowledge creation experience is one characteristic included in most definitions of OEP. The networked participation which takes place as learners work together in a community to create knowledge can result in increased student engagement. Artifacts created contribute to the community beyond the walls of the classroom, something described in Knowledge Building theory as adding value to student work even beyond its use as an evaluation of student understanding.
OEP and innovative pedagogy Much of the impact of OEP is a result of the "transformational role" of the collaboration taking place between instructors and students. Open educational practices can also provide the experience and tools to help bridge the gap between formal and informal learning, and potentially an open source curriculum or emergent curriculum. Use of these tools and experience facilitate innovative pedagogical practices resulting in benefits beyond simply mastering course content. For instance, Nusbaum describes a project in which students were invited to modify the openly licensed textbook being used in their psychology course. These student modifications diversified the content and helped create a resource more reflective of the context in which the students were taking the class.
OEP and social justice