Community colleges in the United States have always been “open” institutions. Clifford P. Harbour in John Dewey and the Future of Community College Education observes that the “traditional community college mission has three components and each is grounded in a philosophy of expanding educational opportunity.” All three components are characterized as requiring openness:
- “ ‘Open door’ admissions policies”
- “Open access via delivery of instructional programs and services at relatively lost cost”
- Open access “exhibited through development of a course schedule that accommodates the needs of working adults”
Indeed, Harbour is only echoing George B. Vaughan in an earlier generation who, in The Community College Story, emphasized that community colleges promote equity through “removing barriers to access for those segments of society traditionally underserved by higher education.”
The metaphor of an open door has been used to characterize this historical open access mission of community colleges. Community colleges are open to let people in. This open in-door has distinguished community colleges from most other institutions of higher education. But once inside, and in particular once inside the classroom, community college pedagogy and practices have tended to be very traditional and enclosed.
There are many reasons why community college pedagogy and practices are enclosed and traditional. Part-time or adjunct faculty make up the majority of teachers and full-time faculty have high teaching loads. Faculty have little resource and even less time for sophisticated curriculum or pedagogical development resulting in a heavy dependence on textbooks and publishers. Faculty development resources are scarce, meaning faculty often teach the same way they were taught decades earlier. Students are mostly part-time, commute, and often work jobs. Opportunities for students or classes to gather or engage in activities together outside the scheduled class meeting time are virtually non-existent. In this environment the content-transfer model of teaching triumphs. Access to the college is open, but too often the pedagogy has been based on what Paulo Friere has criticized as the “banking concept of knowledge”, a concept of education in which ‘knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing”. The textbook becomes the source of knowledge and the instructor the gatekeeper. Enclosed classrooms with closed materials lead students to become passive receptors of data or knowledge. It is a closed loop. Faculty select the copyrighted text and communicate the information to students who in turn respond to demonstrate they have absorbed the “knowledge” (we hesitate to call it learning!).
Thus community colleges have remained institutions of open access, but not open education or open knowledge. Until now. Community colleges can now provide an open education, not just open access. The classroom itself can now take students out into the open world of the World Wide Web. It is indeed a World Blown Apart. Vaughan’s emphasis on serving “those segments of society traditionally underserved by higher education” calls for a critical pedagogy not just access. Open education or open learning can enable that critical pedagogy within the existing institutional structures of community colleges.
In this chapter we will first examine the concept of open education closer and distinguish open education from open access by laying out the principles of open education. Then we will describe an exploratory project undertaken at Lansing Community College, the LCC Open Learning Lab.
Principles of Open Learning in a Community College
What is open education? What does it mean in practical terms for a community college to provide open education? Open education, open pedagogy, and open education are terms that still being defined by scholars. The terms overlap. We find the definition provided by Robin Derosa, Professor at Plymouth State University, useful. She thinks of “Open Pedagogy” as comprised of four basic guiding ideas:
- Opening and improving access, broadly writ to include OER, lower textbook costs, conversion to digital materials, and access to digital technologies.
- Education as a learner-driven process.
- Stressing community and collaboration over content.
- Connecting the academy to the wider public “to merge theory with practice, engage learners with “communities of practice” that matter to them and to the world, and make the educational system work for both students and the public good.”
We agree with this guiding ideas and have refined them into our own list of four principles which parallel those of DeRosa’s:
- OER and digital technologies
- Empowered agency
- Create
- Connect
The first two principles involve the educational environment created – the resources and tools used or available to faculty and students to use in learning. The last two principles involve the activities or pedagogies used – what students and faculty do with those tools and resources.
The Open Environment: Tools and Resources
OER: Permission to be Open
Innovations in copyright licensing, the growth of the World Wide Web, and technology advances and have opened possibilities on a scale previously not possible. Innovations in copyright licensing such as Creative Commons licensing have produced an explosion of Open Education Resources (OER). OER serve to open access to even more since they often result in free or very low cost textbooks. This particularly benefits community college students. Free textbooks are only the beginning however.
David Wiley has emphasized the 5 R’s of OER: the rights to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute educational materials. These permissions are granted by Creative Commons licenses on copyrighted educational materials. Obviously, these express permissions allow faculty to open up educational materials in ways that closed, copyrighted publisher materials don’t. Instructors who use OER, who use these permissions, alter the context of the textbook. The publisher and the textbook are no longer the gatekeeper and sole authority. By revising or remixing, faculty both convey and experience a shift away from the gatekeeper – banking model. Open education becomes possible but only possible. OER enables but by itself doesn’t require a shift to open education.
A subtle but broader permission is granted by an institutional push for OER than just the specific 5 R’s. The 5 R permissions refer to allowable actions with regard to specific works of OER. Clearly in courses where OER are selected to replace closed proprietary publisher content, a shift towards opening the learning is facilitated. But not all courses and classes at this time have suitable OER available for adoption. In our experience, a college-wide push or initiative to adopt OER itself provides a critical permission. If there exists a strong push or initiative to make faculty aware of OER and for them to adopt, faculty experience being given permission to critically examine their course. We doubt that any colleges have in the past expressly directed faculty to make selection of the proprietary textbook as the first step in course design or redesign. Yet academic culture, historical practice, and the adjunct status of most faculty have made textbook selection from established publishers the de facto first step in course design. A college wide push to adopt OER effectively gives faculty permission to critically examine their course starting with learning outcomes and pedagogy as the first steps. Even when there are no suitable OER found by faculty, the search for them has caused faculty to reexamine exactly what they are trying to do in the course and how. It is subtle, but faculty experience the push for OER as a grant of permission to open up their courses.
Websites & Technology: Empowering Voice
Permission to be open is a start, but such permission is empty if faculty and students lack the tools and infrastructure for an open learning experience. Permission is impotent if faculty and students lack a public voice. They must be empowered to act on that permission and to speak publicly in their own voice. They must have agency. Artifacts of learning are digital now. Our lives are recorded in digital artifacts.To have agency, both faculty and students must not only have permission to create their own digital artifacts, they need the digital tools to create, store, share, own, and control them.
Digital work created or stored in school-controlled and vendor-designed Learning Management Systems supports the college’s and the vendor’s needs, not the agency of the learners. Control and effective ownership is surrendered to the institution. Faculty and students need spaces and tools of their own to support their agency.
Rather than look to the LMS or commercial ePortfolio systems, systems which tend towards the closed and not the open, as the primary learning environment, faculty and students need spaces they control. Jim Groom and Brian Lamb argued in 2014 in Educause Review, that
“perhaps it’s more useful to turn to Jon Udell’s ideas first expressed seven years ago. In his talk “The Disruptive Nature of Technology,” Udell laid out a vision in which K–12, colleges/universities, and open-source programmers are encouraged to help learners create “coherent personal digital archives” that seamlessly integrate with a wide range of institutional systems. Udell argued that these archives should encompass more than just a student’s schoolwork; they should also include personal photos, videos, transcripts, X-rays, dental records, police records, and a million other digital life-bits.16 The archives should then grow into much larger, abstracted digital spaces in which people manage and maintain all their records and also decide how to push out their records appropriately to various destinations.”
A relatively small but growing number of innovative higher education institutions have moved in this direction of creating open web spaces, domains, and webhosting for faculty and students to create, manage, curate, and control their own digital learning artifacts. Some institutions such as Virginia Commonwealth’s Rampages project provide more than 26,000 websites to students and faculty and create over 8,000 new sites each year.
Audrey Watters explains the paradigmatic project in creating student and faculty spaces is
The Domain of One’s Own initiative at University of Mary Washington (UMW) is helping to recast the conversation about student data. Instead of focusing on protecting and restricting students’ Web presence, UMW helps them have more control over their scholarship, data, and digital identity.
The Domains initiative enables the student to build the contemporary version of what Virginia Woolf in 1929 famously demanded in A Room of One’s Own — the necessity of a personal place to write. Today, UMW and a growing number of other schools believe that students need a proprietary online space in order to be intellectually productive.
As originally conceived at the Virginia liberal arts university, the Domains initiative provides students and faculty with their own Web domain. It isn’t simply a blog or a bit of Web space and storage at the school’s dot-edu, but their own domain — the dot com (or dot net, etc) of the student’s choosing. The school facilitates the purchase of the domain; it helps with installation of WordPress and other open source software; it offers both technical and instructional support; and it hosts the site until graduation when domain ownership is transferred to the student.
And then — contrary to what happens at most schools, where a student’s work exists only inside a learning management system and cannot be accessed once the semester is over — the domain and all its content are the student’s to take with them. It is, after all, their education, their intellectual development, their work.
Today, Domains of One’s Own projects exist at over 60 institutions, most of them research universities, graduate schools, or private four year liberal arts colleges.
Together, OER initiatives and digital technology projects such as Domains of One’s Own projects provide the environment for providing an open education. They provide permission, tools, and agency. They empower learners to have a voice. OER provides open resources and the permission to open the courses. Domains projects provide the tools and web spaces for faculty and students alike to openly create, share, curate, manage, and collect the artifacts of their learning journey. However, an open environment is necessary but not sufficient for open education. What is done in that open environment by students and faculty is just as important. An open environment needs open pedagogy.
Open Pedagogy
We shift our focus now from the open education environment, the permissions and digital tools, to open pedagogy, the ways learners use the Tom Woodward of Virginia Commonwealth University, itself a Domains of One’s Own school, describes how the open digital environment it creates translates into changes in how teaching and learning happen – how it creates an open pedagogy. He describes “open pedagogy as a general philosophy of openness (and connection) in all elements of the pedagogical process, while messy, provides some interesting possibilities. Open is a purposeful path towards connection and community. Open pedagogy could be considered as a blend of strategies, technologies, and networked communities that make the process and products of education more transparent, understandable, and available to all the people involved.”
Among these many elements and activities of open pedagogy, we agree with Randy Bass and Bret Eynon that two of most important qualities of new emerging digital ecosystems in higher education are:
- Horizontal access to creation and production
- Networks and the role of the social
Creating
Open pedagogies involve having learners create things. Bass and Eynon observe the significance that “all people are now producers as well as consumers of content. Students are creators as well as learners.” Having learners do things and create artifacts is not new, though. What is new is that the open educational environment allows learners to create more meaningful and authentic works. Traditional assignments involve creating disposable artifacts: the essay that only the professor will ever read, the case study that disappears when once submitted, or the discussion that disappears when the semester ends. The ubiquitous Learning Management System compounds the insignificance of student work by keeping it locked tightly behind a firewall where only students in the class may see it, and then only until the semester ends.
A Domains of One’s Own environment empowers learners to create authentic works. It enables learners to create using the same tools they can and will use once graduated. It even allows faculty to students to find and extend their own toolsets since the websites involve the same open source software available to the general public. By having a website they control, learners are motivated to create more substantive and often more creative works. What they create will last. It will be available to the public as long the learner decides. Google will find it and turn it up in search results. The learner is transformed from a mere consumer or receiver of information into a producer or creator. Students begin to transform into scholars.
Connecting
The World Wide Web and the explosion of information has changed the nature of education. No longer is education about gatekeeping or providing access to scarce information. As Bass and Enyon put it, “We now live in an era of information abundance that is not merely about content resources but exponential means for social networks to reproduce, reuse, and remix knowledge. Instead of gatekeeping, open pedagogy focuses on activities that connect learners into those networks so they can reproduce, reuse, and remix knowledge too.
Open pedagogy fundamentally means helping students form connections – connections between ideas, between sources, between people. Digital life involves social networks. The Web itself is networks, the Internet. The Web itself is based on the hypertext transfer protocol which at it’s core is about hyperlinking or connecting data.
Faculty and students who create using their own websites or their own domains develop intimate experience with using, traversing, and forming networks and links. Their sites are public. They are an integral part of the Web. They can be found by search engines. They can link to other sites and other sites can link to them. They engage in authentic assignments that have lasting value. They become literally part of the World Wide Web of knowledge.
This immersion in connection making and following powers learning at multiple levels. Learners obviously learn the technology basics of creating a hyperlink or of finding information to link to. But in the process, learners must make decisions. Is this a credible source? Where did this source get its information? What is the context of forming the connection? Links form connections and can connect ideas. Websites connect the words or ideas to the identity of the author. Learners must learn to decide what to expose, how, and why. The task for forming links and connections naturally leads into learning of digital literacies.
Links, connections, and social networks also connect people, often people who have not encountered each other in person. Connections between people can lead to relationships. For example, one of the authors (Luke) has spoken of the powerful changes in his own personal and professional life that arisen directly as a result of blogging and the subsequent connections and relationships formed, relationships with people literally around the world. As further evidence this chapter would not exist, or at least certainly would not have been written these authors, if it were not for the connections, relationships, and collaboration made possible by Web when scholars work “in the open”. Open pedagogy practices help learners to form, navigate, and nurture their own networks and relationships.