Open Education Global 2022

This learning lab session sits at the intersection of two critical shifts occurring within the same broad time frame, in the world of open education. On one axis, the session concerns itself with open educational practices (OEP) (Cronin & MacLaren, 2018), the expansive range of educational approaches based in the web and incorporating elements of relational and often collaborative or sharing-focused practice. OEP has roots in open scholarship (Anderson, 2009) and networked participatory scholarship (Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012), though prior to the pandemic, pedagogical OEP focused on teaching appeared to be building momentum (Weller, 2014; DeRosa & Robison, 2015; Courosa & Hildebrandt, 2016) and centering equity (Bali, 2017). Along the other axis of focus, digital technologies and datafied systems have become powerful infrastructural realities in higher education over recent decades (Perrotta &Williamson, 2018). This latter reality has made the systems we rely on for scholarship and education digitally-dependent yet increasingly opaque both to students and to educators (Raffaghelli & Stewart, 2020). Reliance on digital and datafied systems has, additionally, been accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as institutions around the world have turned to online learning platforms at scale.

At the intersection of these two phenomena, what do these shifts mean for open education, in terms of OEP and, specifically, the open web in the classroom? As we emerge from the pandemic-centered online ‘pivot’ and the emergency remote teaching period (Bozkurt et al, 2020), where are open educators and conversations about equity situated within the broader global conversation about online learning? How can educators committed to open practice continue to centre it in their work, even as digital platforms become increasingly extractive? And what emergent forces are we as educators working with and against as we try to develop equitable and participatory open digital classrooms? With race and gender biases built into algorithmic decision-making becoming increasingly evident (Noble, 2018; Benjamin, 2019) and digital surveillance increasingly translating educational experience into behavioural data for extraction (Erickson, 2018), this session invites participants to explore participatory and data literacy-focused practices, and to grapple with the post-pandemic realities of higher education at classroom, institutional and sector levels.

This session will frame questions for and with participants, while also offering pathways toward building digital and data literacies for equitable open educational practice, within post-pandemic classrooms. The learning lab will open with a hands-on exploration of participants’ own OEP understandings and approaches, then examine forces shaping higher education at this juncture. Finally, it will outline OEP principles and pathways that have that have worked for this instructor, in endeavouring to develop open practice in scholarship and teaching, and to build digital and data literacies among students. The lab format will be designed to be participatory, in generating conversations about the intersections between datafication and open in higher education, while also practical in its emphasis. It will call not just for emphasis on OEP, post-pandemic, to help re-centre online and higher education more broadly on the participatory capacities of the web, but also for a focus on data privacy and data ethics as necessary partners in that prioritization for any sector that claims a responsibility to equity.

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