Over my years in academic libraries, I’ve learned about the publishing industry, and how broken it is; I’ve worked with faculty to help them understand how to publish openly, preserving rights to their own scholarship. I’ve been aware of Creative Commons licenses for the past several years in the context of opening up access to content and allowing for a more equitable sharing model for authors and creators, and have been publishing openly myself for a few years as well.
It wasn’t until I started my Educational Policy and Leadership doctoral program that I started really ‘getting’ what open access and OER could do for student scholarship, equitable access, and social justice in higher education. Learning more about participatory action research, open pedagogy, and the potential to partner with students to shape curriculum to make something meaningful, was a more powerful way to teach. Understanding this potential, I shifted my research toward taking a closer look at the connection between open scholarship, the Creative Commons, and intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy. So much more was making sense to me about how I could conduct research that could help move policy decisions toward shifting to an open pedagogical model.
I started collaborating with other colleagues at my
institution on the study of teaching and learning (SoTL), looking specifically
at courses that had renewable assignments, and as a part of the curriculum,
included educating students about Creative Commons licensing and applying it to
their own scholarship. After having talked with students for years on how to
transition from information consumer to producer, this felt like the missing
piece – researching how much that model of having them become creators
impacted their perceptions of themselves as scholars. By having students
collaborate on the development of their curriculum, they become a part of that
process, and have their voices reflected in the education system.
Rising costs may have started the
conversation regarding the transition to open access publishing, but open
educational resources have the potential to further engage the student community
and open up learning opportunities that have not yet been accessible to learners. Open pedagogy, similar to self-determination
theory, assumes that with perceived control over participation, individuals
have a stronger feeling that their actions are very important to their personal
fulfillment and motivation. By opening
up the education process to increased student participation, we are allowing
for learners to take on an active role in shaping their learning and their
future (Blessinger & Bliss, 2016; Ryan & Deci, 2017; Mays, 2017).
In addition to engagement, open education serves humanistic, social and political purposes; by allowing for the inclusion of the student voice in the creation of scholarly content, learning becomes a more social and democratic process (Blessinger & Bliss, 2016; Mays, 2017). In a conversation with bell hooks back in the late 1990s, political activist and Harvard professor Cornel West discussed scholarship and access to prestigious publishing houses in the context of power dynamics and lack of voice for subordinated groups. He proposes that the best these marginalized groups could do to fight against a closed system would be “to either establish our own institutional networks that would give our texts visibility, or simply continue to bring critique to bear on the manipulation and the co-optation that goes on in the mainstream” (West & hooks, 1999, p 546).
Critiques of the publishing industry have pushed the industry to a critical tipping point with faculty and academic libraries as research intermediaries pushing back (Ellis, 2019). New institutional networks and university press have grown to support the scholarship of all academics and the potential to include more voices. The next step, including the student voice, will provide the motivation and engagement every educator seeks to instill in their learners.
It is this inclusion of the student voice and active participation in the educational process that is at the center of my current consideration of academic integrity at my university. A challenge I am currently facing in the rapid transition to online learning prompted by the pandemic, is that many faculty and our administration are incredibly concerned about students cheating during online exams, and plagiarizing the work of others. Sitting on the executive board of our Faculty Senate, I was hearing the topic of proctoring software coming up again and again, and that implementing a surveillance state at our institution was the solution for the coming fall semester. The glimmer of hope that I had a couple months ago was during a conversation with our Chancellor, where his rebut to this conversation indicated that we could design the curriculum differently, and that many other global institutions do things differently, lending to a thread in the exploration of open pedagogy in broader context. Since that time, I have been shepherding a two-pronged campus-wide discussion on how to approach academic integrity: (1) Long term: Moving toward an open pedagogical model, starting with student education and student-led advocacy (2) Short term: Exploration of prevention of cheating through anything but proctoring software if possible – supporting the development of creative assignments and assessment.
I am finding that by approaching a shift to openness through a shared topic of concern that is indirectly related is making all the difference. We’ve been having conversations with faculty about open publishing for years, supporting the transition of teaching content to open through our Open Education Initiative grants starting in 2011 (https://www.library.umass.edu/oer/open-education-initiative/), implementing an Open Access policy for publishing in 2016 (https://www.library.umass.edu/open-access-policy/), and supporting open access publishing and research in myriad ways. Necessity and shared struggle are what brings our faculty together now to look to a future of openness. Talking with other educators as a part of this certification course has helped to give me so many new ideas about how to approach conversations, as well as many new skills in my toolkit. I am thankful for the community and new knowledge! It has inspired me to establish new ecosystems of support for the open movement on my own campus and into the global community.
Blessinger, P., & Bliss, T. J. (2016). Open education: International perspectives in higher education. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers.
Ellis, L. (2019). A turning point for scholarly publishing. Chronicle of Higher Education, 65(23), 5 p.
Mays, E. (2017). A guide to making open textbooks with students. Montreal, Quebec: Rebus Community.
West, C. & hooks, b. (1999). Conversation with bell hooks. In West, C. (Ed.), The Cornel West Reader (pp. 541-549). New York: Basic Civatas.
Creative Commons Attribution