Authors Jonathan A. Poritz
License CC-BY-SA-4.0
Open Education
As The Practice of Freedom
for Both Students and Faculty
Jonathan A. Poritz
jonathan@poritz.net
www.poritz.net/jonathan
Center for Teaching and Learning and
Department of Mathematics and Physics
Colorado State University-Pueblo
11 May 2020, Online
This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
These slides available at poritz.net/j/share/OEasPoF4SaF/ .
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Open Education as Practice of Freedom online, for CNCC: 11 May 2020 1 / 21
“Drill-and-kill classes”
Education which does not center on the autonomy and agency of student
and instructor, like drill-and-kill classes is only a tool to turn us all into
better – more docile – factory robots and consumers.
1 2
1
Publicity photo of Charlie Chaplin for the film Modern Times (1936); [Public domain in the United State (maybe not in
other jurisdictions!) since it was published between 1924 and 1977 without a copyright notice], via Wikimedia Commons,
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chaplin - Modern Times.jpg
2
Planking in the supermarket by TheeErin from www.flickr.com/photos/27073477@N00/4112368718, released under a
CC-BY-SA 2.0 license.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Open Education as Practice of Freedom online, for CNCC: 11 May 2020 2 / 21
bell hooks and Paulo Freire
Thinkers like Paolo Freire and bell hooks had very much this perspective3
but nevertheless found their way to a kind of optimism: a late book of
Freire’s was called Pedagogy of Hope.
“The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of pos-
sibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to
labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an
openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even
as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to
transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom.”
emphasis added, Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks4 , 1994, p.207
hooks likely was nodding here at Freire’s first book, Education as the
Practice of Freedom.
3
although rooted much more complex and deep-rooted injustice: hooks is a queer, female, African-American academic and
Freire lived colonialism, and had to flee a military dictatorship in Brazil!
4
pseudonym of Gloria Watkins
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The e-banking model of education
Freire criticized what he called the banking model of education, where
teachers are thought to deposit knowledge into the minds of students.
Jean Marc Cote publicdomainreview.org/2012/06/30/france-in-the-year-2000-1899-1910/ [Public domain], via Wikimedia
Commons, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:France in XXI Century. School.jpg
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The tension that drove the creation of Creative Commons
The Creative Commons nonprofit was founded in 2001. Their licenses,
alternatives to traditional all-rights-reserved copyrights5 , are the key legal
technology which enables the OER and open education movements.
“The internet has given us the opportunity to access, share, and
collaborate on human creations (all governed by copyright) at an
unprecedented scale. The sharing capabilities made possible by
digital technology are in tension with the sharing restrictions em-
bedded within copyright laws around the world.”6
I.e.,
sharing possibilities tension restrictions of
!
of the Internet copyright law
5
Well, actually CC licenses are built on top of traditional copyrights. If you are unfamiliar with the basics of copyright, CC
licensing, and the CC organization, ask me now or at the end.
6
from the 2020 Course Content of the Creative Commons Certificate, which is by the Creative Commons and released
under a CC BY 4.0 International license.
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The 5Rs of OER: pedagogical academic freedom codified
faculty autonomy pedagogical
But notice that =
and agency academic freedom
If you stop to write down in detail the specifics of pedagogical academic
freedom, it’s not hard to end up at David Wiley’s 5Rs7 , the rights
• Retain - to make, own, and control copies of the content
• Reuse - to use the content in a wide range of ways
• Revise - to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself
• Remix - to combine the original or revised content with other open
content to create something new
• Redistribute - to share copies of the original content, your revisions,
or your remixes with others
7
For which, see his 5Rs of Open and The Access Compromise and the 5th R, both released under CC BY 4.0
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Impediments to student autonomy and agency ( )
[Note this is a before covid-19 discussion!]
• Well, drill-and-kill classes themselves.
• Standardized testing, standardized educational resources.
• Course material and approach which hasn’t changed in decades
(centuries?).
• Lack of student engagement.
• Culturally insensitive teaching.
• The so-called “achievement gap” between student populations that
are traditionally under-represented in higher education and other
students.
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Impediments to student autonomy and agency ($) 1
We’re probably all aware that public higher education doesn’t exist any
more in the US: [data from State Higher Education Executive Officers Association]
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Impediments to student autonomy and agency ($) 2
With the well-known consequence for total student debt in the US
Federal Reserve http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g19/Current/
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“...like marshmallows.”
As I said in a piece, I wrote in Inside Higher Ed on 27 February 2019:
“Total student debt in the United States stands at approximately $1.5
trillion - yes, trillion, with a T. It increased by approximately $37 billion
in the third quarter of 2018: that’s a quarterly increase by about the
endowment of Harvard University or, annualized, by more than the GDP
of three-quarters of the nations on Earth.
Public institutions of higher education in a majority of U.S. states are
funded more often much more by tuition than by state support, calling
into question the adjective public in that traditional terminology.
... It’s not so much that as a society we are eating our seed corn with
this treatment of the next generation, it is more that we have set the
global climate on fire, skewered our children on pointy sticks and are
roasting them like marshmallows.”
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Textbooks, in particular
As everyone in this group surely knows, textbooks are a surprisingly large
part of the financial burden on students today:
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Textbooks pain multiplier
I like to point out how this means that many educators’ intuition about
textbook costs, particularly if they have some grey hair like me, is quite
wrong:
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But it gets worse
The #RealCollege Survey found8 in 2019 that for students in higher
education in the United States
• 39% were food insecure in the 30 days before taking the survey,
• 46% were housing insecure in the last year, and
• 17% were homeless at some point in that year.
Now ask yourself: if you were a student in debt, [sometimes or often]
hungry, and concerned about keeping a roof over your head ... where
would your economic priorities be?
And for a faculty member who teaches a large class with 100 students,
around 17 of them have recently been homeless; if the class 25 students,
around four were homeless.
8
#ReallCollege 2020: Five Years of Evidence on campus Basic Needs Insecurity, Baker-Smith, Coca, Goldrick-Rab, Looker,
Richardson, Wilson, 2020, on the web here.
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What do students do?
We know what students do in response to these economic pressures:
• First of all, while CNCC estimates9 that students should spend in the
range $900–$1,800 per year on books and supplies, students10
actually spend around $415.
• They buy an older edition of the textbook.
• They delay purchasing the textbook.
• They never purchase the textbook.
• They share the book with other students.
• They take fewer courses to save on textbook costs.
• They choose which course to take based on the price of its required
textbook.
• They download pirate copies of the textbook from the Internet.
9
on your “Tuition and Costs” web page
10
in a national survey, averaged
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Briefly, after covid-19
Students are now under far, far higher financial pressures. To the extent
that they are able to continue in school, they will have far less money
available to purchase expensive textbooks.
Additionally, many of the coping mechanisms we know they use – sharing
a book is very common, getting a book from the library when they are on
campus, etc. – are now impossible.
I hypothesize that a large but hard to measure part of the fall in academic
success which probably happened this spring semester is due to the fact
that all of those students could no longer come to campus to get access to
course textbooks in the above ways... so they were put under all of the
current stresses while trying to continue their courses (those who did try)
but without their course textbook(s)!
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Last financial argument: think about the ADA
We’ve seen that you have students in your classes who are or have recently
been homeless. We’re now going into another Great Recession/Depression.
Even if you can find a very cheap textbook, some students will be unable
to afford it while putting a roof over their heads or food on their tables.
You might say that such desperately poor students are only a handful, and
why should the large majority of other students suffer a sub-optimal
textbook just to save the small minority?
But if you had only one blind or deaf student in your class, you would find
a way to make accommodations – if not, you would be in violation of the
Americans with Disabilities Act! There is no group of disabled students
that is small enough that you are permitted to let slip through the cracks.
Why then do we permit any financially disadvantaged students to miss
their chance at success? If the free books you find are not quite as good,
surely we can compensate by the excellence of our teaching, and so loose
no students at all between these financial cracks?
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OER vs ZTC
I hope you’ve been persuaded by the economic arguments. You might then
ask if the only important thing about OER is their cost – typically, $0.
If cost were the primary driver in this movement, then we should probably
be talking about “Zero Textbook Cost [ZTC] courses,” rather than
“courses which use OER.” ZTC courses can use expensive (to the library)
materials which are free (to the students).
This can be a particularly attractive perspective for funding entities such
as legislatures, because they are often concentrated on the return on
investment for their dollars spent, which is measured by total amount
students save – i.e., it only cares about cost.
In Colorado, for example, public institutions of higher ed are currently
competing to meet the Governor’s ZTC Challenge incentivizing a range of
activity from ZTC degree pathways to Z-Professors who use only free
textbooks in their classes.
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Open Pedagogy, or OER-Enabled Pedagogy, or...
On the other hand, the pedagogical academic freedom which OER
provides has lead to various approaches to pedagogy which are called open
pedagogy, OER-enable pedagogy, critical digital pedagogy, etc. Some of
the brilliant folks working in this area include Maha Bali, Robin DeRosa,
Rajiv Jhangiani, Sean Michael Morris, and Jesse Stommel; see also The
Open Pedagogy Notebook. E.g., some of these authors talk about
disposable assignments that support an individual student’s learn-
assignments: ing but add no other value to the world and
renewable assignments that both support individual student learn-
assignments: ing and add value to the broader world. With renewable
assignments, learners are asked to create and openly li-
cense valuable artifacts that, in addition to supporting
their own learning, will be useful to other learners both
inside and outside the classroom.
[Although I confess I’m not sure I dislike “disposable assignments” as much as the name implies I should....]
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Open Pedagogy’s 5Rs
Rajiv Jhangiani’s blog post 5Rs for Open Pedagogy11 gives a new set of
Rs expressing the ideals that underpin his view of open pedagogy:
• Respect for the agency of students and creators including whether
they wish to perform public scholarship or not
• Reciprocate by not just drawing on but also contributing back to the
commons, by sharing resources, practices, and ideas
• Risk is ever present with open pedagogy
• Reach involves having an impact that extends well beyond the
classroom, a course, or a semestern objectives.
• Resist against forces that conspire to pit increasingly precarious
faculty against increasingly precarious students. Resist against the
commodification of learning. Resist against the neoliberal university.
11
which he released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
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The Practice of Freedom
Using OER sits in the eye of this storm.
Designers and instructors have the academic freedom to build customized,
engaging courses out of remixes of OER.
Students see the benefits of those more engaging courses, and of the ($0!)
price tag.
The results enhance equity!
12
12
Colvard, N., Watson, C., Park, H. (2018, July) The Impact of Open Educational Resources on Various Student Success
Metrics. Retrieved from www.isetl.org/ijtlhe/pdf/IJTLHE3386.pdf
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Questions, Comments, and Contact Info
Questions? Comments?
Email (feel free!): jonathan@poritz.net ; Tweety-bird: @poritzj .
Get these slides at poritz.net/j/share/OEasPoF4SaF.pdf and all files for
remixing13 at poritz.net/j/share/OEasPoF4SaF/ .
If you don’t want to write down that full URL, just remember
poritz.net/jonathan/share
or poritz.net/j/share
or poritz.net/jonathan [then click Always SHARE]
or poritz.net/j [then click Always SHARE]
or scan −−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−→
[then click Always SHARE]
Also, tons of useful stuff at the OER site of the Colorado Department of
Higher Education masterplan.highered.colorado.gov/oer-in-colorado/ .
13
subject to CC-BY-SA
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