Our Journey, Day 76

Day one of OE Global 2023

The event is being hosted by NorQuest College, which is a community college that really got on board with Open Ed in 2020 with 20 courses using OER. In 2022 they committed to a plan to have 80% of its courses converted to Zero Textbook Cost by 2030. This is an incredible goal and it seems to me quite possible they may achieve it. One of the main sponsors if ecampus Ontario, which has its own Open Library as well as some kind of micro-credentialing product. One of the things that really jumped out at me was the conference's focus on life-long learning. This is entirely appropriate and in keeping with the UNESCO Sustainability Goals, of course. It's more resonant to me now, I suppose, because I'm expecting to be out of Higher Ed teaching at the end of the academic year.

The first keynote speaker was a young Métis guy named Darrion Latendre who is the NorQuest faculty member in charge of an Indigenous STEM program. He gave a good talk about working native ways of knowing and living into Open Ed. and expanded on the metaphor of braiding that had been introduced earlier in a blessing given by a native elder. Latendre talked about "two-eyed seeing", which he described as combining indigenous and western ways of understanding the world. It struck me that in a broader sense, there are probably a lot of traditional cultures that could be held up as counterpoints to modernity. But the way he described native culture certainly worked in this way as well. I liked the point he made about considering himself a "carrier" of knowledge rather than an owner of knowledge. Ironically, this seems entirely in keeping with the ideas Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins advanced about being in a dialogue with the Great Books. Latendre mentioned that he didn't know the western philosophers well, "but I did know my Kokum". His grandmother was one of his important teachers, and although whet he learned from her was a more practical and grounded type of wisdom, he seems to have believed it was every bit as real and important as what he might have learned by reading those philosophers. A western modernist might disagree and argue that objectively, this is inaccurate. But is it? Content more relevant to the learner's life would be (subjectively) perceived as more important, and as a result studied more energetically and integrated more deliberately into the person's life. So (objectively) the learner might be better off than if he had simply been forced to sit and read the western philosophers. Ideally, of course, one would do both, as Latendre has done with science.

Over the rest of the day I attended six sessions. There was one on blockchain as a distributed ledger for micro-credentials that said some interesting things about learners owning their own portfolio of learning but that also suggested to me that nothing much has changed since 2019 when I attended a similar session at OE Global in Milan. Later in the day there was a really interesting talk by people from the Higher Ed system office of Idaho, about OER and Z-Degree work they're doing. The state people led the process by beginning to have weekly chat sessions over lunch every Monday. The topic each week was simply, "What's new?" After a year or more of this, when they asked for feedback, they heard the biggest impact was just that "You showed up". They fostered confidence that Open Ed really was a lasting priority, and people got on board. I took that as a good lesson for other systems that want to foster that same type of confidence.

Finally, there was an interesting panel session about adapting existing Open content. Lots of talk about the variety of people that could add value on teams. Librarians, instructional designers, students, accessibility specialists, technologists. One panelist suggested that in the planning or grant proposal process, people should be asked "Who is on your team?" The expectation should be set that a team ought to include members from each of these specialties. And that's an idea that I think Minnesota is aware of, but it would be valuable to try to implement that on the front end of new projects. I also got the sense that Minnesota hasn't done a deliberate enough job building in a peer review into the OER production process. My OER textbooks get peer reviewed when I donate them to the Open Textbook Library. But until then, they're no more reviewed than my lectures. I guess that's not a disaster, but maybe it would be an advantage to offer an editorial service if we could. The head of curriculum design at NorQuest College is also the editor of their OER publishing project. If Minnesota State had an OER publishing project, I think they could they could implement some editorial oversight. This might result in better OERs that would be more widely adopted within the system and outside it. This might also be a way of selling the services of helping faculty improve not only their content's readability but also its accessibility and cultural relevancy, which I think the system would like to do but don't want to mandate. So offering a service that includes that might be a way of making that happen in a voluntary way, which would be preferable.