Open Education Co-Design as a Participatory Pedagogy in an Online Graduate Program

This paper builds on student-instructor partnerships by describing how an instructor, students, program coordinator, and members of a research team were involved in the co-design of an open educational resource in a graduate program in education. A four-part open learning design framework was used to guide the course design: (a) clarifying the co-design process; (b) buildingand sharing knowledge, and making thinkingvisible; (c) building relationships; and (d) sustaininglearning beyond the course. The framework, alongwith the collaborative team effort that was part of alarger research project, enabled the developmentof an openly licensed and accessible digital book.The project brought together a collaborative teamwho were passionate about learning more aboutopen education and a small grant supported theadditional expense of professional copyediting torefine the book.

«Alacena», An Open Learning Design Repository for University Teaching

Being a teacher means being involved in the design of learning activities. The teaching profession has become a «profession of knowledge», not because knowledge was or is the legitimate component of the profession, but because the teacher is the designer of learning environments and has the ability to design the spaces where knowledge is being produced. But these learning environments have long been regulated to the privacy of the classroom environment with student complicity. One positive aspect of the launch of the European Higher Education Area has been to bring greater transparency to the process of designing teaching and student learning. Our objective in this study was to identify, represent and document a wide variety of learning designs made by experienced and innovative teachers. We hope this repository will be available and accessible to every teacher through the Internet. The participants in this study were 58 teachers mainly from universities in Andalusia and the five branches of knowledge. From interviews we proceeded to represent all the learning sequences, available in the repository of sequences that we named «Ala cena». This repository is accessible on our research group’s website (http://prometeo.us.es/idea). The conclusions of our study were that there are innovative learning designs aimed at promoting a greater understanding of what students learn through their involvement in processes of inquiry and/or collaboration, and they are representative of good teaching practices in universities.Ser docente significa estar implicado en el diseño de actividades de aprendizaje. La profesión docente se ha transformado en una «profesión del conocimiento» no ya porque el conocimiento haya sido o sea el componente legitimador de la profesión, sino porque el docente es el diseñador de ambientes de aprendizaje y tiene la capacidad de rentabilizar los espacios donde se produce el conocimiento. Ahora bien, estos ambientes de aprendizaje durante mucho tiempo han quedado regulados en el ámbito de privacidad del aula y a la complicidad con el alumnado. Uno de los aspectos positivos que ha tenido la puesta en marcha del Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior ha sido aportar una mayor transparencia a los procesos de diseño del aprendizaje de los alumnos. Nuestro objetivo en este estudio consistió en identificar, representar y documentar una amplia variedad de diseños de aprendizaje realizados por docentes con amplia experiencia innovadora y que pudieran estar disponibles y accesibles a través de Internet. El profesorado que ha participado en este estudio lo han conformado un total de cincuenta y ocho docentes principalmente de las diferentes universidades andaluzas y de las cinco ramas de conocimiento. A partir de entrevistas procedimos a representar el total de secuencias de aprendizaje que están disponibles en el repositorio de secuencias que hemos denominado «Alacena». Este repositorio está accesible en la página web de nuestro grupo de investigación http://prometeo.us.es/idea. Como conclusiones del estudio se constata que existen diseños del aprendizaje innovadores y universitarios que pretenden promover en el alumnado una alta comprensión de lo aprendido a través de su implicación en procesos de indagación y/o colaboración y que son representación de buenas prácticas de enseñanza.