Building a Community of Open Practitioners

Overview

The use of competitive institutional and external grants to support both educational transformation, and the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) is a mainstay of the university sector. The use of funding, and research frameworks provide both time and conceptual spaces for deeper exploration, and the renewal of curriculum practices to better align with not only the needs of learners, and emerging discipline narratives and assessment, but the institution’s mission, and wider society.

Superficially, grants are uncritically accepted within the university sector as vehicles for change, yet outcomes are often isolated, and disconnected beyond the immediate context. Furthermore, the challenge is to sustain and strategically integrate change, rather than rely on successful outcomes ‘through the heroic efforts of a dedicated team, rather than repeating proven methods of an organization with a mature… process’ (Paulk et al., 1993, p. 18).

Open educational practices (OEP) are positioned at the University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ) as a form of practice- and values-led change, requiring a community approach that privileges personal, professional, and conceptual connections throughout the institution and to a wider community of external practitioners and advocates. This chapter describes the theoretical underpinnings of an OEP grant program, that is translated into practice, and thence to transferable, reproducible practices for organisations seeking similar outcomes.

Key stakeholders

Ultimately, successfully translating institutional strengths, isolated good practice, and strategic directions into actual educational change at the course level is contingent on engaging with, and securing commitment from, those affected by the intended change. Whilst UniSQ could identify pockets of existing OEP and individual champions, no systemic adoption of open education had occurred beyond the UniSQ College (a section of the institution dedicated to non-traditional pathways into degree study). The internal OEP Grants, deliberately designed to engage staff in owning educational change, were offered, and refined across several iterations between 2016-2022. Communications with Faculty L&T leaders, librarians, learning designers, and media producers were backed by information sessions, and grant writing workshops that raised awareness of OEP, supported prospective applicants to shape their ideas and align with OEP principles and processes, and connect them with potential ongoing partners across the institution.

Background

Whilst the initial grant offering was positioned as a trial, the intent was – budget willing – to refine the offering over subsequent years to ensure the longevity of OEP, and recruit additional faculty staff based on the communication of successful outcomes by their peers. The program required a robust, empirical foundation serving the dual basis for staff engagement, and potential for research dissemination.

Conceptually, Fullan and Stieglebauer’s theory of educational change (1991), was paired with Wenger’s Communities of Practice (2010) to guide the program design. The theory of educational change comprised four environmental triggers, namely (i) staff need to actively participate in change seeking behavior usually starting in small groups and building in scope, (ii) that pressure exists to change and that support exists to facilitate and navigate change, (iii) that successful change requires attitudinal and behavioral change, and (iv) that participants take ownership of the process as their confidence increases.

The core aspects of Communities of Practice defined the space as one focused on a specific ‘domain’ of knowledge, that learning is contextual and collaborative, and driven by participants who designate the community as a ‘safe space’ for discussion, experimentation, success, and failure. Furthermore, the centrality of member agency and autonomy was supported by placing the program coordinator (the Manager, OEP) as a facilitator who responded to community needs, often as an intermediary between the community and the wider university or open education community – enacting a form of servant leadership (Greenleaf, 1998).

Project description

Operationalising the conceptual framework required steady, authentic reinforcement within the community to co-create behavioural and social norms. Communities require time to grow organically, and within the constraints of comfort and engagement of the membership. The grants initially covered twelve months and were later extended to eighteen months based on participant feedback. The longer period also provided more space for community building, and establishing a trust-based environment.

In practice, successful applicants were invited to an orientation session, where the grant principles and processes were reiterated. Each applicant (or team of applicants) was asked to bring a precis of their project and outcomes to share with the community, and to field questions. The orientation concluded with the grant awardees collaboratively setting a time for their monthly community gathering (the term ‘gathering’ rather than ‘meeting’ was always used to distance the expectations for action away from any administrative function, and toward a term that evoked fellowship and sharing). Their ‘homework’ from this session was to consider a set question and return in a month with answers for discussion. The initial question was always ‘if you could ask this community to make you three promises, what would they be?’.

Commonality of responses was discovered across the years of offer, namely asking the community to promise (i) to be present at the gatherings and engage to the best of their ability, (ii) that the community space be ‘judgment-free’ and seek to build practice and support members, (iii) that the community space be a place for the free but respectful exchange of ideas and opinions, and that said discussion remain confidential within the community, and (iv) that anyone can ask for help, and that community members would endeavor to share generously. The ‘promises’ were collated, and became a ‘community charter’ and shared with all members as an internal document. Some examples of the promises included asking everyone in the community to be actively present during community time, to be professional and kind when offering feedback or suggestions for improvement, and to respect that members may arrive with differing levels of energy to offer. In future sessions, activities were explicitly linked back to the charter whenever possible, to ensure it was a part of the lived community, rather than a single ‘ice-breaker-style’ question. Additionally, the first fifteen minutes (not timed, but rather gauged by the group) were for ‘fellowship’ (Wenger, 2010). This was an opportunity for community members to enter the space, enjoy refreshment, mingle, and ease into the community mindset. Fellowship time became a successful liminal or transitional space between day-to-day tasks, and the community activities.

Each gathering began with the question ‘what is one grant-related activity you would like to celebrate?’, serving the dual purpose of peer validation for success (no matter how small), and a progress report. As the members became more comfortable within the grant lifecycle (usually about three to four months into the program), they would also use this as an opportunity to ask for feedback on next steps, or to ask for support. Members would often meet outside of the community gatherings to pursue outcomes, or share expertise.

Facets of the knowledge domain were identified by the community, and guest speakers from across the university (and sometime the sector) were invited to the space (actioned by the grant coordinator as facilitator for the community). New domain knowledge (such as Creative Commons licencing, or open assessment) would always be followed by reflective time to consider how this knowledge fit within disciplinary norms, personal teaching philosophies, and the reality of learning and teaching in the university. By explicitly providing time to integrate new knowledge with existing practices, members could glean individual value, and engage in focused discussion that could lead to changed practice. Often, new topics for exploration would emerge, and the cycle would begin anew at next month’s gathering.

As the gathering concluded, awardees would commit to outcomes for the following month, against which they would report. The format for every gathering can be summarised as:

1. Fellowship time – building community, providing transitional/liminal space.
2. What do you have to celebrate? – peer validation and accountability, opportunity to seek assistance
3. What will we learn today? – expanding and contextualising the knowledge domain, identifying future avenues for building knowledge
4. What will you do in the following month? – goal setting, enacting new knowledge

Key outcomes

Interviews were conducted by a third-party research assistant after the first six months, twelve months, and then at the program conclusion (eighteen months). Overwhelmingly, awardees spoke positively of the experience, describing the community as critical to their learning, sense of belonging, and a key contributor to their individual success. Most interviewees specifically mentioned the monthly meeting frequency as integral to generating and refining ideas into practice, as well as a strong motivator for progress and accountability. In every case, interviewees stated the ongoing community aspect as absolutely essential for future offerings of the program. Interviewee statements included:

On contextualising learning as lived practice:

And so I go out there like, you know, like Little Red Riding Hood in the woods, with all my ideas in the basket and then suddenly come across the big bad wolf. What happened was, I had to really struggle to understand what creative commons licensing meant in practice. And I’m not very good with abstract figures and concepts unless they’re embedded in a real experience that makes sense to me.

On collaboration:

There are other people there to help you see and just knowing that is really important. So that’s another thing that it has changed for me with the openness, is knowing how many people are involved and sorts of things that they can help with, here at the uni particularly. But beyond the uni as well, you know through USQ’s involvement with other organizations around openness, that all helps. I kind of feel like, if I wanted to do other stuff, I have more knowledge about who to go and ask.

On sharing project updates

I think working with a team has been really good. Listening to other people, when we go to meetings…there are other people doing their own projects and the way they were doing them was a real eye-opener. It was something that gave me ideas, things to aspire to.

From a purely quantitative perspective, grant program outcomes included:

• Engaging fifty-seven staff across sixteen subject areas
• Providing benefit to 9,665 students with a total student savings of AUD352,615.00
• Generating a further AUD43,500 in subsequent external grants
• Producing fifty-four published outcomes including journal articles, book chapters, conference papers and presentations, internal invited L&T presentations, and invited speaker opportunities from other universities, and
• Anecdotal evidence showed the outcomes from the grant program contributed to successful academic promotion applications.

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References

Fullan, M., & Stiegelbauer, S. (1991). The new meaning of educational change. New York: Teachers College Press.

Greenleaf, R. K. (1998). The power of servant-leadership. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Paulk, M., Curtis, B., Chrissis, M. B., & Weber, C. V. (1993). Capability maturity model for software (CMU/SEI-93-TR-024, ESC-TR-93-177). Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute. https://resources.sei.cmu.edu/library/asset-view.cfm?assetid=11955

Stagg, A., & Partridge, H. (2019). Facilitating open access to information: A community approach to open education and open textbooks. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 56(1), 477-480, https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.76

Wenger, E. (2010). Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept. In Social learning systems and communities of practice (pp. 179–198).