Editable version (MS Word)

The choice to take the opportunity at Brock was a family decision and one born out of work with a wonderful coach, Isabel Budke, who helped me to achieve greater clarity about my personal and professional goals. One reason this wasn’t a quick decision is that I absolutely loved my work and adored my colleagues at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, where I first began working in 2007. I was very happy at KPU, gratified by our sector-leading supports for open educational practices, how we managed to support our university community through the first two years of the pandemic, the many ways in which we innovated with access-oriented programs and policies, and especially proud of the inclusive, supportive, and values-driven culture that we had carefully built and nurtured. I was also deeply grateful for the opportunities I enjoyed along the way that helped me to grow as a leader and a human being. But after working with Isabel I also understood that I wouldn’t be able to grow as much as I wanted to (or could) unless I challenged myself by stepping into a different environment. I also felt reassured by the knowledge that there had been sufficient development of capacity, expertise, and leadership at KPU that the work I had begun would continue.

Brock wasn’t the only foreseeable external opportunity, but it did align incredibly well with my other criteria, foremost among which was finding an alignment with my core values. I came to this understanding through in-depth conversations with close friends and confidants at Brock both prior to and during the application process, but also because I deliberately used the interview process to interview my potential new colleagues, to communicate clearly about the kind of values-based leadership I aimed to bring, and to interrogate my own perception that Brock was a good fit. I also wasn’t entirely a stranger to Brock, as I had visited here in 2017.

Six months later I still have a smile plastered on my face as I walk through our beautiful campus (located within a UNESCO designated biosphere reserve, no less). Beyond the beauty of its physical geography, Brock is blessed to have a palpable sense of community that is upheld by the wonderful people who work here and who have deep connections with this university and the surrounding community. That Badger pride really shows! I saw it at residence move-in day, student orientation events, BIPOC community socials, Fall Preview Day, convocation, and our Tribute to Teaching celebration (see below for photos from some of these experiences). I saw it at the Unity Cup and at Niagara 2022 Canada Summer Games events. I see it when I spend time at the beautiful downtown campus of the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts. And I especially witness it in the thought and care that I see infusing the everyday decision-making of so many colleagues across the university. Leading with care and compassion is a big part of that values alignment I was looking for. And I see so many true leaders and kindred spirits here, including Brad Clarke, Robyn Bourgeois, Trecia McLennon, Leanne Taylor, Ebru Ustundag, Dawn Shickluna, Cal Murgu, and of course my dear friend Giulia Forsythe, to name but a few [note: following yesterday’s exciting announcement you can also add the incredible Sheila Cote-Meek to this list!].

It has been especially meaningful to spend time with and to get to know the members of my teams, including in Brock’s Centre for Pedagogical Innovation and Co-op, Career, and Experiential Education. We have enjoyed many delightful coffee/lunch/dinner conversations and walks around campus. We have played tennis and celebrated holidays together, and even sung together while playing the ukulele (no surprise to anyone who knows me). And every day that I am on campus I enjoy starting and finishing my day by walking through the corridors of my teams’ offices and seeing my colleagues in person. Having experienced the great impact on mental well-being of one’s relationships with the people we work alongside every day, I take seriously the privilege of supporting such incredible people and am honoured by their confidence, trust, and friendship.

In terms of my formal role, it has been a busy first six months, with highlights that include sponsoring the creation of a cross-functional group focused on supporting trauma-informed practices, collaborating to plan new supports for open educational practices, addressing some longstanding structural issues, working closely with the Brock University Student Union and the Graduate Student Association to identify and address various barriers experienced by students, assuming support of the Ombuds Office, joining the Social Justice Research Institute, and assembling my research team (the Inclusive Education Research Lab). But top of the list has undoubtedly been the development of our academic plan, which I worked to refine through an extensive consultation process, and which received the unanimous approval of our Senate on January 18.

This plan represents an important roadmap for our academic operations for the next five years and that reflects the will and has the support of the university community. It is bold, progressive, and reflects our shared values. In focusing on teaching and learning the plan draws on the lessons of the pandemic, takes seriously our ethical obligations in relation to the calls to action of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission and our commitments to the Scarborough Charter, and aims to play a leading role in fostering progressive change as well as to prioritize care, especially for the most marginalized members of our university community.

Hence you will see that the plan includes commitments to 44 actions including:

• Develop resources and supports for educators grounded in anti-racist and trauma-informed pedagogies that sustain inclusive and harassment-free learning environments;
• Develop and adopt an ethical framework for educational technologies that ensures the procurement of digital tools do not perpetuate and reinforce systemic inequalities and racial biases;
• Embed Scarborough Charter principles of Black flourishing, inclusive excellence, mutuality, and accountability into academic planning, including through the development of a Black Studies program;
• Design supports and opportunities for non-traditional learners, including working adults and those with parental responsibilities, to ensure they are well prepared for success;
• Identify and work to dismantle systemic academic barriers experienced by BIPOC, disabled, 2SLGBTQ+, and gender-diverse faculty, staff, and students and develop supports and community that foster inclusive participation and belonging, and that support flourishing;

And of course:

• Support the creation, adaptation, and adoption of open educational resources;

As you can see, there is a lot of good work that lies ahead. I am excited to partner with colleagues across the university in implementing changes that I believe will help make the academy a more supportive and inclusive place. And I am deeply grateful to both our Provost Dr. Lynn Wells and our new President Dr. Lesley Rigg for their strong support and for fostering an environment where I am able to do my best work. Far from the usual performative allyship that we see in higher education, I see Brock as a place where real change is taking place and I am thrilled to play a part in this.

Reflecting on that today represents just the 10% mark of my term in my current role, I am filled with both gratitude for the path that led here and anticipation for the road ahead. As us Badgers say, Surgite!

Parallels Experiences for Students and Faculty

I have come to identify several clear patterns over the past year and a half: One had to do with the many, many parallels between the experiences of faculty and students:

Both had to quickly master new learning technologies in order to continue teaching or learning.

Both had to find personal spaces that were amenable to this work.

Both were desperately trying to balance work and personal obligations.

Both were trying to keep safe and healthy.

Both benefited from flexibility. For example, at my institution, we quickly moved to extend the withdrawal date for courses to the very last date of the semester while simultaneously extending the grade submission deadline for faculty.

Both faculty and students experienced tremendous anxiety about how they would perform in what felt like a strange new environment that had been forced onto them.

And both had to find ways to manage those anxieties.

Anxiety Influences Pedagogical Choices

But this is where the second pattern began to emerge, as this symbiotic relationship wasn’t always mutualistic. Consider it from the perspective of a faculty member who needed to manage their own anxieties and stress levels… If someone had never used learning technologies such as the learning management system or video conferencing platforms, theirs would be a steeper learning curve. And if certain well-worn and comfortable learning activities or assessments wouldn’t translate neatly to an online environment, well then the need to redesign them (at least in part) would be another challenge and source of anxiety. As Belikov and her colleagues have written, “the shift to remote instruction necessitated a shift in pedagogy, which caused some faculty to feel negatively about their remote teaching self-efficacy.”

But it wasn’t just a sense of low self-efficacy. For as this whitepaper about disruption in and by CTLs during the pandemic observes, “The crisis led many faculty members to revert into a very deep conservatism. It was their attempt for a shred of control in a world drowning in uncertainty. Their teaching approaches presented a great degree of fidelity to face-to-face approaches and the assessments approaches they adopted were problematic. “

Considering that many faculty members sought to retain as much as possible of what was familiar, it is no surprise that synchronous delivery and high stakes online exams emerged as dominant instructional practices early in the shift to emergency remote instruction.

Some of you may have read this thoughtful blog post published in March 2020 by Rebecca Barrett-Fox imploring faculty to “Please do a bad job of putting your courses online.” In this post the author shared some excellent and helpful, if blunt home truths, such as:

Your students know less about technology than you think. Many of them know less than you.

They will be accessing the internet on their phones. They have limited data. They need to reserve it for things more important than online lectures.

Some of your students will get sick. Others will be caring for people who are ill.

Students will be losing their jobs.

Do not require synchronous work. Students should not need to show up at a specific time for anything.

Don’t fuss too much about the videos. You don’t need to edit out the “umms” . . . Editing is a waste of your time right now.

Don’t do too much. Right now, your students don’t need it. They need time to do the other things they need to do.

Listen for them asking for help. They may be anxious. They may be tired.

An Embrace of Pedagogies of Care (and Neglect of Self-Care)

Of course, these last two rang very true for faculty members as well, which introduced a third dynamic, which was that the growing embrace of a pedagogy of care sometimes ignored the labour of care.

I am truly privileged to work alongside and learn from some gifted faculty members. One of these is my friend Jen Hardwick, who teaches in our English Department but who also has a 50% appointment on my Commons team as an Educational Consultant. In writing about the labour of care she reminds us that:

“Care isn’t just a sense of good will, after all; building relationships and working to mitigate systemic barriers is active, daily work. Care is sending check-in emails to students who are struggling; meticulously going through each document, Moodle setting, and image to ensure it is accessible; holding extra office hours to accommodate students who are working or who live in other time zones; or staying up late to mark assignments that had extensions and now need to be returned in a hurry so that students can keep up. It is also listening, looking for resources, problem solving, affirming, advocating, and supporting, sometimes through our own exhaustion, overwhelm, and trauma. Care . . . is vital, and within our current context, it might be our most urgent work.”

“But,” Jen goes on to write, “care work is also difficult. It is also often unrecognized, under-appreciated, and unequally distributed. We know that it disproportionately falls on women, and BIPOC faculty. It comes with no awards or prestige, no time-releases, and often no thanks. Worse yet, it is often employed as a band-aid for gaping social and institutional inequities.” 

Thankfully, many faculty were supported by academic support units in providing care (Donnelly, Miller, and Strawser, 2020). The brilliant Brenna Clarke Gray, always so generous in sharing her insights, wrote about this in April 2020:

“Educational technology is care work on a number of fronts. When I support faculty, I absorb a tremendous amount of anxiety, anguish, fear, and stress . . . I feel ill-equipped to be their first line of defence. But I do it anyway. And while I help them digitize their course content, we chat about their families and their students, how to manage their stress levels, how long this all might last.”

She goes on:

“But more importantly, I want to help faculty make teaching and learning decisions around technology that enact care for students. That has never been clearer to me than in this pandemic, where my key role has been to advocate against synchronous, timed exams; against lengthy video lectures; against requirements of synchronous participation; for asynchronous participation options; for reflective writing and other open-book assessment strategies; and for generosity and compassion in course design. I spend far more time discussing pedagogy than I do pushing the buttons, and the pedagogy I work hard to enact is one that acknowledges the once-in-a-century shitstorm we are living through and asks for compassion. It is a pedagogy rooted in an ethics of care.”

I know my team felt the same way. And admittedly it is a difficult approach to maintain, especially when you sometimes receive angry calls from a faculty member experiencing a deep state of distress. You know that the glitches in your institution’s video conferencing service are outside of your control, and that in fact the global digital infrastructure is creaking and straining as it supports a level of use it certainly wasn’t designed for. You know that the problem they are calling you about today isn’t one that warrants the level of anger you hear in their voice. But you also know that they are anxious and feeling a loss of control. So you try hard not to take it personally and to extend them some grace. And you continue to care for the faculty members as they continue to care for their students, even as that labour of care takes its toll on you both.

Looking Back: Centres for Teaching and Learning as First Responders

As the pandemic hit our shores, our team in the Teaching & Learning Commons felt a deep sense of purpose and mission. We knew that our faculty were overwhelmed and anxious about what lay ahead and that our university community needed our assistance and guidance. My team rose to the occasion in more ways than I can articulate, developing new resources and training, bringing on new learning technology platforms, redesigning our workflows, partnering with units and colleagues across the institution like IT, accessibility services, and the privacy office, and especially building relationships so that our faculty felt supported and reassured that we had their backs. In those early days of the pivot to emergency remote teaching, like so many other Centres for Teaching and Learning, we were working overtime and in overdrive, responding to literally thousands more requests for technical support and hundreds more requests for pedagogical consultations than ever before. I have often said that it felt like we were the fire department at a time when every single person’s house was on fire.

This sentiment was echoed by a white paper on disruption in and by Centres for Teaching and Learning during the pandemic, which described how CTLs operated as academic first responders and how our instructional designers, teaching and learning experts and multimedia developers operated as “sherpas of online learning teams.”

At KPU we quickly developed and offered an intensive 5-day course on learning to teach online. Consisting of 5 modules, all underpinned by the Community of Inquiry framework, it covered everything from the building blocks for online course design through reimagining content, activities, feedback, assessment, and facilitation in digital spaces. Now, of course, this training wasn’t designed to support effective online or blended course design under optimal circumstances. As my friend Rolin Moe wrote, “you can’t teach someone to swim while they’re drowning.” No, this course was primarily about equipping faculty members who had never before taught online with a basic, foundational understanding of how they might approach emergency remote instruction in a way that would provide a supportive learning environment for students. Happily, hundreds of our faculty members took this course and hundreds more took advantage of the great many asynchronous resources we developed, from how-to guides to webinars to self-paced modules. 

This early phase of the pandemic was both exhilarating and exhausting. It was certainly never easy. Fortunately, our university leadership didn’t hesitate to invest in supporting teaching and learning through this period and, on top of the investments in upgrading our technology infrastructure and new equipment for faculty and instructional staff, we grew the size of our team in the Teaching & Learning Commons. But, despite this, the massive surge in demand for our supports meant that we were still stretched to the maximum, which is why it was even more important that we made the time to reflect on our core, shared values as a team. Through a collective and iterative reflective process we identified four of these: community, ethics, creativity, and care. And since then we have made sure to distill our thinking through these values, whether we are dealing with resource constraints or addressing critical strategic questions.

But through it all we had immense empathy for our faculty who moved online with little time, no choice, and often through herculean efforts, most of them teaching online for the first time. The brief 48-hour instructional pause just before our pivot really felt like that final gulp of air you take before the wave hits you. So we advised faculty members to retain what they needed, to trim what they didn’t, and to change what they had to in order to survive the remaining weeks of that semester. We urged them to provide students with flexibility and compassion, and to be gentle in their expectations of themselves as well. The pivot was never going to be graceful, but it was about keeping afloat and keeping students afloat.

Without question, this entire pandemic journey has helped forge far stronger relationships between faculty and Centres for Teaching & Learning like ours. This has been critical, especially as we shifted over the past year and a half from a focus on firefighting in the short-term to something closer to showing faculty how to build with fire-retardant materials; or how to design for more effective blended and online teaching and learning.

I really appreciated this wonderful acknowledgement from Sarah Elaine Eaton, a faculty member at the University of Calgary last June in the magazine University Affairs:

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, teaching and learning centres (TLCs), and the educational developers and instructional designers who work at them, have shown the deep value they bring to their institutions. During the crisis, they have become instructional superheroes who have not only supported an unprecedented “pivot” to online and remote learning, they have taken the lead in ensuring universities stay open.”

She went on:

“In some cases, those working at TLCs have literally rescued faculty members who otherwise would have been pedagogically paralyzed. As a result, many instructors have managed to do what they might never have imagined possible. Although most faculty members would still prefer to teach face-to-face, the reality is that many have quickly learned new instructional and delivery skills. As a result, hundreds of thousands of postsecondary students across the country finished their courses, and in many cases completed their programs, because professors continued teaching. They have not done it alone. TLC colleagues have empowered them to adapt quickly and with as little disruption as possible.”

But Sarah wasn’t only reflecting on the assistance that CTLs were providing. She was also highlighting how the degree to which an institution had previously prioritized teaching and learning determined how well-equipped they were to navigate the pandemic. Certainly institutions that had CTLs in the first place, but especially those that were well-staffed and well-resourced, because of course your budget is really a statement of your values. Plus, as we should all know by now, anytime you are referred to as a hero or a first responder, you should be nervous because you run a grave risk of being undervalued and considered expendable.

But I will also reflect here that in addition to the actual instruction and guidance provided to faculty, the increased support for teaching and learning practice through the pandemic has had another positive repercussion. And that is that faculty members who engaged more in learning opportunities themselves—whether about universal design for learning or even about learning technology tools—themselves began to appreciate more what it felt like to be an online learner.

Consider for example the relief you feel when you are not required to keep your camera on for a 2-hour synchronous session, or when you enjoy flexible deadlines, or when your course includes a stripped-down set of required activities with the option for deeper dives wherever your interest is peaked, when you perceive that your instructor is present and engaged, when you don’t feel like you are engaging in independent learning but rather like you are a part of a learning community, when your contributions are respected, and when you feel trusted. And oh the resentment when you are forced to engage in activities that you perceive as busywork!

It is interesting to observe how these elements—direct support for teaching and learning, indirect advocacy for care, and perspective-taking and reflection—came together to shape the approach of faculty through the pandemic. 

Looking Ahead: An Opportunity to Shape a More Inclusive Future

As Cathy Davidson and Dianne Harris wrote, “From this horrific catastrophe, there are lessons that higher education can learn from itself.” This reflection must occur now, because as many of us have shifted back to campus this Fall (at least in part), there has already been a sense of a snap back to reality (and oh, there goes gravity!)–an uncritical push or pull towards comforting pre-pandemic malpractices without an eye to retaining the growth or lessons of the past year and a half. This is a real danger. For example, many otherwise brilliant colleagues are sincerely comparing their highly stressful and first-time online experience with emergency remote instruction with a rosy retrospection of familiar, classroom-based instruction during optimal circumstances.

But as Sian Bayne and her colleagues write in the Manifesto for Teaching Online, “The deficit model of online education often assumes a particular pedagogy in which repositories of self-paced, didactic materials are worked through in isolation and tested via multiple-choice assessments” whereas online leaning “can be the basis for opening up a more inclusive form of education” that “places teachers and students in a creative and highly generative space where good teachers find their practice being opened up to new ways of doing things.” Online can indeed be the privileged mode.

To quote Josh Eyler:

“…now is our moment. We must hold the floor and refuse to let these conversations change or fade into the background . . . if we let this moment slip away from us, we may never see this kind of opportunity for reform present itself again. Students, faculty, staff, everyone will remember the beneficial changes that institutions made during the pandemic and wonder why these same institutions are going back to the way things were done in the Before Times, especially because the pandemic has revealed just how inequitable education was and remains . . . Hold the floor. Let’s do this work together so that no one feels alone . . . We cannot let this chance pass us by.”

One of the most beautiful things I have witnessed over the past year has been the open sharing of ideas, practices, and experiences. This has happened a lot at the individual level of course, but incredibly many institutions have also managed to shed much of their usual territoriality. There has a lot of open collaboration and a lot of new open resources. Some of my favourite examples include this collection on resilient pedagogy (edited by Travis N Thurston, Kacy Lundstrom, and Christopher González), this cookbook of asynchronous activities from the Office of Digital Learning & Inquiry at Middlebury College, and this professional development resources for open online educators from four wonderful colleagues from Ireland, Orna Farrell, James Brunton, Caitriona Ni She, and Eamon Costello. Of course, this is precisely the value of open educational resources: to generously share instead of jealously guarding our expertise, and to not reinvent the wheel but instead to be able to build on one another’s work.

At KPU we are determined to build on the lessons and the momentum of the last 18 months. We have held university-wide discussions, surveyed our faculty and instructional staff, and have been building new institutional supports that will help raise the bar for teaching and learning. This includes the launch our new framework for educational development, called the Foundations in Teaching Excellence program. This comprehensive yet flexible framework encompasses a series of modules organized around the five core domains of: learning design, learning assessment, learning technologies, inclusive teaching, and reflective practice. And it’s just the start. Ultimately of course this is about culture change, both within and beyond our institution, towards one that values, supports, and celebrates teaching in all of its modes.

As Kevin Gannon writes in his book Radical Hope:

“Change in higher education can sometimes occur dramatically . . . [But] the real work of change in higher education is done students by students, classroom by classroom, course by course, and it’s done by educators who have committed to teaching because it and their students matter”

So let us lead with trust of students and trust of faculty. Let us move beyond toxic academic hierarchies and boundaries. Let us no longer pay lip service to caring about teaching and learning. Let us remember that online can indeed be the privileged mode. Let us continue to widen equitable access and increase affordability. Let us ensure that we design inclusively. To draw on a wonderful insight from Christina Katopodis, if we are going to talk about rigour, let us ensure we have rigorous standards of flexibility and accessibility. If we are going to talk about academic integrity, I will suggest that we extend that concept to our own ethics and our own approach both technology and pedagogy. Let us lead with care but not forget about self-care. Let us build supports and structures that support humans and that foster humanity.

Let us begin now.

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare

Three weeks ago my family and I spent three days on the gorgeous Southern Gulf Islands. Even a few hours into the trip I began to experience a palpable unpeeling of tension, a distancing from tasks, a delayering of noise and news, and a recentering of spirit and self-care. It brought into relief just how much cognitive and task overload I have regretfully become accustomed to and how much I have been risking burnout. This is something I haven’t paid sufficient attention to despite several caring colleagues (including some from HR!) directly expressing their worry about my well-being.

This realization made me reflect on several things, including the behaviours I occasionally encounter at work but that disproportionately drain me (politicization, Machiavellianism, and cruelty) as well as the elements of my practice that truly energize me (making the lives of faculty and students better and watching colleagues flourish). It also led me to begin to make small but effective changes so that I can shift from my repeated and failed attempts at achieving a vaguely “better work-life balance” towards setting some concrete boundaries and implementing specific strategies that support my desired life-work harmony (I will gladly share some of these in a future post).

Now that I am midway through what feels like a relatively luxurious 2 week vacation (something else I have felt unable to schedule for far too long) I have disconnected entirely from all work (no email/messages/notifications, made possible thanks to my wonderful colleagues) and am regarding with curiosity and interest the thoughts that naturally enter my mind as I enjoy a break from my usual endless schedule of meetings, emails, planning, tasks, overtime, and more overtime.

Interestingly, over the first few days I experienced rather a cascade of new thoughts, ideas, and inspiration about what I could do to work with my colleagues to further improve many of the small but meaningful aspects of our work lives. So although I was clearly still thinking about work (that is, when not playing with my kids, reading, binge watching, playing tennis or music, or napping), it was about people instead of projects. This observation makes me wonder how much more caring and effective leaders would be if they weren’t routinely worked into the ground; if we were permitted the mental space that affords one’s best thinking. As someone who looks to build healthy systems and communities I recognize that burning myself out in pursuit of a noble goal is neither something I should model nor something that will allow me to see my work though. In short I cannot be an effective caregiver if I do not also look after myself.

One of the reasons for some recent overwork has been short staffing and a personal determination that this shouldn’t have a negative human impact (on others, anyway), especially when it comes to students. But adopting a “buck stops with me” approach only works if you have the support to also occasionally say “deal me out,” if only for a hand or two. This is also tied to the root cause of roles sometimes carrying too many responsibilities (whether at an individual or unit level). This in turn leaves too little room for expected unexpected events to occur (the “known unknowns”). As my team’s leader I am able to address this in a several ways, including analyzing our activities to pull back from any high effort/low impact initiatives, to err on the side of doing fewer things better, and to ensure that our strategic planning adopts a human-centered approach. And while I will continue to advocate for my team and for the resources we need to do what is expected of us, it is important to recognize that individual or even unit efforts are not necessarily effective or enduring solutions to systemic challenges.

I am immensely proud of my team. I am also protective of them and the culture that we have worked hard to build and sustain. I have seen these efforts pay dividends as our department now enjoys a reputation across our university for not just doing good and vital work but also being values-driven, caring, and collaborative. This in turn has meant that colleagues across our university increasingly want to work with us (and when the opportunity arises, within our team). And while this is heartening and vindicates our approach, it is also a reminder of how powerfully a team can be shaped by its norms and the culture it is designed to uphold. After all, poor leadership doesn’t just break up a team (e.g., through resignations and early retirements). It also breaks a team’s spirit and can leave lasting scars. So while the process of culture change is often described as a long game (especially in academia where traditions die hard and where cruelty is often paraded as rigour), success will require changing the rules so that care (including self-care) isn’t just performative cheerleading from the sidelines but guides every aspect of our work, both within and outside of the classroom.

Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it our other efforts to love fail. Giving ourselves love we provide our inner being with the opportunity to have the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from someone else

bell hooks

As we should all know by now, pivoting rapidly to remote delivery of teaching and learning over the course of a few days to is not the same thing as designing an effective online course. However, as many of you will also now experience, designing an online course with a few weeks notice (perhaps also while you are pivoting for your Spring semester’s final weeks and final assessments) is not quite the same thing as having four months to plan for teaching online in the Fall.

Before you read any further, I will plead mitigating circumstances for my terminology. I spent nine years of my life in a professional dance company and so the language associated with this unplanned pedagogical shift (PIVOT!) is oddly comforting to me. Of course, this also leads me to stretch the metaphor too far. I apologize.

Spring Pivot

With little time and no choice, you moved your teaching and learning to remote delivery. Our brief instructional pause may have felt like the gasp you draw before the currents drag you under. You kept what you needed, trimmed what you didn’t, changed what you had to, and survived the remaining weeks of instruction. It may not always have been graceful, but you kept afloat (and, importantly, kept your students afloat). Many of you reached out to grab the branches the Teaching & Learning Commons extended into the water and held on. Some twigs unfortunately snapped, but we tried to follow you with stronger supports (moving to a cloud-based server for BigBlueButton sure helped!). If you were already using Moodle you at least had a life vest, which allowed you to share resources, communicate with your students, and conduct some activities (e.g., discussions) and assessments (e.g., quizzes). But we were under no illusions about the size of the task that you (and we, collectively) were undertaking. Anxiety was high. And we’re not quite on dry land yet.

Summer Pirouette

Those of you teaching this summer will experience a much greater transition. Planning for a entire semester of remote instruction is qualitatively different from planning for 3 weeks of remote instruction, so anxiety levels are still moderately high. There are many questions that you will need to address. Some concern the extent to which you should teach synchronously, or how you might redesign specific activities and assessments in order to ensure your students will still meet the necessary learning outcomes. Others concern the broader question of what you can do to better support your students’ remote learning. For those of you who are not teaching during the current semester, you will have had a bit more time to prepare for the shift, but this is still very quick and not an optimal lead in to teaching online for the first time, a situation which can leave you feeling vulnerable and exposed. The Commons is once again here to provide resources (e.g., our summer Moodle online course template), strategies, and consultations, but if you are busy closing out the spring semester you may still feel overwhelmed. We understand and are here to offer help as often as you need.

Fall Piqué

If you are teaching this spring you will no doubt want to take some time to decompress before you begin planning for the fall semester (which, unless things change, may also need to take place remotely). But the good news is that you have a reasonable amount of time to prepare for this (or, if you are teaching this summer, you will at least have the benefit of that first pirouette’s experience). The Commons will be your support through the summer. Our guide to designing online courses will give you both the theoretical understanding and a set of practical strategies to help you design a much more effective, and even enjoyable, online course. This will certainly take time and effort (mostly front-loaded), but our goal is to help you to do this in a way that will pay dividends in a post-COVID world. For example, the micro-lectures you create for the Fall will allow you to flip your classroom next year. It may feel daunting right now, but we will be with you every step of the way.

Let’s Talk About Faculty Anxiety

Let’s be clear. No one signed up for this situation. Not the faculty, not the staff, and certainly not our students. Aside from our concerns about teaching and learning, all of us are also grappling with personal challenges and fears. For example, I am juggling supporting my team and the KPU community with making sure I am not neglecting my two young children at home (while frankly ignoring some high expectations around home schooling). I also have a family member in a long-term care facility in North Vancouver whose health is never far from my mind. The anxiety we feel is entirely understandable, which is why the Commons has been consistently advocating for compassion and urging self-care.

Having said this, there are several factors related to teaching and learning that can raise or lower our anxiety levels. For example, having more time and support to prepare to teach remotely will help. So too does not having to suddenly learn how to use all kinds of new technologies and tools. But from what we have seen in the Commons, a common strategy to reduce anxiety is to simply transfer your current approach to teaching to remote delivery. For example, by moving the same kinds of activities and assessments online (e.g., discussions and final exams in Moodle) or by moving your weekly 90 minute face-to-face lecture to a weekly 90 minute synchronous video lecture. The latter strategy is entirely understandable, especially when you are doing an emergency pivot and not planning a piqué. As my friend Rolin Moe wrote recently, “you can’t teach someone to swim while they’re drowning.”

Let’s Not Forget About Student Anxiety

However, as you plan for the future, we urge you to simultaneously consider the instructional strategies that raise or lower student anxiety. For example, having low-stakes assessments, feeling like they are part of a learning community, experiencing instructor immediacy and presence, and being given more flexibility all lower student anxiety. On the other hand, requiring students to be available for a synchronous 3 hour window each week increases student anxiety, especially for students with children or other responsibilities at home, international students stuck in different time zones, and those who do not enjoy reliable access to technology or the internet at home.

Anxiolytic Instructional Design

Putting these two dimensions together doesn’t yield a universal scatter plot of strategies, as familiarity with technology, existing (pre-COVID) teaching and learning practices, and other factors vary widely. Yet, given enough time, resources and supports, we hope to help you select from a range of instructional strategies that lower student anxiety while also lowering your own–anxiolytic instructional design, if you will.

We will do this by giving you both the theoretical and practical training you need to know how you can design an effective online course. We will show you how you can build an online community, share resources, create content, design learning activities, and plan for assessments and feedback, all in a way that is optimized for an online environment.

In dance, when you make a turn you try to keep your focus on a single point in front of you. You do this to maintain control and reduce your dizziness. This technique is known as spotting.

As you move from your spring pivot to your summer pirouette or fall piqué, please allow the Teaching & Learning Commons be your point of orientation. We will be here for you as long as you are able to engage with us. And when you turn back around, we will still be here. With our help, along with the advice and feedback of your peers, the generosity of your students, and the slack that you hopefully give yourself you will have the best chance of delivering a graceful performance.

I remember the first time I heard the term “free riders” being used in the context of the open education movement. It was at the Open Education Conference in 2015 in Vancouver when, during a presentation titled “The Economics of Open,” the Chief Executive of a for-profit player in the space was referring to those who reuse OER (including for monetary gain) without contributing anything to the commons. I remember reacting with some surprise because, as a co-author of open textbooks, I saw other people reusing my work as a measure of the impact of my efforts. Even as a relative newcomer to the movement, I know I wasn’t the only one in the ballroom to feel this way.

Seems to me, who’s a “free rider” and who’s not is a societal question fundamental to educational access, not a corporate one. #OpenEd15

— David N. Wright (@davidnwright) November 19, 2015

But the more I thought about it the more I could see how companies for which profit is a primary goal, and whose primary obligation is to shareholders and not students, could perceive differently the reuse of their resources by those who will neither compensate them monetarily or in kind.

But the CEO was also talking about good corporate citizenship, about the importance of giving more than you take, adding unique value, and being transparent around how that is happening. Heartening stuff.

#opened15 economics of open; shifting from open as free rider to framing open as public good. Good corporate citizenship looks like what?

— JohnRobertson (@KavuBob) November 19, 2015

Two and a half years later I witnessed a representative of the same company, Lumen Learning, giving one of the lunchtime vendor presentations at an OER conference that I was keynoting. During his presentation he shared images of home improvement disasters (think photographs of doors that are cut at obviously incorrect angles and so won’t shut). His explicit argument was that OER work should be left to the professionals and that his company were the ideal professionals to hire when you wish to create or adapt OER. This was absolutely shocking to me and this time I tweeted out my surprise, because this wasn’t a strategy I had seen from Lumen before and I had great respect for much of their work in this space (so much so that I had previously even explored partnering with them). This was quickly followed by an DM from one of the leaders of that company confidently informing me that he seriously doubted the accuracy of my characterization. But I was in the room (as were about 100 other people). And it really was what the rep said. We had a bit more of a chat about it via Twitter DMs and, to his credit, he immediately recognized the need for a company-wide conversation about framing. Good corporate citizenship requires ongoing vigilance.

Over the years I have encountered all kinds of shady strategies by for-profit players looking to capitalize on the growing interest in OER, from a marketing brochure from Pearson that touted a new digital delivery platform for leasing textbooks (but that actually cites open textbook efficacy research), to emails from sales representatives (aka “Senior Solutions Providers”) of Pearson Canada that warn my colleagues against adopting OER (email subject line to faculty: “OER Cracks Appearing”), to being on stage with the CEO of Nelson Canada while he compared OER to white rice. “It’s great!” he said. “But you don’t want to eat it everyday.” And this is all without all of the clear cut cases of openwashing that we continue to see.

So while many caution against demonizing commercial publishers, I have to say that characterizing accurate descriptions of publishers’ past and present business practices (e.g., price gouging, “new editions” of textbooks with only cosmetic changes, etc.) or the use of quotes from their own public statements as “demonization” is a form of gaslighting. They actually do and say the things that we are sometimes told shouldn’t be discussed in polite company.

Characterizing accurate descriptions of publishers’ past and present business practices or the use of quotes from their own public statements as “demonization” is a form of gaslighting.

This is why it has been fascinating to follow the discussion of the role of commercial players in the OER space over the past few years (see, for example, these posts by Barbara Illowsky and Jim Luke). On the one hand, I fully understand and appreciate the skepticism that many in our community feel when they see [Large Commercial Publisher] announce a new strategy or platform that includes OER (or even one that includes the word “Open“).

As I described during my presentation at this year’s ACRL conference, I see several phases that commercial publishers have gone through in their still-evolving relationship with OER, from largely ignoring it to disingenuously attacking it (“if it’s free, how good could it be?”), to the current strategy of co-opting it (“hey you can access OpenStax textbooks in our platform too!”). It was a strategy we could long see coming, especially when Cengage’s own research forecast that the use of OER as primary courseware was poised to triple within five years.

As an aside, I take the inclusion of open textbooks in commercial textbook publishers’ platforms as a ringing endorsement of their quality

And yet the narrative is not so simple because some of the for-profit players are making efforts to be good (or at least better) actors in open education. I believe that these efforts should be recognized and lauded. In some cases we are witnessing the outcomes of individual efforts to (slowly) change long-standing organizational culture. I believe these internal advocates need our support to engineer systemic change, to get their organizations to understand the value (and not just the price) of doing right by students. Wilde stuff, I know.

While this may seem like a tricky balance, I see it as quite straightforward to criticize openwashing by a commercial player while also recognizing positive developments from the same actor. What is more, I believe we should be clear about what we mean by openwashing so that commercial players know to avoid it (this way, if they do engage in it they are knowingly embracing their demonic side).

This is why I so appreciated the publication of the thoughtful CARE framework along with the ongoing efforts of Cable Green from Creative Commons to help operationalize what being a good actor in open education means in discussions with commercial publishers. Cable’s list includes:

• Being open and transparent about what they are charging for (platform, analytics, all-rights-reserved content, etc) and what they are not (OER).
• Properly marking (title, author, source, license) their OER and giving proper attribution to others’ OER.
• Ensuring all publisher OER can be downloaded without any barriers (non-password protected) and in editable file formats.

So when Cengage followed through on one of our suggestions to give back to the commons and released three of their own titles under a CC-BY 4.0 license, I congratulated Cheryl Costantini (VP of Content Strategy), shared this news widely, and celebrated. At the same time, a month later when Cengage exploited the problem of food insecurity among students (which they have played a causal role in creating) as a marketing tool for their proprietary platform, I took issue with it. Similarly, when Lumen Learning provides open content and code to the commons, I applaud and thank them. But when Lumen does not make titles from their OER catalogue downloadable and instead suggests that people copy and paste from their webpages, I take issue with it because they know better.

I use these two companies as examples because they are very different entities, with very different origins and philosophies, very different actors running them, and with very different histories within the open education movement. However, in my view, the same standards should apply to both. Your initial skepticism of Cengage is warranted because of their past behaviour just as your initial trust of Lumen is warranted because of the immense and continuing contributions of David Wiley to the open education movement. But it is not true that nothing that Cengage could do will ever be enough. Because they could be good citizens of the open education movement (I write this knowing some of you will scoff) and open licensing is not incompatible with for-profit business models. At the same time, Lumen does not get a pass on scaremongering around OER adaptation just because David Wiley is their co-founder. I say this as someone who deeply respects David. Indeed, it was listening to David speak that triggered my own entry into this movement (I recounted this in my keynote address at the 2015 BC Open Textbook Summit, which I began with a tribute to David).

But this conversation is not about one person or one company. If it sometimes appears to be it is because the founder of the Open Education Conference (who for years took on the Herculean task of organizing this event by himself) co-leads a for-profit player in this space, one whose employees are usually seen volunteering behind the registration desk and performing other duties during the conference. This is a tension that David Wright wrote about way back in 2015.

It is true that David Wiley took heat when the Open Education conference in 2017 in Anaheim was slated to include a keynote address by an officer of the Global Education Initiative of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a decision that was revisited in the face of an outcry from the community.

But these criticisms should never be personal. They should instead be structural. Everyone has blindspots positioned according to their worldview, which is why forming a program committee for the Open Education Conference was a positive step (even if one might quibble that the members are selected by David and some of their suggestions may be vetoed by him). So while the current controversy about a keynote panel at this year’s Open Education conference keynote panel is merited (see this thoughtful and articulate thread by the wonderful Michelle Reed), this criticism is still not personal.

Among other things, the criticism focuses on the elevation of this session as a keynote panel, its framing as being about the “Future of Learning Materials,” the lack of representation from library publishing programs, and the pre-screening of questions that are to be submitted in advance of the conference.

In Michelle’s words:

https://twitter.com/LibrariansReed/status/1182672950836842500?s=20

These are just some of the differences between the announced keynote panel at OpenEd19 and a “Hot Topics” panel during last year’s Creative Commons Global Summit in which representatives from Cengage, MacMillan, Top Hat, and Lumen were on stage together. Following presentations by the panelists, the session (which was moderated by Cable Green from Creative Commons) opened for questions. I was in the room that day and used the final audience question to list just a few of the panelists’ past (and in some cases present) misdeeds and inquired whether they (in the spirit of their newly-discovered affection for OER) would be willing to publicly commit to changing their ways. Frankly, the answers that were offered were less than inspiring and ranged from denial (e.g., “If we are doing something incorrect please do tell us”) to dissent (e.g., insisting that their fear mongering about the discoverability of OER reflected a real challenge that they do not exaggerate for financial gain).

Despite these responses and the press-release style statements issued by the panel, I appreciated that Cable organized that session. You see, I do want to have these discussions with commercial players. I am interested in a diverse and healthy commons and I take no joy in skewering for-profit actors publicly when they perpetrate harm and lie to advance their bottom line. This is why I have volunteered my time to meet with (and continue to have discussions with) both large and small for-profit players in the space.

If you read Michelle’s thread in its entirety you will see that she acknowledges several times the value of having these conversations. But a conversation it needs to be. Not a PR exercise with pre-screened questions, plastic smiles, and marketing drivel. Not a reputation cleanse. And certainly not on a platform that frames for-profit players as the future of learning materials.

If there’s a silver lining to this kerfuffle, it may lie in the number and diversity of voices in the open education community that have spoken out in thoughtful, nuanced ways against the planned panel. While some may view this conversation as “divisive” or “uncivil,” it actually gives me great hope and confidence in the future of course materials.

There are many of us who have been pushing to have more critical conversations about open education at this conference. In some cases these proposals have been rejected, but when they have been included you will note that they have typically been standing room only. This includes a dynamic hybrid session about the Ethics of Open in Anaheim in 2017 and several sessions in Niagara Falls in 2018 (yay conference program committee!) including Jess Mitchell’s keynote, Open Education & Student Learning Data by Billy Meinke-Lau and Steel Wagstaff, Dangerous Data? The Ethics of Learning Analytics in OER in the Age of Big Data  by Cristina Colquhoun and Kathy Essmiller, Open for Who? Open Practices with Remote Australian  Aboriginal Knowledge and Learning by Johanna Funk, and Power, Publishing, and A Broader Vision for OER by Zoe Wake Hyde, Jess Mitchell, Ethan Senack, David Ernst, and myself. Even if you look at other events such as OpenCon, the panels that focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion have been the most powerful and impactful. This is because the community is thirsty for these critical conversations. Not just to hear people cheer on each other’s good work within an echo chamber. But to challenge and push one another, and to try to avoid perpetrating harm with the very best of intentions (which will happen if we ignore digital redlining, accessibility, data privacy, and other social justice issues).

While some may view this conversation as “divisive” or “uncivil,” it actually gives me great hope for the future of learning materials.

Having critical conversations about open education isn’t just possible, it is essential. These are the conversations that resonate and that we need to feed into future planning. They ask tough questions. They don’t confuse inclusion with both-siderism. They bring us together and help keep us in check.

Of course the Open Education conference is just an open education conference and it certainly isn’t the only place to have these conversations. Regional events such as the Northeast OER Summit, the Cascadia Open Education Summit, Wisconsin’s E-ffordability Summit, the Statewide Colorado OER conference and others are wonderful options. Further afield, the OER conference and the Open Education Global conference are both events that welcome critical conversations. As do other events like Digital Pedagogy Lab and the many virtual conference hallway conversations facilitated by Virtually Connecting.

So let me leave you with three thoughts:

1. If you disagree with concerns that have been raised by the community, please try to refrain from the straw man argument that criticisms like those that are being made of the planned keynote panel at Open Ed 19 are made by those who are opposed to any and all commercial activity in open education. This is an inaccurate and intellectually lazy take.

2. If you have concerns, don’t be fearful of making legitimate and respectful critiques just because the people associated with the activity are kind and generous (because I assure you that the open education community is home to some of the kindest and most generous people you will ever meet).

3. And finally, if you are in a position of power please don’t engage in tone policing, especially with those from marginalized or under-represented groups. As the open education movement seeks to serve those on the margins, we would do well not to weaponize concepts such as civility in order to suppress dissent.

The open education movement is maturing and growing ever more diverse. I firmly believe that a critical open education movement is a much stronger open education movement. I hope you do too.

Yet, as powerful as quantitative research (especially local studies) can be in bolstering the institutional case for investing in OER it is worth reminding ourselves periodically that this approach is limited in what it can tell us. Yes, research tells us that students will perform the same or better when they are assigned OER in place of commercial textbooks. Yes, it tells us that these gains accrue in favour of marginalized students. Yes, it affirms OER adoption as a student enrollment, persistence, and success strategy. But as with all educational research, it can only measure those elements of teaching and learning that can be commodified, standardized, and quantified. Lorde’s warning that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house applies to the neoliberal university.

For example, institutional data can easily tell you about the average GPA of course sections that assign OER vs. commercial textbooks. But it cannot tell you about how OER adoption makes a student feel less poor in the eyes of his peers. Analytics can tell you about how many times a student visited a particular page in an open textbook, but it cannot reveal to you that she did so because her instructor took advantage of the permission to adapt the book and changed the names in the examples in the text to reflect the diversity of the classroom. It cannot tell you that the student repeatedly revisited that page because she finally saw herself represented in the text. Similarly, research can tell you about factors that inhibit or promote faculty adoption of OER, but it cannot easily assess a re-invigoration in pedagogy as a faculty member reconnects with the values that led them into education in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong–I am not suggesting that we abandon quantitative research on OER. Far from it. But what I am suggesting is that the variables that can most be easily measured don’t communicate the whole story. Or even perhaps the most important elements of the story. After all, the more you focus on counting the number of cresting waves while peering through a periscope, the less likely you will experience the beauty of the ocean.

Respect

for the agency of students and creators, including whether they wish to perform public scholarship or not, and, if they do, what specific license or label they are comfortable applying to their intellectual property. Be mindful of the labour that goes into open pedagogy, visible and invisible. Not everything could or should be open. Open pedagogy without respect for agency is exploitation.

Reciprocate

by not just drawing on but also contributing back to the commons, by sharing resources, practices, and ideas and helping to build upon and contextualize the resources, practices, and ideas of others. Practice good citizenship of the commons. Open pedagogy is about community.

Risk

is ever present with open pedagogy, from the platforms that we utilize that mine and monetize our intellectual labour and the digital footprints that we require our students to leave in the course of their education to the open sharing of unpolished ideas and practices that leave us exposed and open to criticism and judgment. Open pedagogy involves vulnerabilities and risks that are not distributed evenly and that should not be ignored or glossed over. These risks are substantially higher for women, students and scholars of colour, precarious faculty, and many other groups and voices that are marginalized by the academy.

Reach

involves having an impact that extends well beyond the classroom, a course, or a semester, beyond the artificial divides between formal and informal learners, beyond what could possibly be envisioned when crafting precise and predetermined learning objectives. Open pedagogy takes on a life of its own because learning is living.

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. Resist being brokers for surveillance capitalism. Open pedagogy is not a panacea but it strives to be antiracist, democratizing, liberatory, and decolonized.

I am grateful to my dear friend and collaborator Robin DeRosa for providing me with feedback on this post.

Good morning.

It is a privilege to be here with you. Territorial acknowledgements are customary where I come from in Canada and an important element of truth and reconciliation, so I’d like to begin by acknowledging that we are in Manhattan which is the traditional territory of the Lenape.

I come to you from Vancouver, Canada, which is located on the traditional, unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples. My university, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, is a public post-secondary institution and proud to takes its name from the Kwantlen First Nation.

Open education is a philosophy about the way people should produce, share, and build on knowledge. Proponents of open education believe everyone in the world should have access to high-quality educational experiences and resources, and we work to eliminate barriers to this goal, whether these are high monetary costs, outdated or obsolete materials, or legal mechanisms that prevent or inhibit collaboration among scholars and educators.

Open education can sometimes seem like a radical idea but it shouldn’t, especially as we approach the 70th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Many of you will recall these words from Article 26:

“Everyone has the right to education.”

And yet, over 265 million children are currently out of school.

“Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages.”

And yet, 57 million out-of-school children are of primary school age.

“Technical and professional education shall be made generally available”

And yet 617 million youth worldwide lack basic mathematics and literacy skills.

“higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.”

And yet, by 2025 tertiary education worldwide will need to find a way to provide 100 million additional seats.

The truth is that the only reason open education still sounds radical is because of how far reality is from this goal. What is really radical is our tolerance for failure in delivering on a universal right to education.

This is why it is so important that Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) explicitly include a focus on Quality Education. Having specific targets for 2030 helps, as does recognizing the central role that education plays in making progress towards all of the other SDGs—the breaking of the cycle of poverty, progress towards gender equality, responsible consumption & production, and reduced inequalities. But on that note, it is especially important to recognize, as SDG4 does, that an education that is not inclusive, an education that is not equitable only serves to reinforce and replicate existing power hierarchies.

One incredibly powerful tool that is being effectively deployed across our world right now in service of SDG4 is Open Educational Resources or OER. OER are teaching and learning resources that are published with an open license. These can include textbooks, instructional videos, interactive simulations, lesson plans, and much, much more. Publication with an open license means that the copyright holders are choosing to permit others to freely reuse their work for any purpose, to retain their work forever, and even to redistribute their work to others. They are also choosing to permit others to build on their work, to adapt it for their local context, for example by translating works into a regional language.

For example, in Senegal, which has one of the fastest growing markets for self-paced online education, the project SeeSD is translating and adapting STEM OER to fit local needs.

Open licensing often also permits others to earn a livelihood based on their work, by building and selling services around the resources, in the process spurring economic growth.

This is what education is about at its core: empowerment through sharing.

So when the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands chose to place high-resolution images of their masterworks in the public domain, they made the study of Art History more accessible to millions more than could have ever afforded visits to the museum, buy prints of these works, or even buy textbooks with small photographs.

When the University of Colorado at Boulder here in the US chose to openly license interactive simulations for a variety of STEM disciplines, they made concepts in Physics, Math, Chemistry, Biology, Astronomy, and Earth Science more accessible, more comprehensible to millions of students around the world.

When BCcampus in Canada creates, adapts, and shares the more than 250 open textbooks in their repository, they make it possible for students for whom the cost of commercial textbooks is prohibitive to succeed, to not have their learning or academic potential constrained by their economic reality.

As an educator and an author of open textbooks, I have been thrilled to witness the impact of the adoption of OER across the globe.

In South Africa, 10 million Siyavula open textbooks were printed and distributed to government schools between 2012 and 2014. OER have been integrated into the teacher education program at the Open University of Sri Lanka and projects launched to support OER creation and use by teachers have been launched in India, Afghanistan, Colombia, Mauritius, Tanzania, and Uganda. A majority of instructors surveyed from 29 institutions in Brazil, Chile, Ghana, Kenya, Indonesia, and Malaysia reported having used OER. [See ROER4D; Hodgkinson-Williams, 2017]

But as has been rightly pointed out, when it comes to the SDGs, we are all developing countries.

So I am equally delighted to see that the Norwegian Digital Learning Arena that now houses more than 100,000 OER averages 60,000 daily user sessions, that the 29 open textbooks published by OpenStax, based at Rice University, have been adopted by 48% of all U.S. post-secondary institutions. And I am especially proud to work at a university that leads Canada in the creation, adaptation, and adoption of open textbooks.

But more than widening access to education, OER is reducing systemic inequities within education. The burgeoning research literature on the impact of the adoption of OER on student success metrics is unequivocal in its conclusion. No matter the type of institution, the discipline, the mode of delivery of education, or the country, students assigned OER such as open textbooks perform the same as or better than those assigned expensive commercial resources. What is more, those gains are typically seen among students who are first in their family to pursue education, those who are economically precarious, and those who are marginalized in various ways.

I am grateful to Heather and Jean-Claude for highlighting progress in Open Access Scholarship and in Open Science. Because of course for advanced students open access articles and open data also double as open educational resources. The open access, open education, and open science movements have been running alongside one another and are driven by the same ideals. They each aim to design equitable foundations for open knowledge.

But looking more purposefully at OER in relation to the SDGs, we see the Open Education Consortium—the largest global open education membership organization—proposing to support the SDGs in partnership with other organizations, including by organizing a simultaneous SDG campaign for 17 days, in 2020, 2025, and 2030 during which they will highlight OER associated with each of the SDGs.

We see the Commonwealth of Learning leveraging OER and information and communication technologies to launch low-tech massive open online courses, learning design workshops for teacher educators, and open schooling for across the Global South which, at last count, more than 47,000 women and girls have benefited from.

We see the OER universitas—an international network of like-minded universities from five continents—building open online courses entirely constructed with OER and making them available to anyone, anywhere. These courses give students the option to earn actual academic credit and credentials such as the Certificate of Higher Education in Business from the University of the Highlands and Islands. Among the courses that the OERu offers are four micro-courses on Creating Sustainable Futures. These micro-courses are available to anyone, now, and are explicitly in service of SDG 4.7, which aims to ensure that by 2030 all learners acquire knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development.

This work, these initiatives are noble. They merit attention and praise. But they also merit your support. One of the simplest forms this support can take is policy, for example, requiring that resources that are developed with the support of public funding ought to be freely accessible to the public, ought to be openly licensed. That is why one of the Ten Directions to Move Forward identified at the Cape Town Open Education Declaration’s 10th anniversary involves Opening Up Publicly Funded Resources.

This is what happened when the U.S. Department of Labor established an open licensing policy for a $2 billion grant program to improve workforce training programs at community colleges, ensuring that the resulting resources could be repurposed. The same thing occurred in Poland, when the government’s E-podreczniki.pl program created a full set of open, digital textbooks for primary and lower secondary education. And recently in Brazil, where the Programa Nacional do Livro Didático—with its budget of $1.3 billion Real—will next year incorporate an open licensing requirement for digital supplemental resources.

But we can do much, much more, and the potential of Open Education to support progress towards the SDGs is not limited to the tremendous, exponential impact of open educational resources.

Open Pedagogy is access-oriented commitment to learner-driven education. It is also the process of designing architectures and using tools for learning that enable students to shape the public knowledge commons of which they are a part. Open Pedagogy exemplifies the approach to teaching and learning that is described in UNESCO’s publication Education for Sustainable Development Goals (or ESD):

“ESD does not only integrate contents such as climate change, poverty and sustainable consumption into the curriculum… It asks for an action-oriented, transformative pedagogy, which supports self-directed learning, participation and collaboration, problem-orientation, inter- and transdisciplinarity and the linking of formal and informal learning. Only such pedagogical approaches make possible the development of the key competencies needed for promoting sustainable development.”

What does this look like in practice? Well, instead of merely using OER, students can create OER, developing critical literacies while serving specific SDGs. Consider medical students at the University of California who are writing, editing, and improving articles in Wikipedia on a variety of medical topics, serving good health & well-being and quality education. Consider undergraduate students at the Ohio State University who are writing chapters of an open textbook on Environmental Science, a volume that is edited and overseen by the faculty in that program, serving Climate Action and quality education. And consider students at Montgomery College who work under the guidance of driven and brilliant faculty to pick specific SDGs such as Reducing Inequality or Gender Equality that empower them to become agents of change in their communities and the wider world.

Post-secondary institutions would do well to follow the lead of Montgomery College by establishing SDG Open Pedagogy Fellowships for faculty. And educators can draw inspiration from their peers who openly share their innovative practices in the Open Pedagogy Notebook.

Open Education in the context of Education for Sustainable Development is Open Pedagogy. It begins with equitable access but it goes much further by working to democratize both knowledge and knowledge creation.

This kind of critical pedagogy, as Henry Giroux writes, “takes seriously the educational imperative to encourage students to act on the knowledge, values, and social relations they acquire by being responsive to the deepest and most important problems of our times.”

The deepest and most important problems of our times, through an inclusive education for all that serves all.

Thank you for your attention.