Abstract:

Adopting open practices in higher education bears the potential to increase quality, access and effectiveness of the educational offer of universities, as well as improve their impact on society and their reputation. Because of this, an increasing number of universities is working to mainstream the adoption of open approaches among their staff, from the ones just aiming at getting a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) out to more adopting more elaborated strategies based on awareness raising and capacity building. Still, universities which are investing in some kind of open education activity, are typically working on open content, for example supporting their lecturers in developing Open Educational Resources (OER) or MOOCs. On the other hand, few institutions are supporting their teaching staff in adopting open practices beyond content, promoting for instance the adoption of open learning design practices, open teaching and open assessment.

If we look at scientific literature, despite the many indications that research on open education should shift its focus from open content towards a more holistic understanding of openness, we see that the existing attempts to map openness within universities are typically limited to open content. To make some examples, Jhangiani et al. (2016) identify a number of patterns on OER use among British Columbia universities; Pete et al (2017) investigate the perceived value of OER from different stakeholders within four Kenyan universities; Hilton III et al. (2017) connect the use of OER with students’ performance in a US university. The main problem with analysing openness dimensions beyond the use of open content, is that practices such as open learning design, teaching or assessment are by nature very difficult to be quantified, since they are connected with individual choices and cultural behaviours and because openness is a social construct which evolves over time.

To contribute to closing this gap in literature, the present paper is attempting to analyse the level of open practices adoption of a university by taking into account all dimensions of openness - open design, open content, open teaching and open assessment and that allows to reach a comprehensive view of the level of “opened fluency” of an institution. By analysing the data collected within the Polytechnic University of Turin in Italy, coming from a cohort of 181 educators, the paper discusses the adoption of open practices within the university in terms of open design, open content, open teaching and open assessment, relating those to the characteristics of the respondents and especially searching for the connections between level of open practices adoption in these four areas.

Based on these results, the paper concludes that educators seem to select their entry point into openness depending on their preferences and on the way they interact with the institutional, technological and time constrains connected to the adoption of open practices. Because of this, any initiative aimed to mainstream the use of open practices within universities should work beyond the support to open content production, to allow the multiplicity of approaches towards openness to emerge and to build on existing capacities of staff across all dimensions of openness.

Keywords:

Open education, OER, higher education, teachers training, capacity building.