Group Admins
Description
“Sustainability” has gained substantial currency in education internationally and is an important motivation for open educational practices, although the definitions educators attribute to this term may differ from what is meant institutionally. Uses of “sustainable” or “sustainability” in higher education range from taking into consideration students’ future needs, to notions of cost effectiveness, accessibility and environmental footprint, synonymous with economics and ecology, and viewed as a business model. The future brings many as yet unknown challenges which will certainly require access to lifelong learning opportunities for growing populations.
Learning and teaching are human activities which take place through communities of practice, often but not exclusively in formal institutions such as schools and colleges. In higher education and beyond, knowledge sharing is no longer limited exclusively to academic publishing and conferences. Technological developments have enabled social interaction through social media tools which are rapidly changing the way we live and work, providing new networks for learning.
Drawing on international collaborative research by practitioners in language teaching in Higher Education, this session will reveal the many tensions and obstacles faced by those who are committed to skills development in Higher Education through teaching. Language education faculty face myriad challenges in finding teaching resources that are suitable, of high quality, and allow for the modifications needed to meet the requirements of their course contexts and their learners. Our research suggests that the grassroots model of “produsage” (a portmanteau of “production” and “usage”) provides a way of imagining a movement toward the use and creation of open educational resources (OER) for language learning. Through a set of examples of video resources that fill a need for authentically compelling language learning materials, we demonstrate the potential of produsage to engage teachers and learners around digital resources, to the benefit of language teaching and learning. In support of this grassroots model, the authors propose practices and policies to address challenges involved in engaging teachers and learners around OER in higher education. This presentation suggests ways in which barriers could be overcome in order to support the academy’s wider role in stewardship of knowledge creation and the academic discourse which facilitates it through recognising open academic practice (OEP).
Participants
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Catherine Cronin
joined 7 years ago -
lucytallents
joined 7 years ago -
Christian Friedrich
joined 7 years ago -
paulineridley
joined 7 years ago -
Jacqui
joined 7 years ago -
suzankoseoglu
joined 7 years ago -
bali
joined 7 years ago -
Teresa MacKinnon
joined 7 years ago -
Leo Havemann
joined 7 years, 1 month ago -
ALT
joined 7 years, 1 month ago
