The Eight Attributes of Open Pedagogy

INTRO MUSIC

HOST 
Welcome to our podcast exploring the attributes of open pedagogy.  
In 2015 Bronwyn Hegarty, a Principal Lecturer in Tertiary Teacher Education at Otago Polytechnic, in Dunedin, New Zealand published her model for using Open Educational Resources. 
The purpose of Bronwyn’s model is to describe open teaching practices known as Open Pedagogy and explain how open pedagogy can benefit learners and teachers alike, and speed the growth of creative and inclusive communities in an open atmosphere.
Bronwyn’s model is made up of 2 parts: the 8 attributes of open pedagogy and what she calls the OEposphere or an atmosphere of openness.
To aid in understanding the OEposphere and the 8 attributes of Open Pedagogy, you will find an illustration of the Open Pedagogy model in the description of this podcast. 
Before we dive into the OEPosphere and the 8 attributes, we had Bronwyn define what a teaching philosophy of openness means.


BRONWYN HEGARTY 
Openness is what I consider to be a philosophy that people either hold naturally or they develop over time when they become interested in Open Educational Resources as their first sort of contact in developing openness. In terms of open educational practices, that’s another step where people have to feel comfortable sharing and collaborating with others and participating in a network or a community of professionals, sharing their scholarship. It’s not easy for teachers to put themselves out there - that is the only way that I can really describe it because they may be afraid of being judged by others, and may not feel confident that the resources they’re producing are of high enough quality, that others will think they’re inferior. They make think they don’t have good  ideas that others would be interested in. So, openness requires acceptance of yourself as an effective practitioner,and in trusting other’s ideas and knowledge, and being willing to accept that other people have different opinions, different perspective and that if  you work together you usually can create something wonderful.


HOST 
This philosophy of openness is essential to understanding the nature of the 8 attributes. 
While the model is fluid with no hierarchy of importance, we begin with  Participatory Technologies, or the social networks and mobile apps that  teachers and learners use to interact and share content. 


BRONWYN HEGARTY 
Attribute 1 participatory technologies is uh, we’ve got teachers and students interacting together using web 2 tools and engaging in social networks. For examples using a lot of different mobile applications to connect with others. It’s a really important component of an educational practice and feeling confident enough to actually contribute something to others and share knowledge. 


HOST
Moving from tools to people, Attribute two describes how people must share the qualities of trust and openness in order for Open pedagogy to work


BRONWYN HEGARTY 
Attribute 2 is about teachers and learners working together but to be able to do that they’ve got to be open to new ideas, they’ve got to be able to share willingly, they’ve got to also trust in the other people. You know, they don’t want to be ridiculed if they say something within the community environment. They also need to have confidence and be able to use a whole selection of different tools. So I guess, that relies on building relationships in the first place..


HOST 
From this atmosphere of trust and openness, Bronwyn moves to our third attribute: Innovation and Creativity. 


BRONWYN HEGARTY 
Innovation and Creativity is kind of self explanatory. But I think what open educational practices do is encourage it to be more spontaneous because if you’ve already got learners and teachers working in an environment that is open, you know, and trying out all kinds of different tools then it’s easier to be spontaneous. a whole lot of different tools so it is easier to be spontaneous.


HOST 
Attribute 4 is the most commonly understood part of Open Educational practices because it relates to Creative Commons licensing and David Wiley’s 5Rs of reusing, revising, remixing, redistributing, and retaining.


BRONWYN HEGARTY  
Attribute 4 is about sharing ideas and resources and this is so that you can fairly disseminate knowledge. It’s easy to do in a face- to-face environment. You know, people are used to doing that. When you come to work online people can feel quite intimidated by putting material into an open platform, so I guess, what you need is trust and the confidence to do that. But one of the most important things to do if you are going to share resources is that you’re open to having something like Creative Commons licensing where materials can be collected, can be reused, you can change it,you can remix it and then redistribute it. So that sort of adheres to David Wiley’s 5Rs which are retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. And to use OER successfully and open educational practice you really need to be able to do that with material. Otherwise, there’s too many restrictions, because teachers in particular need to be able to adapt material to the particular context that they’re in. So, that’s why it’s really important to have freedom when it comes to licensing content.


HOST
Participating in a connected community of professionals is essential to sharing and distributing OER resources as part of the 5Rs. Being part of a connected network for professional support, growth and sharing is part of Attribute 5.


BRONWYN HEGARTY
Attribute 5, Connected Community, that’s where you’d have teaches participating together in a community of professionals. Generally a community of practices is regarded as a group of people with a shared purpose who come together for a shared purpose - to collaborate, to review each other’s work: they’re working on something together. You can also participate in a connected network but I think that’ s slightly different because it doesn’t have the same kind of ownership. 


HOST 
Supporting how students manipulate and generate learning through taking the lead, solving problems collectively, and discussing these processes all illustrate how the philosophy of openness influences the engagement of students with their learning, leading to our sixth Attribute: Learner Generated contributions. 


BRONWYN HEGARTY 
Attribute 6 is learner generated and that’s where a teacher would be facilitating learner’s contribution to OER, and doing that by encouraging students to use different tools: web 2 tools,  social media, encouraging them to work on projects together. For example, students might be setting up a garden on the school grounds, and we have, a lot of that happens here in New Zealand,  so the children would document, you know,  the progress of the garden. So the work getting it planted and then the stages of growth of the garden, children could be taking pictures using tablets.I don’t know if primary school students would have smartphones but certainly secondary school would. And creating like a portfolio to say well this is, you know,  how the garden’s growing. And then the children, you can do other things in class, like they might investigate, you know, different plants. Look up on the internet, find out about, you know, things like how to grow broccoli, how to harvest potatoes, for example. There’s a whole lot of other different thing. And then they’re also looking at the taxonomy of plants so that becomes a really constructivist, student driven learning situation. 


HOST 
When teachers think back upon their teaching -  this is called reflective practice.  This  is an important part of the process of  selecting and curating Open Educational Resources. Bronwyn suggests that Attribute 7, Reflective Practice is not just for teachers, but also for students. 


BRONWYN HEGARTY 
Attribute 7: Reflective Practice. That’s where we’ve got students as well as teachers engaging in reflection, because reflective learning is a lot deeper as we know. So let’s think of a class of technology students, and they might be building something in a carpentry class. And so what they might do is, the teacher may say, you know “Would you like to take pictures to record the progress of (let’s say) building a rabbit hutch?” And so the stages of you know, metering out the wood, putting the pieces of wood together, you know and until the final product is created. Would be recorded and maybe, you know, at the secondary school, students might record that on their smartphones and then, for example, put the images on maybe a class Facebook page. And so the reflective component of that is where they’re actually having to think about whether each stage that they did was actually adequate. Did they meter that piece of wood correctly? Did they make the calculations correctly? And then they also get feedback not only from their teacher on the story they’ve documented and put on Facebook, but also from the others in their class. So they’re getting peer review as well, and peer review is a really powerful reflective tool and that can you know, can get the students thinking “Well actually next time I’m going to cut the wood this way or you know, make the hut this way because it’s missing a few features that would actually be really good for rabbits!”


HOST
Although peer review has always been associated with how academic research is generated, we can see through Bronwyn’s definition and examples of Attribute 8 that peer review by teachers and learners is now also part of the practice of open pedagogy.   


BRONWYN HEGARTY 
Attribute 8, Peer Review, is where  teachers and students are sharing resources they’ve created, they’re sharing knowledge, sharing ideas and they are open to being, you know,  having critique of their scholarship. Peer review happens naturally when you are in a connected community  and when you’re feeling that you trust others. Also you need to be confident to offer advice I guess. And if it’s set up, you know,  in a class that, you know, students are actually putting their OER on places where the rest of the class can see it and, you know, they’re invited to give feedback to the other students then that, that will actually, encourage peer review.  
An example of that was a class that, they had to do transections because they were learning, learning to be arborists, and part of that was learning to do transections, so the students were taken out to a local park and they had to actually teach each other how to do a transection.
There was a competition held by the teacher, where people had to create a video of, you know, doing the transection, and then each group of students  put their video up on YouTube and the rest of the class was invited to give comments on the videos and also to vote on the, on what was the best video. So that’s a really example of peer review and actually a really good outcome at the end if you,  especially if you won the competition.   


HOST 
It is important to remember that the 8 Attributes of Open Pedagogy that have been described in this podcast represent  a dynamic model.  Bronwyn herself acknowledges that: “each of the eight dimensions overlap in many ways. It is impossible to discuss participatory technologies without mentioning innovation, trust, sharing, collaboration, connectedness, peer interaction and review, learner contributions, or reflective practice. We are all learners in this new culture of connectedness and transmission models.”
In the second part of our interview with Bronwyn Hegarty she discusses her Open Pedagogy model and the establishment of an OEPosphere in greater detail.  We hope you will join us for part two of this in-depth interview with Bronwyn Hegarty.
Special thanks to Bronwyn Hegarty of Otaga Polytechnic for being a part of this podcast series.
This resource was funded by the Alberta Open Educational Resources initiative, which is made possible through an investment from the Alberta government.
In keeping with principals of Open Education, this podcast is available under an open license, CC-by-SA.
The music "AM-Trans" and "Cash Rules" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Share-alike 4.0 International license.



CLOSING MUSIC