Here I am, January 2023, starting my third course in the open education program and here is my first assignment blog post for the course, on open educational technologies.

This week we are supposed to be “building on your reflections from weeks one and two, as well as the readings, research the bigger picture of the social and community aspects of open educational technologies as well as their sustainability, and reflect on the following questions:

• How is the software developed?
• How is it supported? By whom?
• What is the licensing regime?
• What is the nature of community involvement?
• What types of support are available to an educator who wishes to use this tool?
• How does it support or enhance teaching, learning and/or related processes?
• Is there a governance structure for the project? How are decisions made within the project?”

But I have found myself struggling with the assignment this week perhaps because start-up this term seems to have been more stressful than usual, due to on-boarding many new and term faculty who have problems accessing the basics at the college, let alone the educational technology they need to support their students. While I agree that we all share ethical responsibilities to use and support tools that are open, provide much more access, and support collaborative community engagement, when the realities of life in a small post secondary institution hit the way they have this term, I can’t imagine having to support multiple tools as well as the myriad of new faculty and student challenges with navigating tech in general.

Now, to be clear, I do use open technologies in my work (probably more than I know I do, as I am honestly not sure of the status of technologies supported institutionally aside from the library’s Sitka Evergreen which I addressed in a discussion posting in week 1 of this course.). I do, however, promote and nominally support Pressbooks (the BCcampus instance), WordPress (the OpenETC instance) and H5P. When I say I support, I mean me, although a few of my instructional designer colleagues are now working with faculty on WordPress and H5P. But if those faculty (or the students who have been set up for course projects) try to contact our more central support, they will be redirected to me. Sustainable? Absolutely not. Necessary? You betcha – there is nothing else supported by the college that will do what these tools do, and the need is clear. But institutionally, I don’t see central support for them coming any time soon. Which is why an entity like OpenETC is so valuable for those of us who have no other options.

My question is more along the lines of what happens when I leave? Not that I plan on leaving any time soon, but I feel the weight of responsibility to share the load for these tools, so to speak, knowing that my colleagues are overburdened with everything else they are doing (including the aforementioned just getting new faculty up to speed on the things that are actually supported institutionally).

I think what really did it for me in our readings this week was Kahle’s discussion of open technologies allowing for meeting individual needs. When I consider this, I honestly want to call it a day. We already have so many demands to make the tools we support now work the way people think they should (because wouldn’t that be so much better). At least now we can say sorry we can’t do that and move on. I can’t help but imagine a nightmare scenario of Frankenstein proportions. Choice is only great when you are not talking about the individual wants of a thousand different people who don’t necessarily understand the concept of compromise.

But one other thing that resonated in the readings from this week was Morgan’s statement “There’s a lot of room for conversations about open ed tech in higher education that still need to happen. For example, what are the social justice considerations? What kind of open source technology literacy is needed at the leadership level so that decisions can be informed? Where are the institutional case studies who have moved to a more open source ed tech ecosystem?”

If the leadership in our institutions (not just at the college-level, but at the provincial level as well) don’t understand what adopting, adapting, creating, and most of all supporting open technology means, let alone what open source tools actually are and can do, I foresee only those institutions who already have capacity and lone rangers in place leading the charge to fuller openness, and others like mine being left further and further behind in the dust.

But when I think about one of our proprietary tools recently being bought out by another for its client list, meaning we are now having to switch to yet another proprietary tool because we simply do not have the capacity to adopt an open equivalent which would also offer much less functionality for our faculty, well I think maybe it’s time to think about retirement…

References

Kahle’s (2008) chapter Designing Open Educational Technology. (found in T. Iiyoshi & M. S. V. Kumar Eds., pp. 27–45).

Morgan, T. (2019, February 4). Open infrastructure and open education practices. Explorations in the Ed Tech World. https://homonym.ca/uncategorized/open-infrastructure-and-open-education-practices/