This week for the Open Ed Policy and Leadership course, I am asked to contribute 300-500 words that express my views on the role of collaboration to sustain open education. I am supposed to draw on examples from my experience and support my writing with examples from the course content (readings, videos, forums etc.) 

The first thing that strikes me about the role of collaboration to sustain open education is the breadth of meaning collaboration can have, as well as the complex nature of collaboration in general. In Week 3, we discussed “open collaboration”, and I wondered if we meant collaboration about Open or collaboration that WAS open. Of course, both interpretations are possible including the most encompassing: openly collaborating about Open.

Now, I think collaborating is the way to go when working on almost anything. Even if I am the one doing the lion’s share of the work, as in writing blog posts or tutorials, I almost always ask for input/feedback if I am not actually working WITH a group to create the documents. But how open can collaboration about Open (or anything) reasonably go?

When defining open collaboration, we should be looking for the opportunity for anyone and everyone to weigh in. But does someone not have to create parameters for this kind of work? And if so, who is that and how can decisions like this be made if everyone is weighing in on them too? The point is, for most initiatives, someone decides to launch it (maybe a small group of someones). Typically we don’t wait for everyone to weigh in on every parameter or goal. Sometimes though we start with something and then once we begin to collaborate and bring diverse voices in, that’s when the parameters or goals evolve.

But when does collaboration become too open? The OER World Map is a great example, to me, of a great collaborative open initiative that quickly became too lofty to be sustained, or even created to begin with. The idea of having a world map plotting OER use sounds amazing, but considering that even in my small institution we have no idea of who is doing what with Open – even determining how to find out who is doing what is an enormous task which would be daunting even if we had someone dedicated to it. And the goal of having every country contribute its OER use to such a world map? Well, maybe some countries keep records, but I wonder how they could ever keep tabs on everything, what their methods would be for finding out about OER use, and whose voices would be excluded from that discovery. Impossible! Even if a ruling government pledged to make the effort, there is no way to assure the next would keep it up. Even in Canada we don’t have a national strategy around Open Education. Nor are there provincial-level strategies (although B.C. does a a decent job of collecting information about post-secondary adoptions). No, it seems to me that while these global aspirations for open collaborations around Open are well-meaning, the reality is that they are doomed before they begin.

So, what then is reasonable, given that I do believe collaboration is vital to Open Education? Well, small projects where people work together towards common goals. Take my institution. When faculty come to me for help, I pull in librarians, the copyright officer, other instructional designers, other faculty, students – whoever I think might need to be at the table. And to prevent me from being the one making all those decisions, we then can ensure, as a group, that we aren’t leaving out others who need to be at the table (like UDL support, or Indigenization expertise.)

I think another great way to collaborate on OER is to engage in collaborative writing. According to Czerniewicz, collaborative writing ensures that you actually do the work because you have obligations to other people so it is harder to give up; it improves quality, because there is so much more brainpower and a wider variety of expertise to draw on; and it allows everyone to be a co-creator – a most Open Education practice!

In the end, for me the power behind of collaboration is that no one person has to know it all or do it all, and even if one person is charged with managing the project (someone has to keep things on track…) the final product will be stronger for the diversity of voices involved.

Czerniewicz, L. (2021, June 8). Writing collaboratively [Blog]. https://czernie.weebly.com/blog/writing-collaboratively

Neumann & Farrow (n.d.) The World OER Map. https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid%3A65db838b-decf-4e29-b2dd-665ee5a0e5b0