Open Education

Where are the grad students in Open Ed? On expanding graduate student engagement professionalization workshops

by Sabrina Davis

Contributed by Maya Hey & Emily Carlisle-Johnston

Neither Undergraduate, Nor Faculty

Graduate students have had scant engagement with Open Educational Resources (OER). Whether at the masters or doctoral level, graduate students wear multiple hats in the Academy, ranging from learner, to teaching assistant, to instructor (Figure 1). They seem to be the trainees and the trainers at once, receiving instruction and providing it to multiple audiences. For this reason, graduate students seem perfectly positioned to shift attitudes towards OERs, yet graduate students appear to be missing from—and missing out on—discussions around Open Education (OE). 

A Venn diagram shows “graduate students” to be in the overlapping area of three circles labeled instructors, learners, and researchers.

Figure 1: A diagrammatic representation of where graduate students are positioned within academia.

Why might this be? For one, the rhetoric of persuasion around textbook costs seems moot when graduate students take smaller, niche seminars (often with course readings that are neither available in an open format nor as financially inaccessible as undergraduate materials). Or, given the fewer number of graduate students relative to an institution’s undergraduate student population, there might be less momentum to advocate for OER adoption—advocacy both in terms of graduate students as students and as instructors. In teaching contexts, graduate students may not have the “final say” in whether or not they can use an OER. Additionally, they may not have the same access to pedagogical resources like their professorial counterparts (e.g. professionalization workshops hosted by a Center for Teaching and Learning), and may not be eligible for OER incentivization opportunities that target faculty (e.g. offsetting labor costs associated with converting course materials to OER textbooks). 

Seeing the dearth of representation of graduate students within OER networks, Maya (a PhD candidate at Concordia University) posed the question of the possibility of involving graduate students in OER advocacy at the 2020 Open Education conference. In the conference’s aftermath, Maya reached out to Concordia’s OER Librarian at the time, Chloe Lei, and together they developed a 90-minute workshop through their university’s professional development program, GradProSkills. Knowing that development of this workshop was in progress, Emily (a Scholarly Communications Librarian at the University of Western Ontario) reached out to Maya to explore what it might look like to deliver a similar workshop for graduate students at Western.. 

While Emily has not yet gone on to deliver it (due to tight timelines between starting her current role and the scheduling of graduate professional development workshops for the Winter term), Maya’s reflections on her delivery (detailed below) have informed a path forward for bringing discussions about OE to graduate students. Whether one is new to OERs or an OER champion, this blogpost analyzes the efficacy of OER advocacy and offers key takeaways for the future of engaging graduate students within a greater ecosystem of knowledge exchange.

A Workshop on Thinking, Making, and Doing OERs

Chloe and Maya tried to highlight “simple steps to make your work accessible, equitable, and discoverable” by framing OERs as a way to learn from and contribute back to an ecosystem of publicly available knowledge. In this sense, they situated OERs within the broader context of public scholarship. They hosted the workshop for Concordia graduate students in March 2021 with the hopes of aligning it with the annual, international Open Education Week. However, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic during (a Canadian) winter term, online delivery made it difficult to promote ‘yet another workshop,’ especially with university students coping with cumulative stressors and the malaise of languishing (Hellesmans et al. 2020). While enrollment capacity was 25 students, eight attended and one provided formal feedback. 

The 90-minute workshop had three equal parts: (1) a primer on OE and OERs including concepts like 5Rs and Creative Commons licensing, (2) a guided activity on making one’s own OER during the workshop, and (3) a Q&A session including best practices around items like inclusive and responsible image use and digital accessibility. 

Part of the intent was to balance the workshop’s emphasis on OER advocacy with practicality. In explaining the concept of open practices, Maya offered a spice analogy: as a(n OER) content creator you can mix your spice blend together and share the recipe with the world, and as a(n OER) user you can take apart that recipe and use only the relevant parts (if permitted) instead of having to create your own from scratch. To help students with the guided activity, Chloe created a step-by-step guide for how to create OERs from ideation to distribution—and all of the considerations in between. To facilitate the guided activity, students were paired in breakout rooms for a pre-activity discussion to decide what kind of OER they would create. Prompts included: what is the material you are starting with, who is your intended audience, and how do you hope this content will be used by others? 

Based on observation and informal debriefs, reactions to the workshop varied from immense enthusiasm, to inundated overwhelm, to thorough documentation for future use. None of the students knew about OERs as one (of many) practices within OE, let alone its momentum as a social justice movement. However, some had heard of open data and open access (in the context of academic journal publications). 

Notably, the students who were most engaged during the workshop were interested in creating public resources in an attempt to mobilize their research and theoretical training outside of academia. An activist/researcher studying Canadian immigration, for instance, was keen on adapting an existing pamphlet made for international students moving to Canada (originally licensed CC-BY). In this sense, the student was not necessarily motivated by the OE movement, but found that its philosophy resonated with their greater goals of knowledge mobilization, social relevance, and public impact. 

For the students who were not as engaged, it may have been that they could not see how ‘doing’ OE aligned with their goals as a graduate-level researcher, perhaps because they were too early in their careers (e.g. first year masters) or already versed in conventional outputs for knowledge mobilization (e.g. academic journal articles, Op-Eds, etc.). 

Takeaways and Future Directions

So where do we go from here? We each fully intend to carry forward discussions about Open Education with graduate students in our respective contexts. Responses to Maya and Chloe’s workshop—and examples of graduate student activism for Open Access (Gebhart & Ziskina, 2015)—suggest that many feel passionately about the values driving open scholarship. This is passion that could play an important role in driving action, but only if graduate students are actually aware of OE and its potential. 

Maya and Chloe’s experience reinforces the importance of nuance in these conversations—nuance that recognizes that not all graduate students may be teaching or have agency in their instruction, that their priorities may lie in completing/disseminating research, and that OE advocacy or action not directly progressing their degree may become uncompensated labor. How do we speak to the different contexts and relevance that OE might hold for different graduate students?

An OER-specific workshop for graduate students can introduce some nuance, to be sure. However, it is just one option, one that is limited in reach to those with the time to attend, those who are connected to networks promoting the workshop, and those who see immediate relevance or connection between their work and the brief workshop description. Another option—and one well-suited to the necessity for nuance—is to meet individual graduate students where they are, embracing that “conversations can promote lasting change” (Dean, 2019). 

That is to say, many graduate students may already be doing work that is rooted in the same values and goals as open education: increasing access or empowering others. By engaging with a student’s current work, goals, and needs, opportunities to identify these existing practices may become more clear: 

  • Are you a faculty member talking to or teaching a graduate student about knowledge mobilization? Consider highlighting the potential for their work to be used in educational settings. With an Open license it would become an OER. 
  • Maybe you are a librarian and a student has come to you in search of new course readings or multimedia items to use in a course they are teaching. Consider introducing  them to a few OER repositories. 
  • Or, say you are a fellow graduate student talking to a peer who wants to publish an article in an Open Access journal. Consider starting a conversation about the social justice implications of Open Access, and the ways that those values also actualize in OE. 

Connecting OE to the existing goals and practices of graduate students may resonate more than introducing OE as an entirely new concept, by way of a professional development workshop. We would do well to instead highlight the greater ecosystem of knowledge from which we borrow and, perhaps, consider contributing back to.

Resources

Works Cited 

Dean, K. (2019). From conversation to cultural change: Strategies for connecting with students and faculty to promote OER adoption. In A. Wesoluk, J. Lashley, & A. Langley (Eds.), OER: A field guide for academic librarians | Editor’s cut. Pacific University Press. https://boisestate.pressbooks.pub/oer-field-guide/chapter/from-conversation-to-cultural-change-strategies-for-connecting-with-students-and-faculty-to-promote-oer-adoption/

Gebhart, G., & Ziskina, J. (2015). Students as leaders in open access advocacy: The story of the University of Washington initiative. College & Research Libraries News (C&RL News), 76(10), 530-533. https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.76.10.9394
Hellesmans, K., Abizaid, A., Gabrys, R., McQuaid, R., and Patterson, Z. (2020, November 24). For university students, COVID-19 stress creates perfect conditions for mental health crises. The Conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/for-university-students-covid-19-stress-creates-perfect-conditions-for-mental-health-crises-149127

Maya Hey [she/her] is a Vanier scholar (Social Science and Humanities Research Council, Government of Canada) and PhD candidate (Communication Studies, ABD) at Concordia University. Her research focuses on food, fermentation, and microbiomes. She is also the recipient of the Public Scholars Award (2019) from the School of Graduate Studies and a former Fellow of the Faculty of Arts and Science. She is the current writer-in-residence at Pressbooks. 

Emily Carlisle-Johnston [she/her] is a Research and Scholarly Communications Librarian at the University of Western Ontario. In this role she supports and advocates for all things Open Access and Open Education. Prior to beginning her current role in December 2020, she worked on Open Education and educational technologies initiatives at eCampusOntario, and as a Scholarly Communications and Research Data Management Librarian at Nipissing University/Canadore College.

This post is by Maya Hey and Emily Carlisle-Johnston and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, except where otherwise indicated. Please reference OER and Beyond and use this URL when attributing this work; for more information on licensing, see our Open Access Policy.