OERlabs Openbook/Field Notes (MSD)

University of Cologne

Maneuvering a giant tanker towards Openness and collaborations?

It is probably the same with university teaching as it is with school and the teachers: Everybody who has ever been a student thinks she/he intuitively knows what good teaching from professors should look like - just as most schoolgoers probably have a clear opinion of how good teaching from teachers should be designed. And so the same question probably arises in the end for many: Why then are there still so many bad and boring lectures at German universities?

This is another question that some students probably also ask themselves: Why is so little use being made of the digital possibilities that have now been ubiquitously available for more than 10 years? Teachers are always working as researchers to keep up with all new (technological) developments, searching for the latest findings and daring new experiments or methods, always restless, always "on the bleeding edge"? Wouldn't teachers be the ideal drivers for new digital methods and concepts in universities?

Only those who look behind the scenes of higher-education teaching at German universities become aware of how complex the teaching situation is linked to the science system: reputation goals, time pressure, scientific habitus, funding and financing efforts for research as well as ever more and more heterogeneous student cohorts, which can be enrolled with their very own expectations at the highest educational institutions in the country.

Teachers as drivers of the digitalization of teaching? (Aspect time constraints)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mV7ZiwUw0wY

What weighs much more heavily is the fact that good teaching makes a very small contribution to a scientific career. So far, good teaching has hardly been rewarded or taken into account, e.g. when hiring new professors. In the informal discussions at OERlabs events, different ideas about the nature of university teaching are put forward, for example the differing views of students and the public on university teachers (e.g. a timetable with lectures in an Audimax).

Potential of cooperation for digital transformation?

And yet - also at the University of Cologne - you always come across motivated lecturers and university staff who care about the university community of lecturers and students and who are committed to good teaching. By looking at the new or changed possibilities that digital technologies bring with them, the question arises as to whether and how they can contribute to the promotion of good teaching. The buzzword density that has developed around the word "digital" is now enormous: Whether digitisation, digital transformation, education 4.0 or Humboldt 4.0 - manoeuvring through interpretations, hopes, dystopias and through the jungle of possible consequences and options for action seems more complex than ever for the individual.

One aspect of the debates was explicitly identified for the OERlabs project: Cooperation. Thus, the subtitle of the project reads "Jointly training (teacher training) students for OER". Digital technologies in particular now permit a multitude of new possibilities such as content (texts, videos, large data sets, etc.) to be exchanged and communication between people to be organised, although the mere existence or use of the new possibilities in no way automatically improves the quality of teaching. Rather, very far-reaching questions arise, e.g. how the exchange of material, the use of media and communication in teaching can now be made profitable and of high quality. Open Educational Resources are a variant of cooperation between teachers.

Why use media in lecturing and schooling?=

"Wait, wait!" - some people will now rightly object - "why do media have to be used for a good teaching at all? And what is good teaching anyway? The OERlabs project follows the discussion in teacher training that there are only few media-related courses in teacher training and that therefore current and future teachers only deal with media and media change in a guided or random way. For example, it is possible to study an educational science course at the UoC without attending a media-related seminar. If students take part in the introductory lecture on media didactics (Jun.-Prof. Dr. Sandra Hofhues), the students of the teaching profession say about the research-oriented blended learning event in the interim evaluation of the winter semester 2015/2016: "Ms. Hofhues, your lecture is simply too modern. This statement very aptly illustrates the "vicious circle of a lack of media education": The project follows the normative assumption that it requires the promotion and mediation of media education and media competence, so that pupils and students can participate independently in society and the mediatised world.

Looking at lecturing and schooling collectively

Who wants to change?

By looking at the vicious circle of a lack of media education, it was inevitable from a project perspective having to prioritize the topic of "good teaching" rather than just discussing "good practice" as it would eventually be incorporated at a school in the future. So how should one deal with these problems? Can cooperation be a sustainable way to make good teaching, i.e. good practice, possible and to overcome the challenges that arise? There are two popular sayings about this. The first is "Teachers are more likely to share a toothbrush than lecture notes". Cooperation during lecture preparation or implementation is therefore by no means the norm at German universities, which means that there are special problems and challenges to be addressed or explored in a project. Above all, the "attitude" towards cooperation among individuals, but also among organisations, is of decisive importance here. Our actions in the project followed the assumption that attitudes of employees are very difficult to change towards certain topics or practices.

Decision to incorporate dialogue-methodology "Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue": Distinguishing between committee work/university working groups

The second saying is a bit more general, but is nevertheless often considered to be a bittersweet truth at German universities as well: "If you don't know any further, form a working group". In the first discussions after the start of the project, the team at the University of Cologne always had the task to distance itself as far as possible from committee structures or working groups at the University of Cologne. There are already many committees and working groups on various topics at the UoC; the sustainable impact and outcomes of these other initiatives cannot be assessed here. As a project team, however, we were concerned with the decisive aspect that the perspective of the institute or the respective organisational unit is primarily represented by the persons present in committees or working groups, i.e. it is also a question of resources (and thus hard questions of financing and internal employee utilisation).

Even if all members of a committee are open to the topic of OER, it can fail at short notice due to the current distribution of resources and the setting of priorities. In order to avoid such cases, the "multi-stakeholder dialogue" approach was chosen as a format which, in addition to the institute's perspectives, focuses on bringing people into an open exchange about and with their individual attitudes and experiences on specific topics. Only then should possible results and perspectives be fed back into the university's committee structure.

The dialogue should also not be limited to creating, sharing and remixing OER material, but should present a broad picture of OER and ask questions about "Open Practices" and attitudes at the UoC. The formulated project objective was to promote and enable "a sustainable change in teaching and behavioral and action practices".

Our hope was to bring people into dialogue instead of roles. Experiencing that interesting conversations take place during coffee breaks in the corridors of universities, in the open spaces of the clocked professional life, has often served as a model for us.

Conceptualizing Multi-Stakeholder Dialogues at the UoC

From mid-April 2018 on, the concept for multi-stakeholder dialogue was developed, including an analysis of the stakeholders, a communication concept, and discussion of the pedagogical and methodological concept for a dialogue process. The conceptual work was flanked by the practical training seminars at the Centre for Teacher Education (ZfL), which started in the summer semester 2017. The open involvement of the students was discussed again and again as an important, albeit difficult goal to achieve.

Overview of the OERlabs Köln and Kaiserslautern

The topic of "Open Educational Resources" in teacher training served as an exemplary vehicle for the exchange of ideas through cooperation, openness and open practices. The teaching profession is particularly suited with regard to the idea of cooperation, since in the different phases of teacher training, university teaching has varying degrees of influence.

In autumn, the concept "OER meets good teaching - Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue (MSD) at the University of Cologne" was finalised with a duration from 14 December 2017 to 5 July 2018. Four core dates, two open lab dates and two virtual phases were set for the participants.

Technical University Kaiserslautern

The setting at the TUK

In order to understand the concept of the multi-stakeholder dialogues at the TUK, it is necessary to briefly describe the situation at the TUK at the beginning of the project again (cf. Getting In TUK): As summarised in the description of the organisation, discussions around the topic of OER at the university up until the start of the project hardly took place at the level of the organisation and beyond the employees who were personally interested. As a result, the definition had to be explained in discussions with people who were not active in the field of e-learning or university didactics. To this end, the project also uses measures that were already planned at the TUK, such as the events of LehrePlus (cf. Getting In TUK). One lesson learned from this specific event is, for example, that we perceive different speeds at the TU: While some actors already have OER on their agenda, others even fear the loss of their reputation and their "unique selling point" by OER - a view that could also strongly lie in the scientific or engineering character of the TU as a university (cf. on discipline and university culture e.g. Huber et al., 1983; Huber, 1990; Becher & Trowler, 2001): Many courses, especially in the natural sciences and engineering, are characterised by the fact that basic knowledge does not change much and is offered similarly at different universities (just think of the many introductory courses in biology, mathematics or chemistry). Even individual focus, which is more common in social sciences or humanities, is hardly possible in these courses. While supporters of OER see exactly this as a genuine point for using OER, other lecturers are sceptical: they are afraid that they will come under pressure to justify themselves or that they will no longer be needed. In addition, from the perspective of teacher education, the topic of OER is seen within central institutions such as the Centre for Teacher Education, but has so far hardly really become visible in university practice.

The TUK is also characterised by the fact that the stakeholders involved in the project knew each other even before the start of the project - also due to the short distances at the TUK - as they have already worked together in various committees and projects or are linked to each other via the organisational structure of the university: There are close contacts between the Department of Education, the Department of Studies and Teaching, the Centre for Teacher Training, the eTeaching Service Centre and the University Library.

And finally, the concept of a multi-stakeholder dialogue must include the specificity of teacher training. The aim of the OERlabs project was to sensitise students of teaching professions in particular to OER and thus to have an effect on teacher education. However, measures in teacher education are structurally complex: teacher education as a vocational biographical development project (Terhart, 1992 takes place at universities in a cross-section between subjects, subject didactics and educational sciences and runs through three different and often not or only rudimentarily networked phases of professionalisation: studies, mandated practical training and professional practice with further and continuing education. This process not only involves universities, study seminars and continuing education institutions, but also ministries and state institutes.

In order to bring the actors into conversation with each other from the perspective of the OER, an OER regulars' table will be established within the project, which consciously refers to the informal nature of the meeting through the name. It aims to create a space in which experiences from other projects on the subject of OER (OER@RLP, but also sub-projects of the UEDU project of the quality offensive teacher training) as well as from the institutions (library, eTeaching Service Center) can regularly converge. The participants of this regulars' table are also responsible for the ideas of the multi-stakeholder dialogues, supplemented by the Vice President for Studies and Teaching. The idea was to work on concrete topics and projects and to consider how the different target groups could be brought together under one OER umbrella. The inner-university perspective of the regulars' table is broken up and expanded by the MSD, as the MSD are open to further stakeholders at the TUK, address stakeholders outside the TUK and take up and integrate their specific perspectives.

A multi-stakeholder dialogue (MSD) was chosen as a format, which were called Round Tables at the TUK. Each round table had a framework theme under which both the same people (a core group that continues to advance the OER theme at the TU) and new people came together. One of the aims of the events was to establish a "core group" within the university that would deal with demand-oriented OER questions beyond the scope of the project, and to connect this group with other actors relevant to the course of the project and the focus on teacher training. The hope was that working on a framework topic will make it easier to work on concrete examples, including concrete materials and target group approaches. A special focus was on teacher education, so that this was also the connecting link between the MSD. The focus was on the question of what OER could look like in teacher education. While the first round table focused on OER at the university, the second round table was explicitly planned around the topic of OER in teacher education and the third round table on the topic of OER in the region. As a result of the extension of the scope, different actors were able to talk to each other at the respective roundtables (at the university's round table, for example, other university managers, at the round table on teacher training, for example, representatives of the further phases of teacher training).

The individual working tables at the events follow a similar structure: After a welcome speech by the Vice President for Studies and Teaching, Dr. Löhrke, there is thematic input, followed by an exchange and work phase for the participants. Notes taken on writable table cloth should enhance the visibility and thus create footprints of the participants. These are then digitalised and serve to identify the participants in the documentation. The results of the workshop were collected (cf. concept contribution) and subsequently summarised and made available to all participants by e-mail.

In conjunction with the OERlabs, the multi-stakeholder dialogues at the TUK are an ensemble of different perspectives: On the one hand, there are (university) political events, but on the other hand they also aim to stimulate further debate and thus to be a rather alternative format of further education. The multi-stakeholder dialogues in Kaiserslautern are framed by the voluntary OERlab dates for students and other interested parties that are organised by the tutors, as well as the regular OER meetings for cooperation partners, in which perspectives and questions from the roundtables were deepened. Ideally, this should be used to establish a link between the other elements of the OERlabs; at the same time, students should also be "given a voice" at the Round Tables or included in the discussion about OER.

In Kaiserslautern, in addition to getting to know each other, participatory sense-making processes (Calton & Payne, 2016) were particularly relevant within the respective thematic focal points on OER and the associated open educational practice among the participants: As the experiences with OER were different, it was important to understand the phenomenon of OER on its own, but also to ask what perspective OER can offer for the current field of work. What all the Round Tables have in common is that they look at university development strategies as well as at questions of the design of teacher education from the OER perspective. By repeatedly addressing OER from slightly different perspectives (university, teacher training and region), it is possible for the participants to focus on only one topic, depending on their interests, or to exchange experiences with actors for a semester in a processual manner. Through the different participants, Openness is not only addressed, but is also taken up as an element of design. It is important that the topic of OER is opened up in a multi-stakeholder dialogue and that the "more" becomes visible compared to licence discussions. The Round Table on Teacher Training, in particular, therefore brought in the problem areas of the stakeholders, while the first Round Table addresses topics such as Open Access and research, but also library issues. In this way, the MSD address the respective interests and problems of the actors. In the ideal case, dialogue and further training are mixed and an alternative space is created in the Communities of Practice (Lave & Wenger, 1998).

Multi-stakeholder dialogues at the TUK serve to bring the relevant people involved in OER and teacher education into continuous contact with each other. To this end, the multi-stakeholder dialogues are thematically framed on one hand, and further connected with more events on the other. (siehe OpenLabs) This will make it possible both to penetrate the OER issue from several perspectives and to exchange institutional knowledge and find solutions and relevant best practices. In the multi-stakeholder dialogues, the OER topic thus opens doors for various discussions: it can be used in its thematic breadth as an occasion for discussion on the design of teaching and university strategies (Jäckel, 2015), on the question of appropriate media education in teacher education, as an occasion for school development but also as an opportunity for civic engagement (Pilch et al., 2010).