Through a unique collaboration between higher education institutions and sectors, two community colleges (College of the Canyons in California and Maricopa Community Colleges in Arizona) joined forces with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a research-focused university, to learn what happens when community college faculty adopt and adapt open educational resources (OER) from MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW). Community colleges provide access to high-quality post-secondary education for students across socioeconomic statuses (Budwig, 2022) and they democratize education by advancing open practices (Tesh, 2022). MIT has long-shared OER at scale through OCW but has traditionally not collaborated with community colleges.
Guided by the principle that “Open is Everyone’s Business,” we intentionally crossed institutions, sectors, student communities, and geographic locations to support community college faculty in discovering, using, and reflecting on teaching with OER. In this presentation we will offer a working model to help develop similar cross-institutional collaborations that will support teaching and learning with OER as a shared responsibility for all stakeholders within the open ecosystem.
In this 60-minute panel discussion, leaders from each institution will share insights, learnings, and reflections from this Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant-funded collaboration that concluded in June 2024. Topics will include: the benefits of collaborative goal-setting; the impact of providing structure such as professional development, reflective practice opportunities, curated OER discovery assistance, and in-person community building; and addressing assumptions about prestige and status.
The panelists will discuss how these learnings point to three tenets of a working model for cross-sectional institutional open collaborations, including: the importance of 1) identifying institutions with which to collaborate that have complementary strengths; 2) communicating respect for stakeholders via programmatic infrastructure; and 3) making space for transparent conversations about how institutionalized stigmas and historical oppression impact the collaboration. These conversations are important because they allow stakeholders to challenge and dismantle prevailing ideologies that perpetuate inequities in higher education.
Throughout the panel discussion, participants will be encouraged to help the panelists expand on the model they are developing for cross-institutional open collaborations by contributing nuances to the tenets discussed and adding others from different perspectives that the panelists have omitted from their working model. We see attendees’ contributions as critical to our work because we cannot build a model for cross-institutional open collaborations alone. It takes a community. Together, we can forge an innovative and adaptable model that draws on the strengths of many to advance equity for all.
Included in
[Session 2C]: First Nations, EquityReferencesBudwig, N. (2022, Fall). A democratizing force: Eduardo J. Padrón on the transformative power of community colleges. Liberal Education.
https://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/articles/a-democratizing-force.
Tesh, G. (2022). Open educational resources in community colleges: Benefits and challenges. In E. Langran (Ed.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 1143-1148). San Diego, CA, United States: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Retrieved November 10, 2023 from
https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/221134/.
Author KeywordsCross-sector open collaborations, Cross-institutional open collaborations, Models for collaboration, Community college faculty, Open Educational Resources (OER), OER adaptation
