Embracing open: the case of COVID-19

This semester has been something of a trainwreck. The pandemic has slammed into us and knocked us sideways. As bad as I think things have been for me, I am aware that for many it has been far, far worse. But this post is not about the virus per se. Nor is it about looking for silver linings. Instead, it is about how the virus forced me to think about the value of open educational resources. I honestly found the module on the ONL course rather confusing. Sprawled over pre-webinar, Padlet, webinar, videos, meetings….I have come away from those 2 weeks with only a vague impression of evangelical rhetoric and some jargon. It really raised my critical hackles. But as I said, IRL, I couldn’t avoid grappling with openness. To slightly misquote Shakespeare, some are born open, some achieve openness, and some have openness thrust upon them.

Open references

Before the semester started in January, I spent a very long time putting my courses together. This involved gathering readings and making sure the library carried them, writing lectures, structuring assessment, designing tutorial activities, all the usual things we all do as we plan for a new semester. Working with the library to acquire all the latest books and journals was tedious, but with the help of a wonderful librarian we managed to move the relevant books from the open shelves to the reserve collection, and to purchase books that the library didn’t have. The students did ask – “Could you please upload digital versions?” – because many of them do not have the habit of going to the library, and not all the resources had digital versions. I kept directing them to the library. I like the idea that when they browse for one book they may serendipitously encounter another. They didn’t see it that way. We went back and forth on this.

Then the virus hit us. In stages, our interactions moved online. As more and more of their classes moved online the students had less and less reason to come to campus, so going to the library first became inconvenient, and then – when all classes were moved online and the library was closed – it became impossible. Suddenly there wasn’t a choice anymore. For resources that they were not able to access through the library’s e-portal, I had to find a solution. It’s incredible – how many things are behind a paywall. There was no time to see if the library could somehow acquire digital versions of books they already had on the shelves. So I spent a lot of my own money. I bought whole e-books and screenshotted the pages I wanted the students to read. Then I shared those screenshots with the students. In one case, the author of a book emailed a chapter to me. In another, a kind soul on Twitter had a digital copy to share. And so it went.

What would I do differently next time? Well for one thing, I am going to make it a point to only use open access references. My students can still browse, and can still savor the sweet taste of serendipity.

Open research

One of the courses I teach is a qualitative methods course. Again I had everything all set up. My students learned about interviews, participant observation, digital ethnography, textual analysis, the interpretivist paradigm…they were all set to start collecting data for their group projects. In fact some of them were halfway through the collection. They had conducted a few interviews, spent a few hours in the field. They had reflected on the nature of the body in the field, and the cues that an interviewer could read.

And then the virus hit us. Suddenly everything didn’t seem so certain anymore. I was concerned about sending them out into the field – crowded shopping malls, youth spaces, etc. Some of their interviewees cancelled on them, citing worry about face-to-face contact. But how to make modifications halfway through the semester in a systematic way? How to justify these changes? How to model for the students a narrative of flexibility and contingency?

This was when I came across a crowdsourced document started by sociologist Deborah Lupton. It is now closed, but at the time I shared it with my students, people were still adding suggestions and references related to doing qualitative research in a pandemic. This was eye-opening for my students, and it helped me to show them that qualitative methods are always in flux. It also manifested the spirit of collaboration and open science that powers much social research today.

Open pedagogy

I am used to teaching in a physical classroom. My teaching philosophy is inspired by the work of bell hooks (see for e.g. her book “Teaching to transgress“). Embodiment matters to me. As a queer woman of minority race, my body is always already oppositional, reflective, implicated. My students also I see as whole people – not just learners, but individuals in context. I am generally troubled by imperatives to move classes online, when there is no sound reason to do this. I have always believed that there is an intimacy to the classroom that is difficult to replicate online. I work very hard to ensure that my classroom is a safe space, and there is a high level of trust developed.

So when the virus hit us, and we had to move our classes online, I was really worried. Of course, we have Zoom, which turns out to have its own plus points. But it is hard to replicate the atmosphere of intimacy and trust. Then I came across Jesse Stommel‘s Twitter account, and it opened up my mind to new possibilities. In response to the pandemonium cased by classes suddenly going online, Jesse – a critical digital pedagogy scholar – shared all his syllabi and protocols for online learning. Out there, for anyone to adopt and adapt. He argued that what was happening was not online teaching – but crisis teaching, and so educators had to take into account the realities of their students’ lives as well as their own. Most significantly, he shared his ethos of crisis teaching – that it had to be based on trust.

This open sharing of pedagogical resources and ethos made me realise that at the heart of online teaching (whether in a crisis or not) was the same trust that I valued so much in the physical classroom. I am not going so far as to say that we can seamlessly replace one with the other. But I will say that I have observed very distrustful physical classrooms and, in the last few weeks, I have experienced a high level of trust in my online classes.

So, in conclusion, I think that it will take some time to connect this organic, crisis-driven embracing of openness with the whirlpool of information that the module introduced. But for better or worse, the journey has started.