Using Open Educational Practices to Support Institutional Strategic Excellence in Teaching, Learning & Scholarship

This paper explores the integration of Open Educational Practices (OEP) into an institutional strategy to develop distinctive excellence in teaching, learning and scholarship. The institution in the case study is a public polytechnic university serving a metropolitan area in Canada. If emerging Open Educational Practices are to flourish at our university, support for OEP must integrate with and contribute to our broader efforts to clarify and enhance our strategic position. We have identified three focal points where our institution can focus attention in order to ensure that our use of emerging Open Educational Practices will best align with, contribute to, and benefit from our institutional strategy for distinctive excellence in teaching and learning: Opening up the pedagogy underlying exemplary OER, to enable a deeper faculty engagement in integrating and mobilizing diverse sources of knowledge in teaching; Opening up that process by which individual faculty improve teaching and learning, as a model for our students' own engagements with knowledge; Opening up our collective faculty work in innovation networks, as a model for students and as a signature institutional strength and outcome. We summarize the rationale and planned next steps for each of these focal points, which are intended to cumulatively build on each other as a value chain to support the development of distinctive graduate capabilities as signature outcomes of our teaching and learning.