Since 2018 I have been module leader for a 15 credit masters level course taught at City, University of London as part of the Masters in Academic Practice, which is a teaching qualification in higher education offered to internal and external staff. Typically there are 100 students on the programme. The module EDM122 Digital Literacies and Open Practice explores digital and information literacies of staff and students, including dispelling the myth of the ‘digital native’ and how to embed various literacies into academic programmes. The module also helps develop copyright literacy (Morrison & Secker, 2017) and situates this as a key component of digital scholarship (Weller, 2011). In addition to being offered to academic staff, it is an elective module for students in the Library and Information Science (LIS) department and has been completed by several members of library staff at City. The module webinar series is available to anyone to join and recordings and resources are shared on the module blog: https://blogs.city.ac.uk/dilop/
In this reflective practice session I will share my experiences of teaching this module for the past 5 years and the impact it has had on my students’ open educational practices. I will also reflect on the role of the open access board game The Publishing Trap (Morrison & Secker, 2022) which is played on the final teaching day of the module. To illustrate the session I will share feedback and assessments created by students that highlight their own understanding and experiences of digital, information, and copyright literacy and its relationship to open educational practices (OEP). The students are teachers in a wide variety of disciplines, but it is worth noting that there has been a high number of health sciences lecturers and nurse educators who appear to find the module particularly transformative. I will discuss any new practices they might have adopted, drawing on how previous studies conceptualise OEP (Cronin & MacLaren, 2018).
The impact of the module will be considered from broader perspective and I will briefly report on findings from an ongoing research project on staff attitudes towards technology enabled teaching and its relationship to open practices (Secker, 2020) I will be collecting additional data in Spring and Summer 2023 so I should also be able to share more recent findings at the conference that explore the impact of the pandemic on staff attitudes.
Finally, I will invite contributions from the delegates to share any insights into the way a module of this type might contribute to building staff understanding of digital literacies and OEP.
References
- Morrison, C., & Secker, J. (2017). The publishing trap. Retrieved August 3, 2021 from https://copyrightliteracy.org/resources/the-publishing-trap/
- Weller, M. (2011). The digital scholar: How technology is transforming scholarly practice. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
- Morrison, C., & Secker, J. (2022). Copyright education and information literacy. In Navigating copyright for libraries: Purpose and scope. (pp. 285–318). Walter de Gruyter. Retrieved from https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/28858/1/
- Cronin, C., & MacLaren, I. (2018). Conceptualising OEP: A review of theoretical and empirical literature in Open Educational Practices. Open Praxis, 10(2), 127–143. http://dx.doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.10.2.825
- Secker, J. (2020). Understanding the role of technology in academic practice through a lens of openness. In INTED2020 Proceedings. (pp. 5363–5368). Valencia, Spain: IATED.
Jane Secker
City, University of London, UK