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By Shira Segal, Collaborations and Engagement Manager at MIT OpenCourseWare
“Community colleges were created to give access to education, to bring democracy to education, to make education more local. That’s why I’m interested in open pedagogy, open educational resources—because I really believe that it’s perfectly aligned with the mission and the vision of the community colleges.”
– Fernando Romero, Chandler-Gilbert Community College (Maricopa)
Audio of Fernando Romero:
What can the Massachusetts Institute of Technology learn from faculty at other institutions who use open educational resources (OER) from MIT OpenCourseWare in their teaching? How do implementers of open education at community colleges meet the unique needs of their curriculum and students? What can we learn about open practices by collaborating across sectors of higher education, and how might these collaborations shape what we do, and how?
To begin to answer these questions, MIT OpenCourseWare launched a collaboration with Maricopa Community Colleges in Arizona and College of the Canyons in California to support and learn from community college faculty. Supported by a generous grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, this pilot project has yielded a rich set of reflections and observations about the range and use of MIT OpenCourseWare materials, the nature of open education practices, and the value of collaboration itself across institutions.
In this project, MIT is turning to open-enrollment community colleges as important thought leaders and implementers in the field of open education. By pairing OER from MIT OpenCourseWare with the impactful classroom applications of open education principles and practices, our work together furthers the shared goal of increased equity, inclusivity, and access for students. And, by collaborating across different sectors of higher education, we build on one another’s strengths and create new pathways for learning.
Why These Three Institutions?
“Community college is an awesome place to be. […] We not only do the first two years better than anybody else, we also do job training and career enhancement. […] We’re not a junior college, we’re a community college. We serve our community. Our communities have such varied needs. And we take care of them.”
– Anne Marenco, College of the Canyons
Audio of Anne Marenco:
Community colleges have long provided an affordable pathway for both traditional and nontraditional students to pursue high-quality post-secondary education, which intersects with MIT’s dedication to providing high-quality OER for free to the world. By collaborating to train and support faculty as they adopt and adapt MIT-created open materials, we are learning what it means to modify educational resources for localized audiences.
With the launching of MIT OpenCourseWare in 2001, MIT became the first higher education institution to make its course materials freely available online to anyone, anywhere in the world. As a catalyst and model in the global open education movement, MIT OpenCourseWare provides materials from more than 2,500 courses that span the MIT undergraduate and graduate curriculum, and has reached over 500 million learners and educators around the world. While we publish new course material from MIT faculty on our website and to over 5 million subscribers on our YouTube channel, our commitment to access and lifelong learning is incomplete without learning from members of the open education community who leverage open resources and practices to promote more equitable educational experiences for learners.
Maricopa Community Colleges is one of the country’s largest community college districts and the first higher education institution in the United States to enable students to search its course catalog specifically for no-cost or low-cost courses. Since launching the Maricopa Millions project in 2013, the Open Maricopa initiative has saved students over $40 million on textbook costs. Leading the implementation and growth of open educational practices and academic innovation initiatives across the district, Lisa Young serves as faculty administrator for open education and innovation at Maricopa Community Colleges and also as Vice-chair of the Board of Directors for Open Education Global.
Similarly, College of the Canyons is part of the California Community College system, the largest system of higher education in the United States, and has long played a key role in advancing the use of OER across California, including the implementation of the Zero Textbook Cost Degree Program for 115 community colleges. At $115 million, this is the largest-ever public investment in OER. As a recognized global leader in the field of open education, James Glapa-Grossklag not only oversees this statewide grant program but also serves as dean of educational technology, learning resources, and distance learning at College of the Canyons and co-leads the Open for Antiracism faculty training program (OFAR) with the Community College Consortium for OER (CCCOER).
By joining forces across different sectors of higher education, we are utilizing one another’s strengths to build a strong foundation and model for successful cross-institution open collaborations. So far, we have implemented content curation for specific course topics, provided individual consultations for participating faculty, started building community across those participating, and conducted reflective practice interviews where we are learning about community college faculty’s approaches and curricular needs.
Key Findings from Community College Educators
What are we learning in this pilot project? In our first round of reflective practice interviews conducted by Sarah Hansen, assistant director of open education innovation at MIT OpenCourseWare, here are some of the recurring themes that have emerged from our conversations with community college faculty thus far. Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.
The Democratizing Force of Community Colleges
Many of the interview participants stressed that community colleges offer educational opportunities to students from underserved communities. And the education provided by community colleges doesn’t only benefit the individual students, opening the doors to further education and successful careers; it also has a transforming influence on the families and communities those students come from, expanding their awareness of what is possible.
“When I see the students in my class, I really see the four-letter word H-O-P-E. Hope. Really—the hope of the family. Many of them are Hispanic families and first-generation college students. They are really the hope of their families and the community.”
— Isaac Koh, College of the Canyons
Audio of Isaac Koh:
The Nature and Value of Collaboration
Across several interviews, faculty emphasized the value of having access to teaching ideas from a variety of sources and expressed the desire to learn from one another as well. Erik Altenbernd from College of the Canyons articulated it in terms of having a dialogue, suggesting that when ideas are shared back and forth rather than in a one-way flow, the resulting conversation amongst a community of educators can enrich everyone’s teaching and approach. Through this project, participants appreciated the “opportunity to grow and connect with others,” as Isaac Koh from College of the Canyons put it, in order to brainstorm together and to learn with, from, and alongside one another.
“I believe in collaboration at the institutional level, and I believe in cultural change. […] When we join forces, we become stronger. […] Creating a community of learning is very important.”
— Fernando Romero, Chandler-Gilbert Community College (Maricopa)
Audio of Fernando Romero:
“I always learn from partnering with people. I love to do collaborative projects because it really increases my repertoire, so that I have more options for my students, more ways to approach an assignment, more ways to solve a problem.”
— Lori Walk, Glendale Community College (Maricopa)
Audio of Lori Walk:
A Window into How Others Teach
Faculty identified various reasons why they value the free course materials available through MIT OpenCourseWare. Many instructors value MIT’s materials primarily as sources of insight or inspiration for their own curriculum design and pedagogy. Thus, MIT OpenCourseWare provides a window into how colleagues at MIT are teaching or organizing their courses, and that information can be just as valuable as the OER themselves. One instructor particularly liked the way courses are structured and the modular way the materials are laid out; another praised MIT instructors’ passion for their fields of study, and also the fact that the materials on MIT OpenCourseWare are often the product of many years’ experience in teaching a given subject.
“[MIT OpenCourseWare] opens me up to accessing content that’s been cultivated by other people. So I feel like I have this unlimited world of data that I can pull in and curate and create my own classes, create my own curriculum– create my own style of how I want to teach and what I want to highlight.”
— John Francis, College of the Canyons.
Audio of John Francis:
Benefits of Open Education
Of course, MIT OpenCourseWare is only a small part of the much larger ecosystem of open education, and our interviewees’ enthusiasm for OER is by no means limited to the educational materials offered by MIT through OpenCourseWare. Faculty appreciate the fact that open licensing allows them the freedom to pick and choose when adapting materials to meet their curricular needs, and that bringing in perspectives from colleagues at other institutions allows students access to a richer learning experience.
“Having more voices in the room is better. Just having a textbook written by one or a few individuals doesn’t do service to the expanse that there is in knowledge. So I really like the idea of using OER materials not just as a textbook, but to build a class so students can see all the different applications, all the different people involved, all the different processes involved in developing science and what science is.”
— Tricia Foley, College of the Canyons
Audio of Tricia Foley:
Spotlighting the Voices of Community College Faculty for the Global Open Education Community
Joy Shoemate (College of the Canyons) discusses the Exploring OER & Open Pedagogy course during our panel discussion at OEGlobal 2023. (Image courtesy by OEGlobal on YouTube)
The learnings from this project have been informative and impactful, and have the potential to shape how we view and practice open education at large. As such, we wanted to share community college faculty’s insights with the global open education community.
Along with our collaborators, MIT OpenCourseWare presented our work in an Open Education Global (OEGlobal) conference panel titled Planned Communities: Building the Foundation for Successful Cross-Institution Open Collaborations. Aptly, this year’s convening focused on the theme of “Building a Sustainable World through Open Education,” and was hosted by NorQuest College in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, making it the first OEGlobal conference to be co-hosted by a community college. In our presentation, we shared audio interview excerpts from the faculty (some of which are featured in this article) which sparked a great conversation with attendees.
We continued this conversation with an additional conference panel titled “Open for Collaboration: Joining Forces Across Different Sectors of Higher Education” at the OER24: Open Education Conference, hosted by the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) in partnership with Munster Technological University (MTU) and their Department of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) in Cork, Ireland. The theme for this 15th annual conference for open education research, practice, and policy was “Digital Transformation in Open Education.”
The feedback from the global open education community makes us eager to involve MIT faculty who have published their course materials on MIT OpenCourseWare, so that community college faculty can influence how teaching happens at MIT, too. Doing so would accomplish what Erik Altenbernd from College of the Canyons imagines as a dialogue between a two-year college and a major research institution like MIT. In other words, instructors at community colleges and those at MIT might be able to learn from each other, in a mutually beneficial relationship.
Resources You Can Use
A foundational training element that was designed and implemented as part of this project is a free Canvas course on OER by College of the Canyons titled Exploring OER and Open Pedagogy. Designed by Joy Shoemate, director of online learning at College of the Canyons, and her team, this self-paced Canvas course is an open training that resides at the intersections between equity, OER, open pedagogy, and culturally responsive pedagogy. Topics covered include open licensing as well as how to find and use OER in equitable ways; bonus materials include resources used during this project, such as the reflective practice interview protocol. If you are already enrolled in this self-paced course, you can log into Canvas Free for Teacher here.
Tell Us Your Own Story of Collaborations in Open Education!
What are you learning in your own collaborations across different sectors of higher education? What are the strengths and opportunities that you are encountering in this work? And what lessons have you learned along the way that can illuminate the pathway forward for others? Comment below to add your voice, and know that we are glad to learn with, alongside, and from you! We thank you for being part of our MIT OpenCourseWare community.
Learn More
Welcome, Dr. Shira Segal! (Open Matters blog post)
Connecting Back to the Roots of OEGlobal with MIT OpenCourseWare
