This workshop introduces and expands on the idea of open educational practice by encouraging participants to adopt an OER model for their professional development programs. In this sprint, together we will define and apply the concept of open professional developmental resources (OPDR) by designing, constructing, and sharing an OPDR.
While open educational resources have been adopted across a wide variety of subject areas, few open resources exist for professional development. In this open sprint, participants will discuss the benefits of building and using open professional development curricula and collectively build an Open Professional Development Resource (OPDR) to learn more about the design aspects of creating OPDR.
The workshop leaders will present examples of open professional development curricula as models for both conceptualization and production. Building from these examples, we will offer an open-ended framework to collaboratively construct and share resources on OPDR, both during this sprint and beyond. In other words, we will design an Open Professional Development Resource about OPDRs during this workshop.
As part of this session, participants will critically engage with what comprises OPDRs as they create a guide about OPDR. They will then work in groups to collect and organize materials around the themes they’ve identified into an open WordPress website. This website will allow for front-end editing and upvoting on content, to allow participants with little familiarity with web publishing to fully participate both in the creation and evaluation of OPDR materials. By lowering the technological hurdles to participation, we hope to open participation during this sprint.
Once materials have been collected and organized in the website, participants will have the opportunity to reflect on these activities in group discussions. What are the affordances and challenges in this open, collaborative form of professional development curriculum design? How can this model be applied generally in professional development and specifically in the programs participants may offer? In what ways do the web based technologies we used during the session help in both the collection and sharing of open professional development resources? These are the questions we seek to answer as part of this workshop.
The last thirty minutes of the session will be used to teach participants’ about publishing open professional development resources. This will give the presenters the opportunity to share and examine the technical work used to facilitate this sprint and OPDRs more generally. For example, using tools like the Documentor plugin for WordPress, participants can curate materials into tailored resources. Additionally, using a GitHub repository, we will show how WordPress’s xml export file can be used to easily replicate the OPDR resources we produced during the sprint. This mechanism allows for sharing of web resources, not only in WordPress, but in a variety of other content management systems and platforms. While cost reduction is an obvious benefit of many open education resources, we argue that this sharing is a key differentiator between traditional educational resources and this form of open educational resources.
Targeted towards training professionals and administrators, this workshop introduces and expands on the concept of open educational practice by encouraging participants to adopt an OER model for their professional development programs. In this open sprint, we as a group will define and apply the concept of open professional developmental resources by designing, constructing, and sharing an OPDR. Within this workshop, we will provide an experiential understanding of both OPDR as a concept and a specific technological model for building and sharing open professional developmental resources.