Developing Open Educational Resources (OER) Using Popular Education

Overview: This workshop will familiarize participants with OER as both an educational resource and outcome in social work learning. We will then use popular education to guide participants through exercises to build their own OER.Proposal text: Open educational resources (OER) are “any educational resources (including curriculum maps, course materials, textbooks, streaming videos, multimedia applications, podcasts, and any other materials that have been designed for use in teaching and learning) that are openly available for use by educators and students, without an accompanying need to pay royalties or licence fees” (Butcher, et al., 2015, p. 5). In making the case for OER, Willinsky (2009, p. 143) states “access to knowledge is a human right that is closely associated with the ability to defend, as well as to advocate for, other rights.” The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has developed large-scale projects to support the development of OER in Member States, led inter-governmental discussions on OER, and, in 2019, adopted the only existing international standard on implementing OER (UNESCO, 2021). While some areas, including psychology, biology, and calculus, have an abundance of OER, social work and other specialized programs have not established OER as widely (Elder, 2019, Open Social Work, 2020).

As media technologies have played a growing role in work and education, OER can be used to make traditionally inaccessible knowledge available to practitioners. We accomplished this through popular education and critical pedagogy (Friere, 2013) in a human development undergraduate classroom. Popular education has long been used in supporting movements for human rights around the world, with the goal of making transformative change with the people most affected by social problems on the problems those people care about most (Baker et al., 2008; Boal, 2000). As social workers, this means working alongside our clients to create change, treating clients as experts, identifying root causes, and designing, then implementing collective action. While some in the profession might relegate these activities to macro practice classrooms, we believe the principles and practices of popular education and collective action belong in the hands of all social workers if the profession is to enact change for human rights whilst supporting the dignity and worth of those we work with. In our course, students were invited to pursue an issue in human development of deep meaning to them. They were supported in developing a curriculum to teach about this issue, and best practices in addressing it, through a popular education framework. Students presented their work at a collectively organized conference for human service workers that issued CEU credits to over 300 attendees and are currently working to publish their curricula as OER that can be used by teachers or human service organizations to offer further education or professional development about the topics students chose.