20th Annual Innovative Teaching Showcase features Open Educational Practices

This year’s Innovative Teaching Showcase theme, “Open Educational Practices,” aims to highlight teaching approaches that create meaningful, engaging, and collaborative learning environments and encourage free and open access of knowledge and learning. 

For 20 years, the CIIA has published an online edition of its Innovative Teaching Showcase—a collection of innovative teaching practices by more than 70 WWU faculty members. The Showcase itself was originally inspired by the "open source" software movement in the late 90s as a way to make inspiring instructional practices publicly available while promoting excellence among WWU's faculty. The design of the Showcase evolved into a Creative Commons-licensed collection, catalogued via Western Libraries, and followed by a global audience. 

Open educational practices represent the use of open educational resources (OER) for teaching and learning in order to innovate the learning process. They include teaching techniques that draw upon open technologies and high-quality open educational resources in order to facilitate collaborative and flexible learning.*

Featured Instructors

  • Kamarie Chapman (Theatre and Dance) set aside the traditional text for her large Intro to Cinema class in favor of weekly curated collections of articles and videos designed to represent a more diverse perspective of cinema, a more focused collection of materials, and a more inclusive set of "voices" in the field. "I have been striving to achieve a balance of representation of creators for years. Exciting and rigorous study, diverse voices from various experts, and community connection is my hope in creating an open-sourced lecture class."
  • Mark Staton (Finance and Marketing) aims to keep content current and relevant in his Digital Marketing class by gathering new free reading materials every quarter, and to make student "deliverables" valuable to them beyond the scope of the class via blog posts and certifications that get posted on public professional network sites. He says, "Digital marketing is constantly changing and if [students] want to have successful careers, they must be lifelong learners." Students emerge from the class empowered to market themselves in the digital world.
  • Jessica Stone (Elementary Education) encourages students in her Multicultural Education for Teachers class to not only learn the principles of social justice and equity, but also to have potentially challenging discussions about diversity. "For this reason, I decided to replace the dated and expensive textbook with free podcasts... What happened when they heard these thought-provoking talks...was transformational." The podcasts increased engagement dramatically, inspiring challenging questions, deep understandings, and a process for applying knowledge.

 

Seeking Instructor Profiles

The Showcase also includes a “profiles” page where more ideas can be shared. Help us include more of the ways people are using free or low cost materials. Contribute your profile to: http://cii.wwu.edu/showcase/profiles_form.aspx 

Learning Event

Please join us for the Showcase Learning Event on Friday, June 7, from 1-3 p.m., Wilson Library 270 to celebrate our colleagues’ work and learn more about this year’s featured instructors.

The new issue of the Showcase will be published prior to the Learning Event. For more information, visit http://www.wwu.edu/showcase or contact Justina Brown at (360) 650-7210 or via e-mail at Justina.Brown@wwu.edu.

*This definition is gathered from several scholars via Wikipedia, 2019.