Openly sharing learning resources to create pathways for hope and opportunity is growing ever more important as ideological and physical borders become increasingly less porous. With materials from over 2,000 courses and 200 million visitors, unlocking knowledge and empowering minds is at the heart of what we do at MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW). In addition to sharing OER through OCW, many MIT faculty members also share their teaching experiences, ideas, and approaches in a special section of their OCW courses, called Instructor Insights. In this section, instructors discuss topics of interest to practicing teachers, such as course design, active learning, engaging learners, teaching with technology, and creating learning communities ”the types of things that help teachers use the resources more effectively with students, thus multiplying their impact.
MIT Instructors share their insights through the OCW Educator project, a faculty-inspired initiative designed to pull back the curtain on MIT teaching for their colleagues at the Institute and around the world. It's based on the idea that sharing the how behind the what of OER makes the materials more useful for educators, and thus, for learners. OCW Educator has been up and running for 3 years, and in that time, we've worked with MIT educators to share more than 130 sets of instructor insights. As the OCW Educator project manager, I've learned a lot about what works for encouraging faculty to openly share their teaching approaches along with their OER. In this presentation, I provide a brief tour of OCW Educator, including how it got started and what the site looks like today, and share 10 tips for getting faculty members to share their instructional approaches. The presentation, which aims to inspire and provide a framework for other institutions to do similar work, will conclude with an interactive conversation about how we can more systematically collect and share faculty insights to support OER use.
