Seeking Nominations for Open Educational Practices-themed Innovative Teaching Showcase

January 9, 2019

We encourage Western faculty, staff, and students to nominate an instructor whose course work reflects this year's Showcase theme, Open Educational Practices.

Every year, the Center for Instructional Innovation & Assessment creates the INNOVATIVE TEACHING SHOWCASE, an online publication featuring best practices of Western's most dynamic instructors.

This year's Showcase, themed “Open Educational Practices,” aims to highlight teaching approaches that create meaningful, engaging, and collaborative learning environments for their students and encourage free and open access of knowledge and learning.

Open Educational Practices are innovations in instructional strategies that seek to expand on the ideals of the OER movement (open access and availability of knowledge) “to improve learning experiences and innovate educational scenarios”3 in ways that involve students and “help them see themselves as contributing members to the public marketplace of ideas.”2

Please consider nominating a teaching colleague (or consider this yourself!) who might be willing to share how they utilize OER resources and Open Educational Practices designed to “respect and empower learners as co-producers on their lifelong learning paths”3 in a variety of ways, such as:

  • Customizing instruction for relevancy while creating or using openly available learning content, possibly in place of a costly textbook
  • Collaborating with students to curate or create open resources, finding texts or articles, editing wikis, and/or creating infographics
  • Implementing individualized learning contracts
  • Empowering students to design their own assignments, policies, and/or rubrics
  • Having students contribute to audiences beyond the instructor via open-access web and social media tools
  • Embodying inclusion, equity, and justice by ensuring open access to educational content

Please use the Showcase Nomination Form by Feb. 8 to let us know who should be featured in this year's publication.

If you would prefer to be included in this year's Showcase via the Profiles section, please submit a brief description of what you do via the Showcase Profiles Submission Form.

The CIIA will announce selected instructors in February for the 2018-19 Innovative Teaching Showcase, published in June 2019.