Open Education

How can we eliminate barriers to learning? How can we ensure high quality education for all? 

Our work on open education blends teaching and research. Past projects have included the President’s Dream Colloquium on Making Knowledge Public—a mix of free, public seminars and university lectures exploring the many ways research makes its way into society. All the course materials, including student projects, readings, and videos of the seminars, are openly available for others to enjoy and use. We’ve also given presentations about open pedagogical practices and contributed to open learning initiatives like eLife’s Open Innovation Leaders program.

Currently, the ScholCommLab is studying the use of Hypothesis—a free social annotation tool that allows students to highlight and comment on digital course materials as they read. By analyzing how students use and perceive the tool, we hope to better understand how social annotation can be used in university classrooms to facilitate learning, community building, and more.

Related Publications

Fleerackers, A., & Albrecht, C. (2019). You-niversity? Perceptions on the public effectiveness of university knowledge production. 13. Download
Alperin, J. P. (2019, May 22). Online Annotations in the Classroom: How, why, and  what do students learn from annotating course material? iAnnotate, Washington DC, USA.
Alperin, J. P. (2019, May 27). Connecting Open Education to Democratic Ideals. Open Education 2019, Vancouver, Canada.
Kalir, J. H., Morales, E., Fleerackers, A., & Alperin, J. P. (2020). “When I saw my peers annotating”: Student perceptions of social annotation for learning in multiple courses. Information and Learning Sciences, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print). https://doi.org/10.1108/ILS-12-2019-0128 Download