Open Community: Not Repository
Open education is often described in technical terms. Licenses. Platforms. Formats. Repositories. But the most important infrastructure of open is community. Relational pedagogy is one of the key benefits of openness in teaching and learning.
A resource can sit online for years without changing anything. A community, on the other hand, changes and grows every day. When open education thrives, it is because people trust one another enough to share unfinished work. They revise each other’s materials and invite students into authorship. They gather, talk, question, remix, and improve and in the process develop a network of people that support each other.
The Call: An Invitation to Act
If open education is going to matter beyond cost savings, we should try not to think of it as a publishing project, but as a community of practice.
That means:
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Share drafts, not just polished products.
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Invite colleagues to adapt your materials.
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Credit generously.
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Involve students as contributors.
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Attend the showcase. Host the workshop. Review the draft.
Don’t just upload a resource. Stay in relationship with it and with the people who use it. Open grows because people show up.
Examples from Practice
- Instructors across institutions co-authoring and updating a shared open textbook, revising it annually based on classroom experience.
- Courses where students write case studies, build open glossaries, create podcasts, or design problem sets that future cohorts will use.
- Campus events where educators share open assignments, discuss failures, and celebrate experiments, making innovation feel collective rather than isolated.
In each of these examples, the resource is secondary. The relationships are primary.
Your Response: A Short Action Plan
Pause for a moment.
Think about your own context.
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Who do you talk to about teaching?
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Who sees your drafts?
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Who gives you feedback on course materials?
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Have your students ever contributed to something that lives beyond your classroom?
Below is just an empty space to envision your response. Feel free to keep track of your responses in your own way. You will be asked to make a short response in each chapter, so collecting them all in one space would be a very learner-centred thing for you to do for yourself!
My first open community step will be:
(Keep it small. One action is enough.)
Looking Ahead: Connecting to the Next Chapter
If we’d like community to be the heartbeat of open education, then the institution has a responsibility to sustain it. Communities cannot rely forever on goodwill and invisible labour. Staff require recognition, time, infrastructure, and policy alignment. In the next chapter, we turn to the structural side of open: How Trent can move beyond celebrating open rhetorically and begin supporting it systematically. Community makes open meaningful and policy makes open durable.
Deep Dive: OEG Connect — Open Community in Practice
Open Education Global hosts an online community space called OEG Connect.
OEG Connect is not a repository of static resources. It is a digital commons where educators, librarians, instructional designers, and researchers from around the world:
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Share open projects in progress
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Ask questions about licensing and adaptation
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Post calls for collaborators
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Discuss policy developments
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Reflect on open pedagogy experiments
It models something essential: open work is sustained by conversation. Instead of downloading and disappearing, members engage in dialogue. They surface challenges. They celebrate wins. They connect across institutions and borders. The lesson is simple but profound: Open becomes durable when it becomes social. A platform alone does not create community. But a shared space, intentionally used for dialogue and collaboration, can turn isolated efforts into collective momentum.
