After 15 years of digital openness in education with as its most visible elements OER and MOOCs, the open community is challenged to widen adoption of openness in teaching practices to (as Rogers puts it) the early and late majority of teachers. For them to adopt, the gain should be clear and directly visible to have them adopt openness. Arguments like it saves students money, it is efficient because you will not reinvent the wheel or publishing quality OER and MOOCs adds to the reputation of our institution are, how true they might be, not appealing to teachers who are in most cases crowded with their day-to-day teaching tasks. One approach to overcome this hurdle is to connect to the core of a teacher’s job: pedagogy. We assume each teacher has a vision on when his/her course can be called a success and what this means for activities s/he and the students have to perform. Many teachers experience challenges in realizing their optimal lectures. For some of these challenges forms of open online education can be of use, especially in enhancing pedagogical opportunities. The latter is called Open pedagogy. To create awareness of the world of open and the opportunities it may have, we have developed a workshop for teachers and teacher support. This workshop has been delivered several times in Fall 2016. In the presentation we elaborate on the content of this workshop, the experiences we had, the feedback of the participants and the impact it had after taking the workshop. The materials used in this workshop and a script is published under a CC BY license and is available in both Dutch and English. This creates the opportunity to conduct the workshop locally for everyone interested, stimulating/increasing chances for widespread adoption of open education in (formal) education.
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I shall use this editorial to express my mixed feelings about the COVID-19 pandemic that affected our lives strongly, personally and professionally, in very different ways for over two years. Going back to our schools, colleges and universities, without even wearing facemasks, sometimes feel a bit unfamiliar. This unfamiliarity also touches upon the way we think and act in our daily work. We are virtually standing at a crossroads: are we returning to our previous routines or moving ahead by incorporating our new pandemic-related experiences into our routines?
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