Every summer, American University’s Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning (CTRL) hosts the Teaching, Research & Technology Workshops. This past summer (August 2017), I presented at three separate workshops:

1. “Open American: Open Educational Resources @ AU,”
2. “Introduction to WordPress,” and
3. “Faculty Tell All: Teaching Online @ AU.”

Two of the workshops were recorded, and serve as my artifacts for this competency. These workshops demonstrate my contribution to a community of practice. My former job in CTRL focuses on the three areas I presented on: open education, wordpress, and online learning. When the summer workshop series came around, I was eager to share this knowledge with my colleagues at American University, and start a dialog around the application of these technologies.

Moving forward, I would love to host more workshops or panel discussions on open pedagogy — that is, the idea of moving away from “disposable assignments” that get read once and ultimately end up in a trash bin, and move towards “renewable assignments” like ePortfolios, student blogs, or other forms of learning that students actively contribute knowledge to. Real-world-based assignments are a good way to think about open pedagogy, and OER often helps facilitate these types of exercises, resulting in the similar term OER-enabled pedagogy.