Call for Papers: Models of Open Education in Higher Education

Education Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA) announces a call for papers for a special issue exploring “Models of Open Education in Higher Education.” Through the advent of open educational resources (OER) and open access, the education arena is witnessing the rise of new models to support learning. From Coursera to Codecademy, to local initiatives led by individual instructors—these models are helping to shift the way that higher education institutions approach pedagogy and credentialing, both at the policy and the course levels. For example, several institutions have created new offices and initiatives to encourage faculty to creatively use open content in their courses; some of these institutions are also supporting lifelong learning by enlisting their faculty to lead Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. Other institutions are partnering with open content providers to create adaptable, accredited courses that are better aligned to employers’ expectations for workforce competencies. And instructors are experimenting with new pedagogical approaches offered through open content as a means of meeting their students’ varied learning styles and needs.

These models will likely continue to make inroads into higher education—spurred in part by rising costs of education, decreases in funding, and increased demand from students, parents, and employers for innovative teaching approaches. There is currently, however, limited empirical understanding of the forms that these models can take, and their potential impact on formal education, on policy, on curriculum, and on the practice of pedagogy.

Education Policy Analysis Archives announces a call for papers for a special issue exploring the policy and practice of open education models in higher education. The special issue seeks to answer: What are the ways that OER support current challenges in higher education? How are these new, OER-based models impacting education as we know it—at both a policy and practice level? And finally, how are these new models impacting higher education stakeholders, including instructors their students? In answering these questions, this issue hopes to inform both theory and in practice by opening up dialogue and providing evidence for the ways that these models can support institutional goals, and by offering insights into successful practices that leverage open content toward enhanced student learning. We invite both theoretical and empirical papers for the issue, as well as papers that draw on innovative approaches to addressing this nascent area of research.

About the Journal: Celebrating its 22^nd year, EPAA is a peer-reviewed, open-access, international, multilingual, and multidisciplinary journal designed for researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and development analysts concerned with education policies. EPAA/AAPE accepts unpublished original manuscripts in English, Spanish and Portuguese without restriction as to conceptual and methodological perspectives, time or place.

Submission Information: All manuscripts should be submitted electronically through the EPAA website and follow the Journal’s submission guidelines: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/. We will not consider manuscripts submitted for publication or published elsewhere.

Deadline: September 1, 2014

Publication date: March 2015

Early submissions are encouraged.

Guest Co-Editors:

Lisa Petrides, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, lisa@iskme.org

Cynthia Jimes, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, cynthia@iskme.org

Please also cc renae.keep@gmail.com on all correspondence.