WPI is justly proud of its exemplary teaching and its path-breaking recognition through tenure and promotion paths of faculty whose primary role at WPI is teaching. In our new tenure and promotion guidelines, WPI defines SoTL as:
“…the development and improvement of pedagogical practices that are shared with others. Effective teachers engage in scholarly teaching activity when they undertake assessment and evaluation to promote improvement in their own teaching and in student learning. Scholarly teaching activity becomes the scholarship of teaching and learning when faculty members make their teaching public, so that it can be reviewed, critiqued and built on by others, through publications, presentations or other forms of dissemination.”
How can open education and engagement with Open Educational Resources contribute to tenure and promotion through SoTL? A team from Iowa OER has published a summary of ideas and resources on this very topic: Open Education in Tenure, Promotion, & Faculty Development.
This document includes a helpful table that maps activities across a spectrum of open education and OER work to promotion and tenure documentation, whether in relation to research/scholarship, teaching, and/or service.
The WPI OER team has collected several other readings and resources relevant to SoTL and OER:
- Driving OER Sustainability for Student Success (DOERS3) Collaborative (website)
- Emancipatory Learning, Open Educational Resources, Open Education, and Digital Critical Participatory Action Research (article)
- The Non-Economic Value of Open Educational Resources (letter to Inside Higher Education)
As the authors of the IHE letter write,
“… we are convinced that the (OER) movement has reinvigorated the scholarship of teaching and learning, as well as the student experience in and beyond the classroom. That is more than cost savings. That is the future of education itself.”