Insights from Building a Model for Collaborative Communities of Practice
By Shira Segal, Senior Manager of Open Education Collaborations, MIT Open Learning
Note: This is the third article in a three-part series that tells the story of what happens when MIT OpenCourseWare, part of MIT Open Learning, collaborates with Maricopa Community Colleges in Arizona and College of the Canyons in California in order to put free and open educational resources into the hands of community college faculty. In this project, generously funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, we worked closely with 11 faculty members over the course of a year to help them find and adapt MIT OpenCourseWare materials for use in their curriculum. In doing so, we created a community of practice and learned the value of working together, the power of listening, and the impact of Open on student success. Read the series: Collaborating with Community Colleges to Amplify the Power of Open, Collaborations Across Higher Education Sectors, and Key Learnings from Collaborations. This series accompanies a special Chalk Radio® episode.
What does it mean to “do” Open in higher education? In the collaborative project described in the previous installment of this three-part series, we at MIT OpenCourseWare worked with Maricopa Community Colleges in Arizona and College of the Canyons in California to support community college faculty as they either adapted MIT OpenCourseWare materials into their curriculum or created their own open educational materials that would then get more widely shared. A few key learnings from that collaboration stand out.
To begin, Open takes on different meanings for different instructors. Some thought of “doing” Open as writing their own open textbooks; others aimed to adapt and update individual lesson plans or problem sets, while still others focused on creating and contributing their own openly licensed teaching materials to “the Commons” in Canvas or other platforms. Additionally, many open educational resources are not “plug and play,” meaning that a resource designed by one faculty member for one group of students at a particular institution rarely fits the needs of a different group of students at a different institution. Because localization matters, the adaptation of open materials requires significant labor and pedagogical craft on the part of educators.
In light of these factors, coming together in person to learn from one another in an interactive way holds particular power, as it points to the value of exploring teaching materials shared by colleagues at other institutions even when they cannot be directly adapted into one’s own curriculum. During our two-day summit at Phoenix Forge, a makerspace powered by Maricopa’s GateWay Community College, faculty reported in a Mentimeter poll that sharing what works well and what doesn’t work well, and learning how others overcome challenges, left them feeling “energized by a sense of purpose” and motivated to maintain community, connection, and collaboration with others in the group. The faculty appreciated our creating a structured space and time for them to share and shape their individual efforts in the context of community and our collective efforts, making for a reassuring and transformative experience.
Image of Mentimeter poll by MIT OpenCourseWare.
The power of community and possibilities of collaboration can function as an antidote to isolation and also as an enabler of the very pursuit of open endeavors. Sarah Hansen, the assistant director of open education innovation at MIT Open Learning and one of the co-leads in this collaboration, points to how the elements of community and collaboration can help address some of the contradictions of doing the work of Open. In a special episode of Chalk Radio® that describes this project, Hansen explains that “Open allows for incredible professional autonomy, and imagination, and meeting students’ needs, on the one side. And then on the other side, it takes an incredible amount of time and work. And it’s not efficient all the time. So we have to hold those two in tension.”
In the podcast episode, Hansen recalls that when we came together for an in-person event, the faculty at both institutions pointed to our being together as a potential solution, “because one thing they said is that working in Open is not a solitary practice. It actually goes better when there’s a team of people committed to creating and continually updating the open educational resources. In fact, one faculty member at that in-person event said that he is unlikely to take on an open project as an individual, that it really takes a community to sustain open educational practices and the materials themselves.” She goes on to say that “a key learning in this whole process is that we cannot do anything alone. We require a community of people working together.”
Finally, this desire to better understand how faculty discover, create, and adapt open educational resources illustrates the value of sharing open projects-in-process. Sharing curriculum development decisions among colleagues and as part of a community is connected to another core takeaway, one that we borrow from Eric Klopfer, Haynes Miller, and Karen Willcox who wrote about MIT OpenCourseWare’s Educator project in 2014: that it’s not always the what that matters but the how. Beyond conveying subject matter expertise through the creation of course content itself, faculty reported that the way one approaches the subject and/or the students is often just as useful, if not more, than the course material itself. We saw this when Robert Bergman from Maricopa’s Rio Salado Community College opted to focus on first-year student success while adapting material from MIT OpenCourseWare. This was also evident when Patricia Foley, from College of the Canyons, used MIT’s materials in order to communicate a strong belief in her students’ capabilities. In a reflective interview early on in our collaboration together, she says,
I’m hoping [the students] see themselves as engineers more. Because they’re at a community college, they really feel like what they are learning […] is not equivalent to what students learn at the four-year schools. But it is. So I want them to know, “This is stuff that they talk about at MIT, so you are not an imposter. You are a real engineering student.” I want them to have that confidence and to know that they are learning at the same level as other students. Our students are smart, so they can do it. They just need somebody to tell them—some of them need somebody to say, “No, no—you can do it. I believe in you. And you should believe in you.”
Similarly, by implementing infrastructures of care at each stage of our collaborative project that provided scaffolding for our work together via built-in opportunities for reflection, development, and coming together, our collaboration emphasized the importance of process over product, prioritizing people and relationships over deliverables. This didn’t mean we didn’t accomplish a lot—because we did!—but it did require being adaptable and responsive to shifting goals and realities. This fulfills the MIT OpenCourseWare Collaborations program’s mission to support people who are going to do powerful things with Open because, as Hansen states at the end of the podcast episode, “I really don’t think Open powers people. I think people power Open. You have to make an intentional shift to focus on people first,” she goes on to say, “And then good things will grow from that.”
Special Episode of Chalk Radio® Podcast
(click on image to play embedded video)
We’re excited to foreground the valuable work of our community college colleagues to the wider public in a special episode of MIT OpenCourseWare’s Chalk Radio® where we discuss our collaborative efforts together!
In “Collaborating with Community Colleges,” I sit down with Chalk Radio host (and my boss!) Sarah Hansen to discuss what we learned in this meaningful collaboration which was co-led with Lisa Young at the Maricopa County Community College District and James Glapa-Grossklag at College of the Canyons, and which was generously funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
In this episode, you’ll also hear how Patricia Foley from College of the Canyons aims to build numerical literacy for her students, why John Francis from College of the Canyons values the increased perspectives that open educational resources bring to his curriculum and teaching, the ways Fernando Romero from Maricopa’s Chandler Gilbert Community College ties open resources to pedagogical freedom and what he calls high-impact practices, and how Robert Bergman’s student-centered approach at Maricopa’s Rio Salado Community College illustrates the power of shifting one’s focus to student success and the possibilities of a wide range of types of open resources.
Tune into “Collaborating with Community Colleges” on Simplecast or YouTube. For further reading and listening, you’ll also find the voices and perspectives of our community college collaborators in this previous Voices from the Field article on the Open Matters blog.
Conclusion: The Power of Open, the Power of Collaboration
Photo by MIT OpenCourseWare.
The core lesson from this collaboration with community college faculty has been the value of paying attention to process over product, and the importance of prioritizing relationships in that process. Acknowledging that we don’t necessarily know the answers or solutions—and that we also need help in identifying the problems—has been deeply instructive. Doing so in conversation with one another and in the communities that we create together has shaped MIT OpenCourseWare’s approach to other collaborative projects and people, too.
Beginning with a previous collaboration with historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and the open educational resource repository Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT), MIT OpenCourseWare learned the power of listening and learning together toward a common goal, and the possibilities (and joy!) that grow out of dreaming both big and small together. Whether we’re creating community and connecting with open education practitioners during coffee hour with the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER), in virtual living room conversations with the Open Education Network (OEN), or in person at the Association of College and Research and Libraries (ACRL) conference, we’re driven by the joy of learning and being together and finding new and meaningful ways to support one another in the important work of Open. So much so, in fact, that we’re co-hosting the upcoming OEGlobal 2026 conference at MIT this fall!
The power of Open and the power of collaboration is evident in all that we do at OpenCourseWare at MIT Open Learning, and there’s still so much we want to do! We want to continue working with and learning from community colleges, and we want to support faculty and those who support faculty, especially librarians. Our work is inherently expansive, from working with Ukrainian librarians to identify course materials for prioritized translation, to providing content curation to support an open-source technology community that serves over 5,000 members across the Caribbean.
We also want to learn more about our mirror site affiliates who make MIT OpenCourseWare available to their communities in areas of low internet connectivity through physical hard drives that we provide and that they set up—there are over 400 hard drives already in use!—and we want to learn more about their stories and the needs of their communities.
And, finally, we want to hear more about open learners around the world and the ways people are using OpenCourseWare to improve their lives and the lives of those in their communities, like those featured in our special “Open Learners” season of Chalk Radio®. All of these things will point us to the larger “community of practice” surrounding open education that we’re part of and excited by. We’re here, we’re listening, and we want you to join us!
Learn More
Chalk Radio® Collaborating with Community Colleges (podcast episode, also on YouTube)
Voices from the Field: Collaborating to Support Community College Faculty in Teaching with Open Educational Resources from MIT OpenCourseWare (Open Matters blog post)
Exploring OER and Open Pedagogy (Canvas course)
Welcome, Dr. Shira Segal! (Open Matters blog post)
OCW Educator: Sharing the “How” as Well as the “What” of MIT Education (white paper)
(Header image: Faculty members Fernando Romero and John Francis; photo by MIT OpenCourseWare.)
