The relationship between OER and OEP is widely discussed in the research literature (for an overview, see Mayrberger 2020). The four articles examined in the autoethnographic study also attempt to understand and explain the relationship between the two concepts. They arrive at different conclusions. Cronin understands the connection as just one “interpretation” (Cronin 2017, p. 2), Hegarty (2015) finds OER are “essential” to OEP, Mayrberger (2020) establishes that OEP “include the use and reuse of OER”, and Wiley and Hilton III (2018) see a “close association”. The various models themselves are not always accurate, blurring the lines even further at times. For example in Mayrberger’s text it remains unclear how OER are defined, as the “narrow view” mentions “OER along the 5R”, which implies a difference to OER that do not or do not fully comprise the 5R.” (T.H.). However, three interpretation lines can be found in the four research texts.

Reducing OEP to the simple use of OER as readily available material is viewed by some of the researchers as a counterproductive limitation. This results in being “relegated to the ‘back benches’” (Hegarty 2015). Similarly, taking a strictly product-oriented approach to OER, thus focusing on technology, may be detrimental to OEP (Mayrberger 2020). Putting too much emphasis on the material aspect of OER as OEP appears to some of us to be limiting (R.R., N.T.). However, using OER in the classroom should not be dismissed lightly because most of us have done so with positive results. (S.F., T.H., N.T.). N.T. even believes “that the potential of OER does not only lie in their creation, but also in students knowing [about] their existence and being ready to re-use existing OER”.

When OER are seen as enablers of OEP in the context of the 5Rs, they are defined as integral components of OEP in some studies (Hegarty 2015), sometimes even synonymous to OEP (Wiley and Hilton III 2018, p. 135). The emphasis here is on the course work enabled by the 5Rs. Wiley and Hilton III (2018) give some practical examples which have proven to be helpful (T.H.). Although some of us have experienced the idea of the non-disposable assignment as a motivating factor for students (N.T., R.R.) and teachers (S.F.), all of us are very skeptical about putting OER at the center of OEP. One of the main concerns is that creating OER presents too many challenges. Both students and teachers need specialized knowledge in the field of openness (S.F., T.H.). Producing OER adds to the workload, especially when it comes to licensing all class materials (R.R.), and there are little incentives for lectures to do so (N.T.). Furthermore, institutional boundaries such as credit and course requirements may be incompatible with the production of OER (S.F., T.H.). OER created in class must be measured up to academic quality standards, which cannot be guaranteed when OER are student-produced (T.H., N.T.). Finally, students cannot be forced to openly license their material if they are dissatisfied with the outcome (N.T.).

Consequently, the assumption that OER are automatically beneficial for teaching needs to be revised, especially if they are only viewed from a teacher's perspective (NT). In some cases, the creation of OER can even result in a different type of exclusion, for example, if students are not used to project-based learning methods (S.F.). This outcome might seem paradoxical at first glance, but Kerres (2019) contends that the mechanisms of openness and exclusion are both inherent in any discussion of open education. He argues further that understanding and analyzing openness and mechanisms of opening in relation to closeness can help to counteract the often political-emphatic charge in the discussion about openness in scientific discourse (Kerres 2019). Regardless of our reservations about creating OER, most of us have had classroom experience producing OER, ranging from blogging to collections of interesting links to writing Wikipedia articles (S.F., T.H., N.T.).

When OER are classified as one component of OEP, the definition of OEP is broadened to include more than just course work (Mayrberger 2020). In that context, OER can contribute to “a new culture of learning” (Hegarty 2015, p. 11). R.R. supports this claim by pointing out that OER can help students gain a better understanding of broader concepts of learning. However, Cronin (2017) demonstrates in her study that OER are still neglected in higher education, and lectures hardly use them. For R.R., this omission is yet another indication that concepts focusing merely on the material side of OER are unimportant to open practitioners. He thinks “contemporary pedagogy as way more than just the mode of working with teaching and learning materials and the licensing of that”. Cronin (2017) even reverses the relationship between OEP and OER, stating that since OEP are present in higher education, and OER are one element of them, OEP can lead to OER. Hegarty (2015) takes a similar stance, claiming that the OEP dimensions she developed, when implemented in policies and strategies can increase OER adoption.

In conclusion, we argue for being less strict about OER as a requirement for OEP. OEP should exist without producing OER. The use of openly licensed material, as well as free content, should be recognized as open practice (T.H., N.T.). If OER are created in class, they do not have to be published openly; they can simply be used in the classroom and published through closed course management systems available at university (S.F., N.T.). And if the teaching method is to focus on the production of OER, it should be at least developed in collaboration with students (S.F., N.T.).

The papers on OEP as well as our own perspectives share the idea of participation. Broadly defined, participation refers to a culture of collaborative learning; narrowly defined, it mostly refers to participatory tools and technology (Mayrberger 2020, p. 1). Participatory pedagogy in general is an approach geared towards fully involving the students as co-creators in the learning process, and participatory technologies in particular serve this purpose by giving all participants digital tools to interact with each other. All practitioners usually emphasize both aspects (see for instance the definition by Cronin 2017, but “participatory technologies”, the first attribute mentioned in Hegarty (2015), sometimes takes over, relegating didactic and pedagogical considerations to the background. When moving from the narrow view on participatory tools and technology, the four texts highlight the orientation towards students or learners in how they co-create content, leading to OER. Participation then becomes a condition and consequence of a learner-centered view on learning and teaching, fostering “shared responsibilities” (T.H).

First, a decisive element in participation, easily forgotten when practitioners focus on participatory tools and technologies, is students’ motivation, which emphasizes “the value of the social factor within learning processes” (R.R., referring to Cronin 2017). Because they value “social learning” related to moving “away from a didactic lecturing style and to encourage more student engagement” (T.H), OEP stress students’ co-creation and participation. OEP are then one of the pedagogical options (“a variant practice” according to S.F.) focusing on “engaging students, fostering collaboration and technological enhanced learning” (S.F., referring to Mayrberger 2020. In their discussion of “renewable assignments”, as opposed to “disposable assignments” which are created for one course only and never shared or reused, Wiley and Hilton III (2018) indeed show that knowing that expanding the learning process beyond one specific class may be exciting and empowering for students (N.T.). As they become part of a larger community, “learners might be more motivated and take the results of their learning processes more seriously if it is published in the internet sphere” (R.R, cp. N.T.).

Second, when moving beyond the mere use of participatory tools and technologies and considering how a participating culture can empower learners, a crucial aspect in designing participatory pedagogical practices consists in taking students’ needs and apprehensions seriously (also see, as a counterpoint, learners’ motivation in 4.4). Teachers always have to navigate between students’ heterogeneous needs, e.g. passing an exam, learning concrete skills, with more abstract and long-term oriented values such as openness (T.H.). Therefore, S.F. is for instance critical about “introducing more than two new tools”, as too many unfamiliar tools, no matter how participatory, may be overwhelming, especially when the students are already conversant with the learning management system of their institution, which is usually closed for other people from outside a teaching course. Moreover, our teaching experience shows that publishing their own material might decrease the students’ feeling of trust and thus openness. Students’ motives for not sharing their work—and thus not fully embracing a culture of participation towards the outside world—include, but are not restricted to the following motives: “they may benefit more from a personalized feedback that they will not share with others, they may be reluctant to upload versions of their work they consider incomplete or needing improvement, they may want to protect their public image, etc.” (N.T.). How, then, do OER and OEP actually help create participatory, but also inclusive learning spaces that take into account students’ needs (R.R.)? Openness can indeed become a vehicle to exclude the students who may not have the time or energy to engage in high-consuming open practices (S.F.). When openness is being perceived as a supplementary workload, students’ boundaries may be crossed in the name of a participatory culture that considers ‘sharing with the world’ more important than what is happening in the classroom (Truan and Dressel 2022).

Third, a key question in the discussion on participation asks where participation takes place, with a focus on the dynamic relationship between fostering OEP in the classroom and producing OER for an audience outside the classroom. Our teaching experiences invite us to recenter the discussion on participation at the level of the seminar: how much openness do the students want, do they benefit from it, are they willing to invest time and energy in making their work open? Merely publishing all teaching materials under a CC license does not mean that the practices leading to OER or based on OER are participatory (R.R., N.T.). A way to tackle the challenges associated with OER, then, is to shift the discussion from their creation to their reuse: the potential of OER also ‘simply’—and this is often overlooked—“in students knowing their existence and being ready to re-use existing OER” (N.T.) or in being able to find and critically assess “user generated content openly available on the internet” (S.F.). Another idea to foster openness while enabling students’ participation is to move to a meta level, for instance by encouraging “a reflection on Knowledge Equity (who produces knowledge, who is legitimate, who is recognized, by what control mechanisms, etc.)” (N.T., also see Kruschik & Schoch, this issue). It is only by recognizing who feels legitimate to participate in knowledge production, especially as these issues are intertwined with gender, class, race, etc. that we can avoid that “the open teaching process can lead to a different form of exclusion” (S.F.). In sum, participation cannot only be viewed as a process oriented towards others, aiming at presenting results outside the classroom (N.T.), as “participation activities [often] start in a closed environment (LMS)” (T.H.).

The understanding of openness and its associated values and attitudes differ in the papers’ outline and argumentations. The four levels of OEP (Mayrberger 2020) focus on practical implementations of educators, like using and remixing OER or co-creating knowledge items. With their even more concrete teaching examples, Wiley and Hilton III (2018) as well report on practical implementations of OEP and open pedagogy. In contrast, Cronin (2017) concludes from her interview study on the perception of being an open educator that “openness as not just a practice but an ethos, a way of being” (Cronin 2017, p. 13). The teachers she interviewed are “motivated by personal values” (Cronin 2017, p. 13) and did not mention concrete practices like using OER. The eight attributes of Hegarty (2015) relate to personal attitudes (like developing trust and confidence for working with others) as well as concrete practices like interacting via social networks.

The different concepts of OEP show the two sides connotated with openness. On the one hand, OEP and related concepts are discussed as attitudes or mindsets towards a different understanding of learning and teaching, based on personal values and embracing broader concepts like “open learning design” (Hegarty 2015, p. 4) and “the formation of a participatory culture” (Cocciolo 2009, p. 114) . On the other hand, the articles reflect on translating these attitudes and mindsets into concrete practices to foster a change in learning and teaching, i.e. “enactioned OEP” (Hegarty 2015, p. 11). The translation of Mayrberger (2020) identifies four levels of OEP. In the autoethnographic reflections, the practitioners discuss both connotations at different levels, while being more critical with vague concepts of OEP that relate to values and attitudes and where a measurable practice is missing (N.T.).

Openness as an attitude or value is reflected as part of one’s personality: “I try to understand myself as a teacher with open pedagogy understanding, though still without a clear definition” (R.R.). This attitude evokes an even broader understanding beyond in-class teaching practices, like “constant professional development” and relations to “social learning” (R.R.). Concrete practices become part of this self-portrait as an open practitioner, like the “importance of peer-exchange” (R.R.). As such, educators should embrace specific OEP to have an open mindset: “The integration of research on teaching and learning as well as trying to research my own teaching practices, is key for me to feel as an open practitioner” (R.R.).

N.T. introduces a further perspective while reflecting on Cronin (2017). In her understanding, “using OEP” means either “being open” and/or “explicitly teaching openly” (N.T.). Here, openness as an attitude and open practices are interwoven, one is not possible without the other. S.F. points at a similar understanding in Cronin (2017), i.e. "educators can shape and/or be shaped by openness". Interestingly, T.H. remarks that the lecturers interviewed in Cronin (2017) understand openness as a social value and do rather not see it as a teaching practice. Valuable goals that shape practice according to the autoethnographic reflections are “focusing on engaging students in the process, fostering collaboration and technological enhanced learning” (S.F.). The learner-centered approach is at the core of OEP. Cronin (2017) relates this aspect to the value of social learning. Moreover, student co-creation and active participation are related to crucial elements of research-oriented learning (T.H.) (cp. Heck and Heudorfer 2018).

Translating an open mindset into practices seems more difficult. The autoethnographic reflections show that a concreteness and clear distinctions between different levels of open practices might not reflect everyday teaching practices. One practitioner embraces the statements in Mayrberger (2020) as they show that “that OEP is not a binary concept in the sense that either teaching and learning practices are open only or closed only. [...] Therefore, full degrees of openness can maybe never be reached” (R.R.). The practitioner sees the four levels of OEP (Mayrberger 2020) as different “ranges” that show a “realistic impression of what OEP could be in concrete settings” (R.R.). Similarly, though arguing against a strict distinction of the four levels, T.H. states that her teaching is “highly fluctuating” and a concrete assignment of her teaching to one of the levels of OEP might be difficult. Although N.T. assigns her teaching experiences to some of the levels, she admits that she as well has difficulties to differentiate between levels.

However, for N.T. and S.F. the four levels of OEP are helpful and stimulate their own reflections on their practices. The practitioners reflect on the different teaching contexts they experienced and the difficulty to fit those contexts to specific “levels of openness”. Mayrberger (2020) also says that OEP is “highly contextual”. Thus, seeing the proposed levels as a range of OEP practices on a nominal scale would best resemble OEP in teaching scenarios. Wiley and Hilton III (2018) suggest four questions for practitioners to check if they are in line with OER-enabled pedagogy. These concrete criteria are seen as “too strict” and might impede “putting the creation of OER into practice” (S.F.). Reflecting their teaching practice, it seems that the practitioners are upholding their values on OEP, but concurrently consider contextual situations. For example, students need to learn to be open (T.H.), and forcing them to publish their material “might decrease their feeling of trust” (R.R.). Course size and exam requirements are other factors in real-life teaching that do not always conform with students’ creation of OER. Further structural boundaries exist, discussed below.

Teaching and learning, whether realized in an open or closed manner, always happens in a given setting and infrastructure. These structural conditions exercise a significant influence on concrete educational practices and thus frame the unfolding potential of openness within educational practices. All autoethnographic reflections investigated in this study cover certain aspects of these structures that represent breaking points between theories and practices when trying to implement OEP, mainly because theoretical concepts often miss mentioning structures and their influence on openness. We understand structures in the context of educational practices as nonmodifiable institutional conditions underlying concrete academic teaching and learning. How and why do institutional structures limit opportunities to foster OEP proposed in theoretical accounts?

Within their reflections on their own educational practices, T.H. and S.F. underline the importance of skills and knowledge related to openness and OER as important prerequisites. A decisive element related to prerequisites, easily taken for granted when practitioners focus on openness in learning and resource co-creation, are students’ and teachers’ “knowledge about open licensing, knowledge about the use of open digital tools, collaborative working skills, and knowledge in didactic design” (S.F., referring to Wiley & Hilton III 2018). T.H. offers an example in correspondence with Mayrberger (2020): “If I’d aim for a narrower or stricter concept of OEP, a teaching scenario would imply that students create OER in a fully open environment (like an open Wiki). I did that once, with advanced BA students, who were asked to write blog entries (although at this time open licenses did play no role). My experience was that some students were not fully aware of the openness in this activity.” Thus, OEP rely on necessary awareness building among learners. Our autoethnographic reflections point out that the concrete implementation of OEP often meets structural barriers in the sense of skill and knowledge limitations that need to be better addressed by institutional measures such as media skill development and separate openness awareness courses in order to reach “full adoption of open pedagogy principles including general frameworks and institutional and political governance” (Mayrberger 2020, p. 4).

There are not only awareness and skills related aspects among learners that attribute for the implementation of open dimensions within teaching and learning practices. All individual autoethnographic reflections deal with the issue of inadequate structural motivation and incentives for university lecturers to foster OEP. In most cases, the autoethnographic reflections question the normative assumption of highly intrinsically motivated teachers when it comes to openness aspects. In response to the empirical investigation by Cronin (2017) based on qualitative interviews with lecturers in higher education, N.T. identifies structural limitations for her own OEP: “In my view, the most central aspect is the reluctance to add to their already overwhelming academic workloads, as teaching remains undervalued in contrast to research when it comes to grant funding and professorships. The time issue is crucial: as long as teaching in general and open education in particular are not as valued as research outputs, I do not see a culture of openness become more prevalent in academia.” Similarly, S.F. relates personal motivational issues also to those of learners by questioning comparable normative assumptions within the framework of Wiley and Hilton III (2018): “The myriad of tasks are not only overwhelming for the teacher and the lesson plan but for the students as well.” All the different autoethnographic reflections share the deep conviction that openness cannot be an add-on without any form of compensation. For teachers in highly competitive academia and its research-oriented incentive structure, compensation possibilities could (and maybe should) be taken into consideration: how does our OER output add up to career decisions and precarious working conditions (for an extensive discussion of the debate on precarious working conditions in academia commonly referred to #IchBinHanna, Bahr et al. 2022).

Besides structural limitations related to the individual level such as motivation and skills, the different autoethnographic reflections also share similar views on the role of broader institutional limitations that influence the realization of OER and OEP. Within the reflection of S.F. in response to Wiley and Hilton III (2018), several concrete institutional factors are mentioned: course size, exam requirements and teaching infrastructure. The individual reflections value the fact that all investigated theoretical approaches highlight the importance of institutional support for OEP, but in practice, this is precisely what is missing. In response to Mayrberger (2020), R.R. clarifies that “academic teaching always takes place in a given setting and infrastructure. I often cannot choose the learning management system, nor the video conference tool, nor the way the lecture is embedded in the curriculum. Therefore, full degrees of openness can maybe never be reached.” S.F. points to the European educational contexts: “All in all, Cronin’s framework got me into thinking about if and how the uniformity of higher education, shaped by the Bologna Process, and OEP, guided by a learner centered e.g. individualistic pedagogy, fit together.” N.T. even takes a wider perspective, which entails the “full adoption of open pedagogy principles” with institutional support, as happening loosely coupled from institutional support, as “an approach I have never been able to adopt, as I design my classes independently of macrostructures at my university, like most lecturers in my department.”