Lansing Community College is institutionalizing the use OER, OEP, and open pedagogy by building an online scholarly commons we call a “Commons of Our Own”. With a “Commons of Our Own”, LCC has been able to accelerate adoption of both OER and OEP.
Commons of Our Own re-connects the college to the community, creating a virtual equivalent of the campus including social interaction. It reinvigorates the institution’s mission.
Transformative college education involves more than a structured curriculum of courses and classes, checking off outcomes. Learning inside the classroom has always been only a part of a good college education. The campus or commons experiences are as important as the classroom. Students at community colleges often don’t live on campus. They increasingly live their lives in digital connected devices or take online classes. There is a vast digital no-man’s land between the closed online LMS classroom and the social media where they live. Students miss the transformative opportunities the physical campus provides to share, create, and connect.
The Commons of Our Own concept builds on our Open Learn Lab, a Domains of One’s Own effort, the first at any community college. It connects classroom experiences with the broader open world of the Web and the public community. OpenLCC.net consists of the many individual voices of the students, faculty, staff, and others in the LCC community. It is hundreds of websites created by them and grouped as: Share, Learn, Create, and Connect.
Phase I taught us “it”, meaning a domains of one’s own effort, was worthwhile, we just couldn’t enunciate what “it” was or where “it” fit in the college. We couldn’t, that is, until we discovered and formulated the concept of a Commons of Our Own.
