I’m Jim Luke, professor of economics at LCC since 2002 and since 2018, the Open Learning Faculty Fellow in the CTE. For the past 5 years, I’ve led the LCC Open Learning Lab (OLL) and the scholarly commons it creates at openlcc.net. I began experimenting with blogs in my classes back in 2008. Through my blogging I learned a small group of leading universities that were implementing “Domains of One’s Own” – programs so faculty and students alike could work in the open, use OER, and publish on the Web. In 2014, a grant from the EDF enabled Leslie Johnson (the the Director of CTE) and I to expand my blogging experimentation to her classes, the TLTT course, and a few other test cases for a year. The following year the school provided me some reassign time and $7000 from ITS (to pay for hosting) to start an ambitious experiment: The OLL. It was conceived as the first “Domains of One’s Own”in a community college, but it’s morphed into a lot more.
The OLL is a meta-innovation. It’s an innovation in itself but it provides the capabilities, support, and networking to other academics that empowers our faculty to implement their own innovations. It’s an innovation to power innovations. Since the beginning, the slogan for OLL has been running errands for ideas. That’s a quote from the great inventor/educator Charles F. Kettering to describe inventing. For me, it means the OLL is here to enable and empower faculty & staff innovations involving open education and the Web. We don’t tell faculty how to do it. We ask what they wish they could do, and together we’ll figure out a way. We run errands for your teaching and community ideas.
Since 2015, the OLL has had mixed support from college leadership but overwhelming support from faculty and staff. Our current Provost, Sally Welch, in fall 2018 decided we needed to institutionalize the OLL and thus it found a permanent home in the CTE (and I became a CTE Fellow part-time). We are still running errands for ideas and the faculty/staff have come up with a big variety of ideas. Today we have over 60 domain accounts and well over 400 different websites supported. We have an OER e-book publishing platform. We have created numerous community-building sites, including the Poetry Project, and LiveTogether-LearnTogether. We are creating an OER free homework system to replace a costly publisher system in Chemistry. Many faculty and students use OpenLCC sites in classes for writing, publishing, projects, and reference. We have supported and enabled three LCC faculty professional development conferences, including an all-online one last May.
Our faculty’s ideas have taken us far beyond the original “domains” concept to create a new concept of a “digital scholarly commons”. LCC’s OLL and its commons idea has gained truly national and international attention as I have been invited to speak or keynote abou what we’ve done at AACU, multiple national conferences including a state CC system convocation, and at least 6 international/global conferences. What matters most, though, is not the recognition, but learning and creativity that OLL has enabled. I am constantly in awe of the creativity of our faculty and the learning that goes with it.
Jim Luke,
Professor of Economics & Open Learning Faculty Fellow, Center for Teaching Excellence
