Psychology Prof Named Open Education Research Fellow

Dr. Farhad Dastur, a psychology professor at KPU, has been appointed an  open education research fellow for 2016 and 2017, making this the second consecutive year that a KPU instructor has received this distinction.

The Open Education Group is an interdisciplinary organization for conducting research and sharing knowledge about the development of open education.

“Open Education is grounded in these enlightenment ideals for freedom and social progress and transformation and liberalism, and it’s connected to a bigger open movement which includes open access, open source, open data, open numbers,” says Dastur. “The essential idea here is that knowledge should be free to be shared, and it should be free to be accessed.”

Dastur will be presenting “How to Open an Academic Department: A Case Study” at the 13th Annual Open Education conference in Virginia this November. He says that the paper will be written with professors in mind.

“What I try to do in the paper is argue that if universities are to remain relevant, and if they are truly to become places of innovation, then they are going to have to step away from this path to some degree and embrace new models of teaching and of governance, and the best model for doing that is open education,” he says.

For a generation with record-breaking student debt, the idea of open education brings rare, constructive attention to the often ignored economic plights of post-secondary students. Dastur believes that open education should be understood as a global movement, wherein learners are being empowered to better themselves through education, and where the barriers of economics and geography are torn down.

Dastur says that KPU will see a number of initiatives from the Open Education Group, including workshops, information sessions, and a week dedicated to open education this month. He also encourages students to ask their instructors about “opening” their classes for greater access.

“Begin working from the ground up to change the institution,” he says. “Because people like me and my colleagues who believe in this are working on a different level. It’s very important that we have different forces trying to change the institution at the same time.”