This essay is a companion piece to “How Do Open Education Resources Acquire Their Value for Teaching and Learning?” by Tom Carey. The introduction to these two essays, by John Rakestraw, can be found here.

Author's Note: This essay reflects the work of the Carnegie Cluster on Expanding the SOTL Commons, whose principals include: George Rehrey, Julianne Bobay, Jennifer Laherty (Indiana University); Amy Burnett, Amy Goodburn, Paul Savory (University of Nebraska); Susannah McGowan, John Rakestraw, Heidi Elmendorf, Randy Bass (Georgetown University); Cammy Shay, Jane Cirillo (Houston Community College); Alice Cassidy, Gary Poole (University of British Columbia); Tony Ciccone (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching); Crisca Bierwert (University of Michigan); Dan Bernstein, Rick Hale, Ann Cudd (University of Kansas); Janice Liddell, Kristie Roberts (Clark Atlanta University);  Nancy Simpson (Texas A&M University); and Tom Carey (University of Waterloo).  --JMR

As the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) expands, its artifacts proliferate along both traditional and innovative paths. In addition to journal articles, book chapters, monographs, and conference presentations, scholars of teaching and learning are reporting their work through less conventional, sometimes more ephemeral means, including succinct electronic “snapshots” and more detailed electronic course portfolios, roundtables, local and limited-run print pamphlets, PowerPoint presentations on Web sites, and so on. Not only are the genres for reporting diverse, from personal narrative to theoretical essay to social science paper, and the methodologies employed wide-ranging, including statistical analyses, case studies, think-alouds, and close readings, but also the sites that index them are spread across the educational and disciplinary literatures. Meanwhile, scholars new to this area of study seek exemplars, methods, genres, and canonical works to guide them in their explorations of the growing body of work.  Even longstanding contributors to this literature find keeping up with developments increasingly difficult. How do both established and new researchers in the field know where to look and what to read? How can they be most efficient with their time and avoid reinventing the scholarly wheel? Perhaps more important, how is the field defined, and who decides what counts as scholarship of teaching and learning? In response to these challenges, a group convened under the auspices of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has asked: How do we know what matters in the scholarship of teaching and learning? How do we make the diverse ways of representing teaching (especially what is available digitally) accessible and useful to people at all stages of scholarly teaching and SOTL, from entry level to expert?

Since 2006, “Expanding the SOTL Commons,” a group in the Institutional Leadership Program of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, has explored the idea of a permanent, digital repository as a means to advance the field of the scholarship of teaching and learning.¹ Representing experiences at a diverse group of colleges and universities, public and private, our discussions began with these challenges:

• to help scholars new to SOTL enter and make progressive steps into the field;
• to conceptualize the future of the field in ways that reflect its diversity of teaching circumstances, student populations, faculty interests, and institutional contexts; and
• to develop new and more efficient ways of communicating across institutions, disciplines, and degrees of immersion in the field.

The group developed the vision of an electronic SOTL repository as one way to address these challenges related to the growing “teaching commons.”²  Such a repository would not only help scholars navigate the growing volume of SOTL but also could be used to introduce a degree of selectivity and ways of sorting and tracking the work being produced under this label, “SOTL.

Designing a Repository
As our group evaluated the idea of a repository as an aid to the SOTL community, we recognized that a wide range of resources is already available online, free and accessible to anyone. A quick Google search on a teaching-related topic will yield thousands, even millions, of results. College and university teaching centers have abstracted their most-cited articles for posting to Web sites. Libraries host specialized databases for search scholarly publications. Would we just be complicating the research process by adding another layer between the user and the source materials, especially as likely users of the repository would be highly trained scholars familiar with such research tools?

We came to realize that, while the skills that researchers bring with them would be essential, most of those entering the field see it as a secondary field to their primary disciplines. However interrelated with their first field of study, SOTL is likely not their primary area of training, so for most an introduction and orientation to current knowledge begins in relation to an unknown and extensive literature.

Moreover, even those already engaged in SOTL recognize that the boundaries of the field have yet to be drawn definitively. Indeed whether it is a field, rather than an area of scholarly focus within established disciplines is a matter of contention.³ Certainly, what counts as “SOTL” is still being negotiated in scholarly conversations, verbal and print. A repository would endorse certain research as within bounds, providing a framework for an iterative process of intentionally defining the field of study itself.

Beyond simply storing or indexing SOTL research, ideally, a repository would act as a touchstone around which an academic community for the scholarship of teaching and learning could form while the repository would be in turn constructed and developed by that community. A spiraling process of development could enable the SOTL community to define the field inductively while, at the same time, the users of the repository would design appropriate ways to search the ideas and objects in the repository--for example, by using keywords--and refine and strengthen those search strategies to fit their community’s particular needs. New search mechanisms beyond keywords, which build on the ways that people access the information in a repository according to criteria such as “most searched,” “most bookmarked,” and “most viewed,” show additional promise for developing community-generated knowledge.⁴ By incorporating such ways for the repository to adapt to community-generated knowledge, the repository itself would reflect the dynamic nature of the field.    

Finally, an electronic repository would provide a lasting virtual space for SOTL research, and the persistent URLs assigned to repository resources would keep items from disappearing into the ether.⁵ In addition, as the archive grew to include new items, it would provide data for the study of the historical development of the field.

As we developed our thinking about the utility of a repository, questions of terminology arose. Some members of the group favored the term “repository,” while others found this term too static and felt that the term “archive” would connote a more active space. As indicated in his piece published here, Tom Carey was a persuasive voice in these discussions, advocating for tools that facilitate social networking among scholar/teachers as an aid to their work, rather than centering the project on a repository itself.

Standing behind this terminology decision are questions about when and how the development of SOTL projects takes place. Would the exchange of ideas between users happen within the context of the repository itself (for example, via comments on and revisions to repository items), or before and/or after materials enter the repository (for example, in collaboratively produced resources, or in email exchanges after one user has downloaded another's work)? If the repository is to be a focal point for the emerging SOTL community, then it could take advantage of rapidly developing social software tools to capture both process and product as the field develops.

Such an interactive structure would give users the flexibility to experiment and develop new ways to use the “repository” to develop their work in a collaborative and social context. Indeed, perhaps networking has now developed sufficient flexibility and nuance that a field with global reach could see significant development without much face-to-face communication at all.   

In our discussions about how to construct such a repository, we initially considered two main approaches:

• The “inch wide and mile deep” approach would focus on one topic, teaching issue, or teaching question and then archive and create material related to that topic. Such an approach would target a topic established to be of interest to some faculty, such as teaching effectively with learning groups or teaching circuit analysis to second-year electrical engineering students, and produce resources that would be transparently relevant to those faculty, including class tips to use in the near future, sources for further reading, and recommended directions for further research.
• The "mile wide and inch deep" approach would ask each campus to mine the SOTL work already being produced at that institution for artifacts particularly appropriate to the wider audience of a repository. This approach builds a broad foundation of primary documents first, with each institution in the Expanding the SOTL Commons group evaluating the contributions. The work would occur concurrently as we chose local exemplars, built indexing schemes, and solicited summaries of the current state of research on a wide variety of topics.

We saw considerable utility as well as some limitations in both of these approaches. For example, the inch-wide, mile-deep approach would cover more of the full scope of SOTL research, but the mile-wide, inch-deep approach might frustrate users who wanted to dig deeper into a particular topic. We were also concerned with feasibility and sustainability of both strategies.

We settled on a plan to pilot a third variation on these themes, one that might be called the “community-based approach,” in which each participating campus would select items for the repository that its constituencies decided were worth recommending through a process appropriate to their situation (see Figure 1).⁶  That is, each campus group would design a selection method appropriate to its setting and use that to choose artifacts of varying types, including such genres as research articles, personal narratives, bibliographies, classroom videos, subject digests, and electronic portfolios. Both inch-deep and mile-deep artifacts would be appropriate if a campus process deemed them so. The collective character of those artifacts would then contribute to a sense of “what matters” in SOTL that stands firmly on community-generated knowledge. The community-based approach would facilitate a repository such that:

• expertise and effort are distributed throughout the teaching commons;
• what “counts” as SOTL arises through a selection of the artifacts by expert participants in the field;
• work represented will be inclusive of the field’s diversity by the nature of the selection process while that process also manages the scope, volume, and quality of work;
• the repository’s contents will remain current because the participants involved in the selection process will change as the community changes; and
• the definitions and character of the work represented will emerge along a local-to-cosmopolitan trajectory.⁷

Such a process-oriented repository would reflect the diversity of the SOTL community and respect the ongoing debates about this scholarship. Furthermore, this approach would set in motion a grassroots, empirical process that is appropriate to the incipient stage of this scholarship, one that can continue to be informed by theoretical developments. It is a proposal worth testing.

Shaping the Field
What will prove most important about these discussions will not be the specifics about keywords, persistent URLs, or a particular database. More important is that thinking toward a repository has acted as a catalyst for discussions about how to intentionally develop SOTL as a field. Together we have envisioned a grassroots, distributed, and scalable process for choosing what matters to practitioners of SOTL while providing for the preservation, organization, and currency of the work in the future.

The collection of artifacts that transmit knowledge is an important tool in forming any community, especially a scholarly one based around ideas. As the community takes shape, the field will gain its own momentum, leading to institutional support for the work of individuals and groups. In fact, the repository's role in shaping of the field might be as important as (or even more important than) the particular theoretical and scholarly SOTL projects included within it. By intentionally cultivating such processes, we can allow for future developments in the scholarly conversation. That is, SOTL is not a conversation that can be sustained if it doesn't generate energy from the inside, changing as its community’s members, their priorities and their ideas change and develop.


Figure 1. J. M. Robinson and G. Rehrey, “Expanding the SOTL Commons: A Pilot Process for Deciding What Matters,” workshop presented at the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Conference, Edmonton, Alberta (October 2008). [return to text]

Notes
1. The group has presented its ideas, including: J. M. Robinson and G. Rehrey, “Expanding the SOTL Commons: A Pilot Process for Deciding What Matters.” (workshop, the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Conference, Edmonton, Alberta, October 2008); and G. Rehrey, J. M. Robinson, D. Bernstein, C. Bierwert, T. Carey, A. Cassidy, J. Cirillo, A. Goodburn, J. Liddell, S. McGowan, G. Poole, K. Roberts, P. Savory, and C. Shay. “Navigating from the Local to the Cosmopolitan: Expanding the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Commons.” (poster, the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Conference, Edmonton, Alberta, October 2008). [return to text]
2. Mary Taylor Huber and Pat Hutchings, The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005). [return to text]
3. See for example, William E. Becker, “An Unrealized Vision for SOTL,” The International Commons:  Newsletter of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 3, no. 1 (January 2008): 10-12. [return to text]
4. Toru Iiyoshi,“Advancing Technology-Enhanced Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: The Work of the Knowledge Media Laboratory in the Past Ten Years,” (presentation, International Symposium on the Future of Faculty Development in Japan: Building the Core in Faculty Development, Kyoto University, January 2009). [return to text]
5. The value of such digital archiving has been demonstrated by programs such as IU Scholarworks, an effort by the Indiana University Libraries to archive work from a wide range of disciplines. Julianne Bobay and Jennifer Laherty at the Indiana University Libraries met with the group to explain the possibilities of a digital repository and the potential for using IUScholarWorks, specifically. For more information, see http://scholarworks.iu.edu/. [return to text]
6. This approach was first articulated in a conversation between George Rehrey and myself. [return to text]
7. R. J. Bass, “Technology, Evaluation, and the Visibility of Teaching and Learning,” New Directions for Teaching and Learning 83 (2000): 35-50. [return to text]