Member Spotlight: Jeremy Larance
A West Liberty University English professor wants to help educators discover the power to revise and remix course materials for their students.
Jeremy Larance teaches British literature, composition, comics studies, and sports literature at West Liberty University. This adventurous combination makes perfect sense once you know that he wrote his dissertation on the literature of cricket and how it depicts England’s gentleman, and has spent recent years studying how American superheroes shape our ideas about masculinity and heroism. Both caped crusaders and white-flanneled batsmen are cultural mythology in motion.
Jeremy’s guiding principle comes from Samuel Beckett: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." It's a philosophy that applies well to open education, a practice requiring innovation and a willingness to experiment and iterate.
What troubles Jeremy is the persistence of a fundamental knowledge gap: for many faculty, there are still big unknowns about what 'open education' means and what you can do with it, he says. His hope for the field is straightforward: deeper faculty education that gives educators the support, language, and frameworks to see open education as a shift in power and possibility.
Luckily, Jeremy actually quite enjoys the nuances of copyright law. “I love finding ways to help faculty see how their teaching can improve by better understanding the rights they already have as educators and creators,” he says. The flexibility to share and adapt materials “are too often obscured by fear, misinformation about copyrights, or institutional habit rather than by the law itself.”
To benefit from the principle of “failing better,” we first need to understand how much we’re free to try.
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