Work in progress: From sage on the stage to guide on the side: Examining shifts in teaching practice through stories of open community participation

Many professors are reluctant to transform their teaching practices from "sage on the stage" to "guide on the side” for understandable reasons. Facilitating student work in a potentially unfamiliar setting has a steep learning curve and requires professors to relinquish control of their classrooms without assurance their career evaluations will benefit. However, professors who do transform their teaching practices continue to report exactly the same concerns - so how does the sage-to-guide shift occur? This work-in-progress paper describes early efforts in a grounded theory study whose initial participants are professors who have involved their classes in open software, hardware, and content communities, a choice which requires such a shift in teaching practices for successful student participation. Inspired by the radical transparency of the open communities our participants work with, the study itself is an open content project, creating a public compendium of teaching transformation stories that can be accessed by educators considering similar transformations to their own teaching practices.