Given that the past year has drawn attention to problems of ableism inherent in proctoring technologies, it is striking that earlier conversations framed these tools as a flexible solution enabling open, online education to achieve its potential. As MOOCs became popularized, so too did remote proctoring, as it offered a way to authenticate student assessments from a distance (Verstelle & Sussenbach, 2015; Hilton et al., 2014; May, 2015).

The uptake in remote proctoring in light of COVID-19 has, of course, seen remote proctoring sufficiently distanced from open educational practices (OEP). Champions of OEP have condemned educational use of surveillance technologies, pointing to the harm that they cause students with their racist algorithms, their disregard for privacy, and the technological inequities that they perpetuate (Against Surveillance, 2020). These conversations do what earlier conversations did not: they recognize Open as more than “access.” They recognize that for Open to mean flexible or equal, “we need politics, not simply technology solutions. We need an ethics of care, of justice…” (Waters, 2014).

An advocate of OEP myself, I was in a non-negotiable position this past year in which I was required to deliver training on a remote proctoring tool to hundreds of faculty members. The experience has since informed my approach to education and advocacy around Open. It challenged me to think critically about the barriers that exist around incorporating OER and OEP into one’s teaching practice—especially labour and misunderstanding—so that I could present these same issues and barriers with other (surveillant) tools and practices.

There has been a lot of discourse this past year on alternative assessments, like open pedagogy, that could be used in place of surveillance technology. There has been less discourse about how to inspire a shift to OEP – and the “ethics of care” that ought to come with it—when one initially believes surveillant practices to be good or necessary. This session will address the gap, pairing research and my own experience training faculty on proctoring tools to share strategies for inspiring faculty to move from surveillant to open practices.