In the field of the Arts openness concerning authorship and copyright of artworks is an ongoing discussion. A visual artist's artwork is her capital, it is the outcome of her practice as an artist. She has the copywriting on it and she gets the credit for authorship of the works. This is sometimes connected to money, mostly to honour or shame depending on how the works are received by the public.
In many resent artistic practices like participatory art or artist collectives practices the authorship of the works is blurring i.e. it cannot be easily traced to one person only as the creator of the work. There is often even no need for pointing out the author of the collaboration. Instead the outcome of the work might be for example a collaborative effort to find new ways how to learn together.
In a similar way I see the collaboration between the teachers at an university. Without the feedback of colleagues and of the students the teacher cannot improve the courses and course design. Openness in course design and circulating of course implementation material leads to feedback and augmented creativity on an institutional, national and international level.
A situation in which teachers learning from each other (and from students) will lead to improved self confidence of teachers. It also results into augmented contentment with the work the teachers do and decreases stress caused by not knowing where they stand within their teaching. Transparency and openness in teaching methods and sharing of teaching materials can help to improve standards of teaching quality because teachers feel supported by others and they are happier with what they are doing.
In an open and creative teaching and learning environment quality is assessed in a continuous challenging of our own standards and in having the courage to trying out new things. The possibility to fail and make mistakes is an important step in a quality assessment. We all are experts in what we are doing. The question is how can we augment our expertise. We become better experts by facing critique and learning from peer feedback.
Teaching in pairs or bigger groups of teachers is one concrete way to foster openness and peer learning among teachers and this results in a quality assessment on a daily base.