[Music]
[Anita Walz] Okay, good morning everyone, thank you for being here. We have a number of people
who are online, so if you wave to the camera over there
everyone will will be able to see you and say hello. We have a number of
panelists from different institutions in Virginia here today, and they're going to
talk a bit about their work on different sorts of open projects.
They have a really wide range of experiences both in writing,
teaching and learning, in pedagogy, and I'm really excited to to hear from each of them.
So I'm going to ask them just to really briefly introduce
themselves: name, title, institution, what's your discipline, and then I'll ask
them to give a little bit longer presentation each. Our goal here is
to just have a really great conversation about teaching and learning in the open
and to learn a lot from each other. So would you like to start?
If you have a quiet voice, this is for room amplification.
[James Harder] I'm thinking without but please let me know if you guys can't hear me. I'm James Harder, I'm with the
office of experiential learning here at Virginia Tech, and most recently I
actually ran the Beyond Boundaries initiative, so for those who are here at
Virginia Tech probably are pretty familiar, but that initiative was looking
at what does Higher Education need to be in a generation, so we're focused on the year 2047.
[Jennifer Kidd] Hello I can't hear it any oh now I do okay
Hi everyone, I'm Jennifer Kidd. I'm from Old Dominion University and I teach
future teachers. So today I'll be talking about a project that my students and I
do together when they create their own textbook.
[Matt DeCarlo] Hi everyone, I'm Matt DeCarlo.
I'm an assistant professor of Social Work at Radford University just down the road from here.
[Amy Nelson] Good morning, I'm Amy Nelson. I'm in the history department here.
[Sue Erickson] And I'm Sue Erickson. I'm library director at Virginia Wesleyan University in Virginia Beach.
[Anita Walz] So I'd like each of you to tell us a little
bit about your approach or your project, how did you get started and as well as
how you got started in your particular project. And maybe can we start with you?
[Sue Erickson] Sure okay so my project in the open is open learning 18 [interruption]
[Anita Walz] And actually I forgot someone. We have a panelist who is online. Kathryn would you
like to introduce yourself and your students? Yes yes we can hear you fine.
[Kathryn Murphy-Judy] Okay well I'm sorry about that we're still having really bad audio problems,
but anyway I'm Kathryn Murphy-Judy. I'm a professor of French and Global Media at
Virginia Commonwealth University, and two of the students who are working on our
project are here with me today [inaudible]
Great thank you so we'll have to go we'll just go down the table and then
Kathryn we'll have you at the end okay great thank you.
[Sue Erickson] So I'm Sue Erickson my project in the open is open learning 18 and this is a
connectivist mooc, so it's fully online. We have participants from all over the
country and really from around the globe and that started last year as open
learning 17 so that was run last spring and it was originally a project under a
AAC&U of faculty collaborative project so this is part this was part of their
leap initiative and so AAC&U found Gardner Campbell from VCU to
put together a steering committee and Amy has been on that as well so that's
how that got started I came into the project a little bit late when they
decided that it would be a good idea to get a librarian on board and actually
it's because of Virginia Tech interestingly enough that
I got involved because I came to the CIDER conference and instead of eating
lunch alone I found a friendly looking person to eat with
and that was Stephanie Blackman who is in the education department at the
College of William and Mary and we started talking about OER and we
found that we had a common interest in OER and so a year later a full
year later she dug out my email when they when the faculty collaborative
group decided it was time to bring a librarian on board and she got in touch
with me so that's how I got involved do I'm gonna leave it at leave it there
talk a little more what does your project do so our project is it's really
professional development in the open the first year we refer to it as faculty
development and then we realized that there were a lot of people who might not
consider themselves faculty who would be interested in this so we have librarians
we have instructional technologists we have a variety of people involved in
higher education and it's really a learn by doing environment so we are learning
about open learning by participating in open learning and so we have a website
that we refer to as the hub. It's openlearninghub.net and that is where all
of the activity is archived it's where activity gets syndicated so
we encourage people to set up blogs if they don't already have them and then
syndicate their blog to the hub so that their blog posts show up in the hub as
they are posted and then we also have a syndication for the hashtag open
learning a team from Twitter so that's always refreshing the page that way and
really getting people connected in the hub so the hub is really kind of the
site where it brings everything together we have all of the open learning
nineteen materials that are still there still available so people can
participate live they can participate while open learning is is active or you
can go back to it later and review things that way this year we set up a
YouTube account so now we have a place where we can archive all of the the live
events like this one and so that's been really helpful to
keep everything connected so we do a lot to support student agency so forgive
each week is on a different topic so for example this week we're looking at open
pedagogy and Amy is actually leading this week and so we have a number of
different live events that relate to that but then we also have readings and
very often we have a different facilitator for each week so each member
of the steering committee is leaving at least one week kind of being the
designer of the learning for that week and we will often give options for the
readings so that supports this idea that Anita referred to a student agency we
want the participants in the course to feel like they are making choices about
what they do the blogging really encourages openness and in a different
sense
this one yes okay okay how's that yes yes okay so we'll pass
the podium like so one of the things the blogging encourages is this I think of
it as a sense of vulnerability so I'm opening myself up to so I'm opening
myself up to other people and engaging with other people people might comment
on my blog and that's an important feature of this type of learning and
it's also a very get what you give so the more people participate the more
they're going to get out of it okay hi can you hear me is this good is this
working is this alright for not better tall alright
so hi I'm Amy Nelson and I came to open education and open learning through a
series of fortunate events that started with procrastinating about getting ready
for class and hoping for more meaningful interaction with my students and having
a sort of long deep frustration with what students actually left my class
with so I stumbled into a faculty development session that Gardner
Campbell ran so this is about five years ago and just that kind of one hour help
me shift the way I sort of thought about what I was doing in the classroom and
over the course of the next couple of years I moved everything more into the
open and started doing more and more collaboratively and really shifted away
from thinking about giving courses to helping students make courses so they
they make we make our core we make courses together and I want them to have
tangibles I don't like deliverables but tangible things that they take with them
into the when the course ends so usually some
kind of portfolio and I'm now involved in so much I don't really have one
project I've got a bunch of projects so you know I would say Micah the original
project was the sort of reimagining and reinvention of myself in the classroom
with my students who are primarily there to learn about Russian history that's
I'm a Soviet historian by training but then that also provided a pivot point to
teaching a graduate course on pedagogy for future faculty that's a
university-wide course that we get about 80 students a year all people who
imagine that they will be faculty down the road but have perhaps never taken a
course in what they're doing when they're teaching it's the kind of course
that I wish that I'd had back in the back in the 20th century and one of its
great strengths I think is that it brings people from all disciplines so we
have you know engineers the Natural Sciences the humanities the social
sciences just really everything everybody together you get a bunch of
really bright people at a together at a time in their life when they're really
thinking about who they're going to become in the relationships they develop
in that course along with the interaction both on Wednesday evenings
and asynchronously on the blogs during the week and then we also live on a
hashtag on Twitter which is Jedi vtg e di VT has allowed us to create this in a
very expansive multi-generational networks community so it's a course that
people take but then but they never leave right so they keep coming after
they after they finish the course they become Jedi Knights and then they come
back so this is a current a current Jedi Master who just just walked in so so the
classroom switch led to the pedagogy course which I moved that that course
was developed by Shelley Fowler who's now at VCC
you and I've really kept it much as she designed it but I've moved it out into
the open so it's it lives on an open website as as much as possible and then
as that was happening I also became the content and web developer for a really
large oh we are in Soviet history it's called 17 moments in Soviet history it
was it's a it was a no er before that was a thing so it was first developed
with neh support in 2002 and the idea was to put primary materials for Soviet
history multimedia materials online it was sort of imagined as a like a primary
source reader the kind that you used to ask students to buy but it would be more
interactive and more interesting because it was online and that was all very new
and you know remarkable at the time so I became part of the team for that when it
was a hacked and went offline very unexpectedly right before the semester
started and I should emphasize that this is a very popular oer so we have about a
half million users per year from all over the world and at the peak times of
the semester we have like 15,000 90 day users so people all over the world use
this thing for their courses and when it vanished right as classes were starting
and it became clear it was going to be offline for quite a while that caused a
fair amount of consternation so I helped reboot that as a wordpress install and
it's currently at MSU with matrix so that's one of definitely a big project
of mine and then the last one that I'll just mention but not really say much
about because sue did a wonderful job of introducing it is open learning 18 so
I'm the open pedagogy point person for open learning 18 which has been a really
wonderful experience right it's allowed me to meet new colleagues and I would
say if you're thinking about open learning and open education please think
about it more as being more than just something that you
do with your students like that you know it's really brought it's allowed me to
meet wonderful people not just at my school and not just in my field but all
all over the world olive all over the country and and it's enriched my kind of
professional life in ways that I you know are surprising and wonderful right
everyone I met so I'm gonna start by talking about how I got into teaching at
Virginia Commonwealth University where I got my PhD the sort of culture there was
really wonderful that they loved having students as
adjuncts because that transfer chief and students need money and but the nice
part about that is they essentially when I was given a course and I was given
undergraduate research no one really likes teaching undergraduate research
methods they said goat I know I do too actually no but they told me to go to
the people who had taught it before and the people who taught it before walked
me through this is my syllabus is my course calendar here's all my
powerpoints here's all my slideshows activities homework assignments use
whatever you want change whatever you want and good and if you have any
questions during the semester just let me know and I really see oh we are as a
way to sort of take that sort of model and scale it outward and I know that
that is not the case everywhere and that I have given that sort of opening and
rooms before and people have given me a really quizzical look but I I thought
that's how things worked because I hadn't been teaching for very long as my
second year at Radford and Jacquie DeLong who is part of the oh we are
librarians we're all trained under the Viva initiative came to our social work
department meeting one day and talked about oer and we looked at the open
textbook network like faculties sort of conclusions was a great idea there's no
social work textbooks we're very far behind the curve promote for most of you
guys we don't even have intro textbooks that exist in the open
book Network but I sort of took that as a call to action I didn't particularly
like the research methods textbook that I've had been using I've used a lot of
them and so I thought I could do better and part of the virginias sort of
initiative to get people to use oer is they had a small grant program where you
can review a textbook inside of the open textbook Network you have to write a
fairly exhaustive review of it and I really like the book that I chose and it
was a sociology textbook sociology and Social Work are kindred spirits a lot of
the time so I figured I could adapt that for Social Work which is what I did and
essentially just cut out the sociology stuff put in Social Work stuff so check
out stuff about you know fieldwork and things like that and put in stuff on
evidence-based practice things like that and so we I did that over last summer
and we piloted it in the fall semester of this year unfortunately we didn't
have enough people to do a good comparison for the spring so we will get
our full experimental data in the next fall but what we ended up finding was
that students are very concerned about textbook cost that should probably not
be any news to anybody that they found the textbook to be of really good
quality they also liked that their professor actually adopted it I think
one of the things they really enjoyed about the adoption process from the
end-user perspective was that there was no skip this part
there was no jump from chapter to chapter everything was integrated to the
poor to the way that I taught the class and they were not only grateful for the
effort that it takes to actually - all of that stuff but they really they
really liked that so that's essentially what I'm doing for the next little while
I am currently in revisions on that bachelor's level textbook based on some
of the feedback that we got from our pilot group and like I said we will get
our final experimental results for a bachelor's textbook I'll also be
adapting a version for master's level masters and bachelors level research
methods aren't that different so it shouldn't hopefully take that long and
it's sort of the overall goal with that project is to get to a place where I can
have one partner with an instructional
designer at Radford and we can create an online version of that that's a distance
education book and integrate that into a flipped classroom model for in-person
students and for a distance education model for non imperson students I'm also
trying to do some advocacy within the Social Work academia field I just came
from an awesome conference where it was really encouraged for faculty members to
share their materials so I go to Social Work education conferences part of the
app like they had attachments so like if you presented on an activity or
something they were all there which is wonderful but no one had given any
thought to the copyright licenses that were attached to it and he had that
stuff so it seems like a really nice end to say like I'm glad you're doing all of
this stuff but we can scale this out so much more and we can do it in a much
more deliberate kind of way so hopefully by you know in the next couple of years
or so when you present at Beckwith PPD or cswe which are completely nonsense
Akron isms to any of you guys but or submit to any of the Social Work
education journals you'll also be prompted to share your stuff via
Creative Commons
good morning everyone it's really nice to be here and as I must seem to my
colleagues on the panel I realized that for once what I'm doing actually kind of
fits in with what everyone everyone else is doing and that we're kindred spirits
here and people aren't gonna look at me with horror so as I mentioned in my
little Prelude I teach future teachers and together my students write their
course textbook and normally people do look at me with horror when I say that
you know why in the world would you have your students write the textbook do you
want it to be inaccurate and full of horrible grammar and you know probably
indecent or who knows what else right you know and so of course that's not my
aim but my aim is to democratize the creation of educational resources to
provide more agency for my students I see openness as not just openness in
terms of access but openness in terms of control who's making the decisions right
so normally you know faculty will select the textbook for students and how does
faculty select them they're they're sent out to different faculty to review them
students never participate in that reviewing of different textbooks my so
students don't have a voice in choosing their textbooks their textbooks dictate
you know what they need to learn and how they need to learn it so there's not a
lot of agency inherent in courses and so flipping this over and saying okay let's
have the students actually create the resources introduces student agency and
begins to disrupt some of those traditional power structures or it's
only faculty who are making the decisions about what students learn and
actually students don't even you know evaluate course textbooks either right
again that falls on faculty but who's the audience for a textbook it's not us
as faculty we're not the intended audience right it's students students
are the intended audience shouldn't they be involved in the evaluation of their
course text interesting question so real briefly
basically how we create the textbook is each one of my students writes what I
call a lesson since I'm teaching future teachers I call this a lesson but it
could be easily called an article or a chapter or a feature right so my
students each create a lesson out of topic and it's not like I'll just talk
about whatever you want there's a list of topics that they can choose from so
students are selecting a topic and then they do some research and it's a it's a
highly scaffolded project they do some research they get feedback from us they
write an essay they get feedback from us and their peers they write a lesson
draft they get feedback from their peers and from us as well then they have a
final lesson that they create and those are rated not by me but those are rated
by their classmates why because again their classmates are their intended
audience and so they're not writing a textbook for me they're writing a
textbook for the classmates so I think their content is wonderful but their
classmates fall asleep all right don't get past paragraph 1 guess whose opinion
is more important right their classmates because if the text doesn't work for
them it's not an effective text right so the students do the evaluation of these
lessons and then I basically take the top
hello about two thirds or so I kind of look at how the students ready to them
and then I pick up cut off that seems reasonable and anybody whose article was
rated at that cutoff or higher becomes an official lesson in our course
textbook and then students are tested on that material as part of their final
exam and I actually take some of the questions that they write that they
incorporate into their lessons and put those on the final exam so students can
at least get one question right oh I know the answer because I wrote that
question right yeah but you know people who ask me well you know again why you
know why go through this this is a lot more work than pulling a textbook off
the shelf and just reading it and absolutely it definitely
a lot more work but my students are learning technology skills they're
learning to give feedback they're learning to receive feedback I can teach
about copyright because we're creating a text I can teach about APA because they
have to cite their sources they're synthesizing material they're writing
for an authentic audience is it has real purpose this task it's not something
that they're just turning in for me you know so then the number of skills that I
can incorporate into this project are enormous and so I see that although this
is more work for me and my students the learning potential of this opportunity
is tremendous plus I like this power shift right that my students then have
some say in what they're talking about so I might give them the topic though if
you know let's say the topic is classroom discipline and that's what
they've signed up for but then they get to decide what within classroom
discipline am I going to focus on right so they're making more decisions
deciding what they're gonna learn and what their classmates will learn of
course the the criteria they have for making those decisions is what's
important for you as a pre-service teacher what's going to interest your
colleagues you know and if you've written a lesson and it's only
interesting to one other person in the class you know you've essentially failed
so they do have some criteria on which they have to use to make those decisions
about what goes into their text so I probably use my five minutes right so
I'll stop there and pass away
good morning everybody I guess I have a bit of a different arc than the rest of
the panelists here my formal introduction to oer was actually when
anita reached out to me to be on the panel i am not someone who's
participated in this at least not from an explicit orientation beforehand she
wanted to have someone who represented experience to learning on the panel I
think that's a really useful way of going about it
but I I really want to thank her for doing so because I think I've gotten a
lot out of it and our office is already being very conscious about the ways that
we integrate open educational resources into what we do and really what most of
that comes from is from the pedagogy side of things
our office is a catalyst for experiential learning we don't actually
do any of the programming that happens across campus were actually something
that provides resources to the students into the faculty that participated
that's in the experiential learning and I think that's really a great
opportunity for us to provide open resources for them and what we're doing
in our office is trying to create high-impact practice experience for
learning and so a lot of the things we're adding are things like reflection
adding mentorship having ways for students to catalog their experiences
and have some sort of a formal output and what we've been doing as an office
as actually having those be in a public space that is something that we think
there's an incredible opportunity for students to learn from each other's work
to comment on each other's work and we've been partnering with the library
to build that into the e-portfolio system that the university is working on
and I think there's a real opportunity there and then from the pedagogy side
we've been working with faculty across campus to look at how do we make some of
the reflection modules and some of the other students experience things that
they might have alongside their experience of learning fits a broad type
of class or type of experience so that everyone can have a similar core of
questions where similar reflections that they can work from but
that still allow professors to tailor those experiences exactly to the
experience that they have going forward so it's a way to build the university
community around a common set of a couple of things that everyone comes to
but it gives the faculty themselves the license to change that content or to
work it around what their class might actually be using and I think that again
is going to be working with the portfolium system here with the library
to find a way to have that resource be available for everyone to edit and
change to the what they want to do with their own class and then again thinking
a lot about that happen what you know our office plays a role with oh we are
and how the two kind of work together I think there's tremendous potential for
us to catalog the experiences that students are doing so we're working with
the library to archive what students are having in their outputs and I think we
have a lot of potential to think about how do we let students edit those types
of things how do we let students comment on them how might we actually grow those
experiences so that others can kind of be a part of the culture of experience
you're learning and that's something that we're working through as we're kind
of flying I guess you might say so this is a new office and we have a lot of
different things kind of going but it's a it's exciting to be here and thank you
guys for having me a part of the film so Katherine can you hear microphone
Katherine why don't you go ahead and tell us a little bit about your project
can you hear me Katherine
okay Catherine if your is from Mike on yes okay Catherine if you are there can
you tell us a little bit about your project as well as the students that are
with you and some of their experiences with this we'll wait just a second
okay so I think that we have lost Katherine unless you can hear her I
cannot hear her she's blinking so it suggests that she might be talking but
we just can't
well
sorry can you try again
here's now yes yes yes thank you I'm so glad please go ahead
Oh we'd love to hear from all three of you okay yes I also heard Shelley
Fowler's name so the here at BCU came out of a problem and the problem is in
foreign language departments that we have everybody has agreed that our 202
which is the second course the last course in the secondary curriculum will
be worse course to teach and learn in so we try to look at reasons why this
course is just such a bug of air and the more we talked about it the more we
realized that it had a lot to do with student motivation and with just general
interests and materials so as we were brains
and see how to fix this very critical course in the curriculum if the students
are disinterested in 202 they don't continue if they're disinterested in 202
they don't really retain the things that they've learned up till that point so we
decided that we would try to do something that was much more student
engaging and so became and also using the idea that our students need digital
communication competencies for the 21st century so we came up with an idea of
having the students curate the kinds of materials that they're actually
interested in the total of will be covered of a variety of themes be about
traveling in the different language countries it can be about foods it can
be about environmental issues so we decided to ask the students to curate to
go out to find what they're interested in and at the time Gardner Campbell was
helping us here at VCU create brand pages which is they ordered press
platform that allows to have a portfolios but also all kinds of
different connected learning programs so we built a platform for curations for
each one of the classes that wanted to participate in this and once we started
here rating we had the idea that well this is great students who are bringing
in what they're really interested in but they need scaffolding in order to help
them be able to work through the materials that they have designated as
being interesting so we started a second part of the project which is the modules
part where together the top level students we create scaffolded modules of
the top rated curations that students have done each year and then we're
building those into only our curriculum this past year we also included having
tella tandem which is where our students in at VCU connect with students in
target countries and discuss issues and topics of mutual interest and concern so
now our students are discussing their curations with students in our native
speakers about what they think of the different sights and sounds that our
students have curated and have much deeper polar discussions and
with the themes the vocabulary and the language skills that are needed to
discuss those so at any rate that is the project that we're working on I think
the two factors are truly student-centered program because the
themes come from the students the actual materials come from the students and
then the creation of the modules comes from students as well and then we're
offering them learning materials that they can afford because they don't have
to pay for them at all and I'm going to stop there because as we go further down
this panel discussion I think what we really want to hear from are the
students who are here with me so I'm going to be quiet yes and then wait for
you to listen to them in the next set of questions that sounds great actually
let's start with your students with with Carrie and I'm sorry everyone danya
Savannah we would love to hear from you regarding what your role has been in the
project and how you got comfortable working in the open or or maybe you're
still not comfortable working in the open but what has it been like for you
my experience with the project was when I was in Russian so it's do pockets this
level forever are subjects of Vernon to teach and so why person Prince was doing
this curation projects and I was basically to go into attorney language
in try to find offensive materials and so either just God and it started to
opening up to looking at English way and going through that into
developing these problems and brightwork building resources
really I wouldn't am quite comfortable yet but so getting there and it's
definitely experience but learning language differently and popping those
skills that I need
so for them in the future really because I would love feelings
about certain feature not learning elaborate chips from 21
and a lot more technologically competent
thank you so I'd like to open this up to both the audience as well as the panel
for questions of each other and for each other so we have some handheld
microphones that I will distribute around the room and this is your
learning experience but I'm sure you have questions for the panelists about
some of the themes that you you hear emerging about teaching beyond your
discipline about content about student engagement and motivation so please
raise your hand if you want the if you want to raise it if you want to ask the
question of the other panelists or if you'd like to ask a question from the
audience
I guess I was just wondering if you could speak a little bit to how things
are looking at addressing accessibility with your students and creation of these
open educational resources if that's a topic of conversation or any challenges
or tips or tricks you might want to share regarding consideration of
accessibility sure
thank you for that is this good thank you for that question
so I've been struggling with this a lot especially recently so one of my
motivations for doing what I do is to make was to make things more accessible
in all kinds of meanings of the word accessible but I've realized belatedly
and I hope not too late to fix it that really making the tools that I use web
accessible for is for users with any kind of disability is is really a time
consuming challenge you know so I'm really committed to doing it and I think
going forward I'm sort of building that in so it won't be you know I'm I don't
want to say it's time consuming so I'm not going to not going to do it but one
of the things I need to sort of asked us to think about when we were getting
ready for the panel was what kinds of challenges we've faced with doing this
work and I would say so you know what a big you know for me the two big
challenges are time and support right so like I I would need I need to clone
myself two or three times which I would happily do because I love the extra
engagement and interaction that I get with the students and I think that's
that's the point but there is a finite amount of time in the day and the
accessibility piece you know is is a part of that right so you know if that
website is gonna be accessible I'm the one who has to go in and do all that
tagging and I have to make sure my students do that as well and I want them
to do that it's very useful for them to learn you know it's it's good like we're
just kind of folding that in along with citation practices and but the licensing
and all of that so it does get folded in with all of that but it's like you know
we're like there's old it's because it's becoming a lot so so thank you because
that this has been much on my mind
man that that's exactly the thing I was about to ask for so that's really great
to hear I know that from our small little pilot project we found students
who when reading the traditional textbook textbooks are often not printed
in like 10-point font and it's they're not particularly attractive to look at
so we had students who complained who had vision issues so I really see
adapting oer this is a basic response as a way to make those materials more
accessible via touched text-to-speech the being able to actually increase the
size of textbook which if you browse like the rebus text books is super easy
this is a different kind of accessibility but one of the things we
did in the open access week this time in open learning 18 was we used a couple of
articles that were not originally written in English and Google
translations made those accessible to us so articles that I could not normally
read and understand were perfectly understandable it was pretty amazing the
level of translation that was involved there so this I think makes an
experience like open learning more globally open so if we're posting in
articles in English non-native speakers of English want to read those they can
use google translations as well so I think that's probably a good example of
a different kind of accessibility that's a great question so we're talking a lot
about content I would like us to talk a little bit about process because
teaching is a process and I'm wondering what kinds of challenges the panelists
have encountered related to being more open encouraging their students to
participate in learning experiences that are maybe more public or more
transparent what kinds of of challenges have you encountered and this doesn't
have to be online it can be service learning there's that there's a broad
continuum so I don't want to exclude you at all
so challenges
I'm surreal constantly uh so I'll say that I I would double down on the time
thing I my students don't present challenges to me at all I think I've
faced a lot of challenges I faced and there's an ongoing challenge to leverage
and amplify the good work that they're doing in ways that are really meaningful
and durable to them in the long haul right so you know the one thing that
would make most of what the work that I do with them you know really resonant
and and easy for them to carry forward into the world would be something like
domain of one's own right but it just doesn't seem what we just haven't been
able to kind of pull that pull that off here so you know it's funny like you can
use anything as a teaching tool right so I talked about what domain of one's own
is and then I explained why we do what we do and I give them choices right we
do have various options for setting up a website and and and all of that and I
sort of walk them through that and give and give them choices so it's not it's
not an insurmountable thing but you know I would say like given how
time-intensive open pedagogy czar and teaching in the
open is I mean I think there is this sort of fallacy around the idea that oh
whoa this is kind of online learning then you're you know you're just kind of
freely multiplying yourself and it doesn't really matter right like no it's
actually a ton of work so it would just be great to see more institutional
support for what the students then can take forward with them when they're when
they're done
I think part of my answer kind of comes back to the question of access but again
a different dimension of Aspen access but it it's where do you find the
appropriate space for where a student is learning and putting themselves out
there and it actually needs to have that closed experience of I'm reflecting on
something I don't necessarily want anyone else to see and I think that's
really been a difficult thing for us to get the right calibration on and I think
it's probably experience to experiences how that shifts but I think pushing
students to continue to try to be in an open space especially when you close it
into a classroom setting has tremendous potential and I think it's really
important for students to think a lot about how they go about presenting
themselves online because in many cases that can be something that kind of lives
on in perpetuity and we want to always be thoughtful about the way that
students might do that I think the other thing I was going to say is in working
with students and faculty of trying to create these open modules that they can
find to into their owns specificity is finding the right part of how many of
the modules do we really want to be a common thing for every class so that
there's a rich data set of looking at cross experiences and but also allowing
that tailoring process I think it's always very difficult on things like
access and the way that you designed these things to find the appropriate as
I've said earlier calibration of what you should allow and we're still working
through that issue
one thing that I've noticed about undergraduate students in particular is
they don't buy into the idea of writing as a process where you do a draft you
get some feedback and revise your draft it get some more feedback and revise it
again it do it once the day before it's due or the night or an hour before it's
due right and then you are done and you get some feedback for teacher oh that's
nice right and that's it and so doing something where you know you're creating
a book that you want to read by others you want it to be a you know decent
quality and that involves revision so what I've struggled with in terms of
process is how do you scaffold a project so that you know students you can build
that revision process in there knowing that students won't actually just go
back and revise the same assignment multiple different times so what I've
figured out is that the only way to do this is to make everything a different
assignment right so we've got to do your research assignment then you're going to
do your essay assignment then you've got to do a draft assignment then you've got
to do it final assignment so everything is a different assignment so what
becomes a challenge then is when my students look at the due dates and the
list of assignments there's like 50 things on that so they're overwhelmed
they're very scared when they see you know the syllabus and you know why do
you have 10,000 assignments in your course how am I ever going to get that
done and so I have to keep telling them over and over it's because everything is
broken down and scaffolded and as a teacher you're going to be doing this
for your students as well but that's still there's still a difficult balance
to achieve there between you know adequately scaffolding assignment and
not the overwhelming students so I would say
that's a significant challenge for at least for me yes please please okay the
process has been very difficult in traditional language courses the faculty
spend a lot of time working on skill development increasing the lexical
vocabulary work working on specifics of parameters doing filling them light sort
of things not work I mean we mentioned that we want to get to the communicative
part but a lot is spent in just this filament bank of very broad kind of
learning the actual language acquisition takes place when there is that
confrontation and the creating of snapple connections and so on and it's
hard work and this project is asking the students in 202 who are going out and
finding what they're interested in having
really grapple with it but not per se being not working with a
fill-in-the-blank situation last semester I got a great deal of pushback
from my students because I took the skilled parts the vocabulary acquisition
and the grammar work and I put that over just as homework and told them that they
needed to have worked on these things in order to then talk about their curations
to be able to work with their curations and begin them to say that was a great
deal of feet of pushback from that and maybe Carrie we were just going up in
Russian we have to go the Russian Google who are you to find materials would
start looking at things not just like maybe people trying to learn the
depression there are English speakers but made by people in Russia like people
are speakers it was a completely different
experience and I like I have trouble trying to really grapple with it what
exactly that meant and what exactly you should look important how to find it so
I didn't make it definitely organic some students are going to struggle with it
and have some pushback but in the end it really became a very valuable experience
having to try to navigate that online starts with her offensive material and
so it is it's a process of learning how to do it and learning how to be somewhat
more self-sufficient learners and one of the practical skills great for language
learning just kind of like the first like page on spending of Grandin behind
website so really the key is like finding these resources that are
interesting for students but it is difficult when you're sorting through
maybe like 50 sites but only five are like really valuable I think that's the
biggest challenge is like really encouraging students love it find
sources that are both educational and fun
so as as I'm listening to everybody I think at least just in self-reflection
it seems like the projects that I've been working on are maybe even a little
bit step a step behind what you guys are doing which is really trying to address
the power imbalances inside of the classroom and to have more collaborative
approaches towards building teaching methods within the classrooms themselves
I don't mean that to self deprecated but like just as a forward so I mean in
social work we are a very tightly regulated educational discipline so we
have specific educational practices and standards that we need to follow I think
there are 15 of them and they all need to be course aligned with every single
part of the course content so every single assignment that you do that as
part of your assessment needs to have these things attached to them all of the
books that you use need to speak this language so I think and just as because
this is probably my first exposure to really this level of openness inside of
the classroom is how do you guys deal with that stuff so I just wanted to
follow up briefly based on what you just said in what James said earlier so I
think for working in the open we make a mistake when we think it's an
all-or-nothing kind of deal right so I think it's a challenge but it's also an
opportunity to raise awareness around what's open and what's not and why right
you know that there are there are reasons to have a discussion that really
only stays in the classroom or is only on the on the on the bulletin board
there are fields that have very strict accreditation standards where you are
gonna have to lock certain things down and and do it in us in a in a really
sequenced way in my in my class even though we teach even though it's all out
in the open one of the databases that we use is a proprietary database that the
library buys it's really important it's essential for them to use if they're
going to get primary news accounts from Soviet period if they don't if they
don't read Russian and you know Google Translate is ok but it's not you know
it's not perfect it's it's a long way from perfect or you know or fabulous as
a translation mechanism so they use that database but they learn how to cite that
database and we talk about the difference like what is this database
what are these articles in that database why do you have access to it why is it
worth you know spending money for what are you paying for when you're getting
access to this database and how are we using that in tandem with these other
openly accessible high-value sources right so problematizing the idea that
things that are open and free are not as good as the stuff that's behind the
paywall right and instead thinking about how you identify high-value material and
then thinking also about real life right real life isn't free real life is an
open access right so in real life we look for open access opportunities to
leverage things that we share in common because we think that'll make the world
a better place we think education is a public good
so let's lean in on that piece but then also think about these other places
where yes you're going to have if you're going to have a difficult conversation
in your class you're probably not going to do that on Twitter right you're gonna
have that in class and everybody's kind of kind of powered down from power down
for a while okay
took the microphone yeah all right so hey man
how do you bring along students who are less motivated who's organized not
bought into these Oh pedagogical principles
yeah I was just gonna ask it you know going backpacking and
I'm just back from the students and related to that you know some of the
learning that encourages engagement is really great for students who are
already bought into engagement and I'm just wondering if you get pushback about
what our isn't that your job to build the course you know I mean I just I
would see that as a fertile with
so those are related somebody wanna
James do you want to not someone else of course I can talk a little bit so I
teach a graduate course in a Sussman and some of the things that we talk about
our student motivation so some of the theory behind motivation is that there's
factors that drive intrinsic motivation so intrinsic you know comes from the
inside and some of those things are autonomy right so allow the students to
make choices another one is relatedness like are you
connected to your community trying to remember interest really administers to
the one of us yes and competence right competence or mastering and so I try to
think about those things as I'm working with my students no I do give them
choice right so I try to provide that autonomy and hopefully that's helping to
drive their motivation you know we have lots of feedback that's given to them so
that's helping to drive up the competence you know if they're feeling
more successful they're more likely to be motivated or in a community we're
doing this together you know people can they can actually
have a digital badge system and they can nominate each other for digital badges
so there you're helping to see to create products that are valued by each other
all right so that helps to drive up this component of relatedness so I try to
think about my teaching in terms of you know how do I think you know how do I
tap into those natural motivators for students so that it's not the extrinsic
you do it or you know more about you know how do we how do we get them to
want to do it which it's not always easy and absolutely they're still pushed back
and you'll see if you come in the afternoon I have one example you know
something you didn't do the best job there's uneven quality in the work that
my students produce and I anticipate that right
I think it's great that you stopped on uneven quality and and I think you kind
of have to celebrate that or at least be very comfortable with how students are
going to approach what they actually put forward in a very but you'll see a full
spectrum of what's available and the experiential learning really kept
started with John Dewey and it was this like how do I learn to think how do I
learn to like build processes and how I experience something and learn to like
reflect on it consciously learn from what I've just experienced and how does
that integrate it to my like Pryor worldview and I think students and
really I probably all of us aren't quite there I'm doing that every single time
but I think as you just look at what students have a lot of license to maybe
not be good at that for at first and I think some of those early reflection
models really might not be that good but I think if you're doing something that
catalogs if you're doing something that goes with the student there's a real
opportunity to show their progress and how that can continue to grow because I
know I'm not perfect at doing those types of things but I think this you
know I wake up tomorrow and try to do it better I guess one of the things I think
we're talking about this universe learning we have to realize and I know
we do there are many different kinds of learners and different types of learners
need different structures and different amounts of scaffolding and different
amounts of constraints actually and so I know I'm working with our students on
the curation project there are students who just jump into it and and are
immediately be trying lots of different things those are my risk takers there
they're absolutely wonderful but I have a whole gamut of students and there are
some who who really need me to give them closer confines and so I differentiate
with them by asking them to come in and work with me so that I can give them
closer parameters that make them feel more comfortable in they're going out
and seeking other resources so I guess I would just bring
in the fact that differentiation across the gamut of order another really
important part for us to build into our I think what stands out to me from this
is just where we are now I think that's probably an important thing to
acknowledge so again I teach research methods students don't want to be there
so getting them to do anything is already a challenge a lot of them don't
buy the textbook unless there are quizzes to do it they're not going to do
the reading unless they absolutely have to the students are trying to maximize
the time that is not spent doing the things for my class and that's totally
normal because those things are way more fun there's only so much I can sort of
brush up against the fun part of that I think for the students inside of my
classroom really since I'm not doing a more open pedagogy let's all create this
thing together what they see is free and what I expected to find inside of our
study was that free would lead to more engagement we believe to higher
satisfaction what I do I never really find that surprisingly the people who
are using a traditional textbook found the course to be ok and people who are
finding the using the open textbook also found the course to be ok so what
happened so I'd say the two things that helped me get past students I wouldn't
say it's pushed back but scepticism are number one asking them to take a leap of
faith with you saying ok I know this is new I know this is different I know you
think you don't like this but just give it a try and once they find out that
they're that they're writing for each other and that they're talking to each
other and that they're interacting with each other that I'm not their primary
audience generally the level of investment and engagement just kind of
goes way up right I think many faculty labor under the mistaken assumption that
students care what we think and honestly you know they do care what
grade they get but you know if you if you've ever provided detailed feedback
on reflection papers or term papers or whatever and then it had that sink
feeling that no one really read what you wrote the way around that is to push
that at push those conversations out into the open have some skin in the game
have those conversations with your students let your students know that you
care what they what they write right so my students post and they comment on
what each other do and then and I also comment I don't make them do something
that I'm not I'm not doing myself and I say you know look I know you might this
might not sound like a fun thing to do on Sunday night after you're hungover
from the football game but if you do this it gives me a chance to read and
respond to you and and for me to be part of a conversation you're having with
your with your classmates we can't do that you know 40 people all together
from 11:00 to 12:15 on Tuesday and Thursday like it's just it's just not
going to work so I found that to be really that goes a long way so far open
learning 18 it's a little different because we're talking about adult
learners in a voluntary learning environment so it's really intrinsic
there's no and highly variable and I know I know Steve you're not getting
credit for Oakland learning so a lot of it comes down to time management and
prioritization and so my one of my last blog posts for open learning 17 and in
open learning 17 I was really more of a student I was on the steering committee
but I had no idea what I was doing no idea never been on Twitter never blogged
I was deer in the headlights and so I I decided to do what I'm now
calling learning outloud I made that up this morning a new lol learning outloud
and so I was learning outloud through my blog post saying oh my gosh here's what
I'm going through it is crazy I don't know what I'm doing I'm participating in
this Twitter chat it's totally chaotic but I got through it and I figure
how to do it better the next time and so when we decided this time for open
learning 18 we decided to add a week that we call the pre milk week because
we recognize that there are a lot of people like me like I had been in an
open learning 17 who were totally honest uninitiated to the land of connected
learning and it is definitely a different way of working and so we when
we were asked to contribute things for that pre MOOC week one of the things
that I contributed was this crazy blog post that I had written about how crazy
my life was in open learning 8:17 and tried to be really honest about the
discomfort the confusion and also the really exciting things that happened
when I started to understand how it worked and how I could get more out of
it and so I guess motivation by I don't know if it's fear oh you're gonna be
really uncomfortable in this experience but you're gonna get so much out of it
so one comment from the audience that that was a comment that it wouldn't
students gave that they got a lot out of it so but there is this lovely guide
again for the guide to making open textbooks with students which I think
they did open learning it so on open learning 18 this was the assignment from
yet for yet yesterday's assignment was hypothesis annotation of Chapter one of
that wonderful resource okay so I have one final question and it is if you were
giving advice to someone about how they could be a little bit how they could dip
their toes in the water what are some steps that that someone could take maybe
they're not an instructors not ready to take a they want to take a little bit of
an open step what would you suggest that they do
I have one ready yeah I'm gonna say I'm so so another project I've done with my
students is on a wordpress site and I know we've got some big WordPress users
out here but I had my students share a story of their identity development so a
story for middle school or high school and the beauty about this is course
content of the students were very motivated to read each other's stories
you know they they could use a pseudonym so their story could be theythey protect
their identity and that students just went in and commented on each other's
stories but this was I think in a really amazing learning opportunity for my
students it wasn't you know they didn't have to create any sophisticated content
that was highly technical they didn't have to curate other stories it was just
their own story but they but they again teaching about diversity and recognizing
other people's opinions and one of the stories that came out that I was
surprised by was one girl wrote about being a cheerleader and you would think
oh come out like that's though you know least diverse person we've got to worry
about you know everybody loves a cheerleader but she talked about you
know students thinking that she was promiscuous students thinking that she
was stupid you know teachers even having those opinions as well and so I think
for a lot of us know who maybe weren't that student in high school it really
gave us insight into you know her her you know her experience in the pain that
she's that she felt from people you know judging her and of course there were
other ones from different groups as well but it was an easy assignment where you
know you can start you just you're creating some kind of a blog having
students write a narrative they don't need to do a lot of research for that
and then sharing and commenting on each other I also really like we tagged it
because it was a blog and that allowed me to send her narratives from under
sort from typically marginalized populations as well so it allowed me to
kind of reshift whose stories got to be the center of the conversation and
students had to comment on people who were similar to them and also people who
were different than them so it was a fairly easy class assignment not that
high stakes but you're still been beginning to get into this mode of
student generated resources that other people can benefit
share your stuff is the easiest way to do that sorry I just came like I just
mentioned that just came from a bunch of social work conferences so you already
have things to share how many times like I was just at this conference how many
times we reinvented the wheel how many people have written a research how to
write a research proposal prompt that's ridiculous why do we do that if
you have stuff please share it on the way or comments or on Merlot put it up
on your university or apposite or e and share that link with other people it's
crazy to me that we don't you have to I know a lot of you are preaching the
choir here but yeah so for faculty I would say humanities come if you're in
humanities humanities Commons is a great place and on the instructional side do
one thing don't don't feel like you have to reinvent yourself overnight right
make one shift you know if you're afraid of WordPress don't want to do it online
do an analogue Twitter exercise with your students in class you know where
they collaborate with each other they're listening to each other they come even
if you're just going to use post-it notes right but the experience will
probably inspire you to think of ways you can build on that
because students are already living in this open social media world and its
main HEC really great ways interesting ways engaging ways that they would like
to intersect with the materials and with their colleagues and learning in general
I think really what I would say is that as we worked it to scaffold out
experiencial learning here at the university the student voice has been
the one that I've been most astounded by and I think really bring that up to the
top has been what happened was surprised by is how thoughtful they are and how
much that voice really resonates with the things that we're trying to do and I
think we do a lot of administrative fathoming of what students might want
and I think this is open the resources a true opportunity to really get a lot of
that voice built into what you're trying to do we are at time we are not at the
end of our time and I want to thank all of our panelists for being here and
thank you especially to those who drove many hours to come here and we'll be
back at 10 after one for the keynotes we hope to see you again
and thank you so much