Near the end of May I worked with Jon Festinger and Will Engle to do a 1.5 hour workshop on how using and creating Open Educational Resources (OER) can have pedagogical value in courses (beyond saving students money, which is also important). You can see the basic abstract for the session in the wiki page embedded below.
Click here to see our slides for the workshop, on Google Slides (or see below).
We also created a wiki page for the event, which has numerous link to resources. We also tried to get small groups to post answers to discussion questions on the wiki, but as the event was held in the late afternoon, a bunch of people left when it was time to do the small group activity (I guess many instructors, like many students, think the “real action” is in the presentation rather than the group discussion!).
The wiki page for the workshop is embedded below.
About this session
"Increasing Student Engagement through Open Educational Resources" is a workshop held during the CTLT Institute in May 2015.
Abstract
Open educational resources are educational materials (text, video, audio, and more) that are licensed to allow others to reuse, revise, remix, redistribute, and retain them free of cost. There are numerous pedagogical benefits to both using OER and creating OER in courses; this workshop will focus on a few of them, including the following.
Asking students to create OER in courses means, in part, asking them to create things that are available to and of use by other students in the course (both past, present and future) and by people beyond the course. Assignments that are read only by an instructor and/or teaching assistant can seem to be what David Wiley calls in a blog post “disposable”: “assignments that add no value to the world – after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away” (Resource here). If, instead, student work is adding value to the world, contributing to a larger body of knowledge that can be used by others, it is much more likely that they will be engaged in working on it and try to make it as good as possible. Examples of such assignments could be student blog posts, student-created web pages or wiki pages, videos, and more that others can see/hear/interact with and learn from. Another example that will be discussed in the session is having students edit an open textbook and share their edits openly.
Using OER in courses means asking students to read/watch/listen to/interact with educational materials for the course that are publicly available and licensed for reuse and (often) revision. Finding and assigning OER can allow for presentation of material in different ways: e.g., a textual resource can be augmented through finding and using a diagram, an image, a video, another text that explains things differently, etc. This can help both engage students and improve their understanding of course material. Further, if the OER are licensed to allow revision, students can edit them or mix them with other resources to create something new, both helping their own leaning and contributing OER for others to learn from.
In this session we will all discuss together the various kinds of open educational resources, including open textbooks, how to find OER for your courses, and several of the pedagogical benefits of creating and using OER.
Facilitators
Will Engle is a strategist for open education resources at UBC's Center for Teaching, Learning & Technology. He engaged with projects that are leveraging emerging technologies, approaches, and pedagogies to support open learning. With a background in library science, Will is interested in understanding and supporting the removal of barriers that limit access to education, information, and knowledge.
Jon Festinger, Q.C. (LL.B., B.C.L. 1980 McGill University) is a Vancouver, British Columbia based counsel and educator. He is an SFU Professor of Professional Practice and a faculty member of the Centre for Digital Media. Jon has taught media, entertainment and communications law topics at the UBC Faculty of Law for over two decades, as well as teaching at various times at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism, the Thompson Rivers University Faculty of Law and the University of Victoria Faculty of Law. He is the author of the first edition of “Video Game Law” published by LexisNexis in 2005, co-author of the 2nd Edition published in 2012. The open and on-line components of his courses can be found here & here. Jon was named a member of Creative Commons’ “Team Open” in 2014.
Christina Hendricks is a Sr. Instructor in Philosophy at UBC, and she also regularly teaches in the Arts One program. She has been a proponent of open education for several years, having participated in and few open online courses and been part of the design and facilitation team for others, including one with Peer 2 Peer University called Why Open?, and a course on Teaching with WordPress. She uses as many open educational resources in her teaching as she can, and posts many of her teaching materials as open educational resources herself.
Agenda and session outcomes
Agenda
- Introductions--to us, to you
- Defining openness and open educational resources (OER) in groups
- Discussion of openness and OER
- Presentation on pedagogical benefits of OER and open courses
- Groups: take a "traditional" assignment and discuss how you might use what we've talked about today to transform it (and why)
- Conclusion
Session outcomes
By the end of the session, you should be able to:
- Give a definition of “open” and/or open educational resources
- Explain at least two pedagogical benefits to using and/or creating OER in teaching & learning
- Explain one or more courses/projects at UBC using/creating OER
- Say how you might adapt an activity or assignment to make it more "open," and why this would be pedagogically a good thing to do
Group activities
Click on your group number to go to the page where you can type in your answers to the questions in the group activities during the session.
To see all the groups' notes from the activities, click here: http://wiki.ubc.ca/Sandbox:Student_Engagement_Through_OER/Group_Resource
You can also see how the group wiki pages look when embedded into a WordPress site, here: http://willdev.sites.olt.ubc.ca/
Resources, links from the session or relevant to the session
Slides from the session
The slides used during the session can be found here (on Google Slides).
Examples of open courses or OER
A list of some examples can be found on the open.ubc.ca website, here: http://open.ubc.ca/learning/
Please add other examples that you know of, below!
At UBC
- Arts One Open at UBC
- Video Game Law at UBC
- Math Exam/Education Resources on the UBC Wiki
- Judy Chan's Food Nutrition and Health course site on the UBC Wiki
- Jon Beasley-Murray's course assignments to create Wikipedia articles: Murder, Madness and Mayhem
- LFS350 asks students to create wiki pages rather than papers: http://wiki.ubc.ca/Course:LFS350
- Physics course adds student-created learning objects into course curriculum: https://blogs.ubc.ca/phys101/
Elsewhere
- Chemwiki: the dynamic chemistry e-textbook, housed at University of California, Davis
- Digital Storytelling 106 (DS106) at the University of Mary Washington (Virginia, USA) (facilitated by lots of people)
- An "open boundary" course on Social Media and Open Education at the University of Regina, facilitated by Alec Couros (EC&I 831)
- Open Boundary course at Northwestern University (Illinois, USA) on networked work and learning (MSLOC 430), facilitated by Jeff Merrell and Kimberly Scott
- Talons Philosophy, an open online high school course in philosophy run by Bryan Jackson in Coquitlam, BC (see further information here)
- Thought Vectors in Concept Space at Virginia Commonwealth University
Open Education
- Library guide on open education, including open access, open educational resources, open textbooks, open data
- The open education handbook, a collaboratively authored and edited book about open education
- UBC Copyright Guide for Open Courses and OER UBC Copyright Office guide to copyright questions for open courses and open resources.
- Introduction to Openness in Education - An open course from David Wiley that provides a broad overview of the ways in which openness impacts many areas of education – curriculum, instruction, learning, policy, technology, research, and finance, among others.
Creative Commons licenses
- UBC Copyright guide to Creative Commons, including where/how to search for CC-licensed content
- Creative Commons website overview of the licenses: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
- Creative Commons license chooser that adds helpful metadata for those attributing you, if you add the code generated to your webpage(s), blog, etc.: http://creativecommons.org/choose/
- A video that explains the basics of the licenses, and some of the specific differences between them (it's focused on New Zealand, but the rules apply elsewhere too!): http://creativecommons.org/videos/creative-commons-kiwi
True Stories of Open Sharing
Watch some amazingly true stories of open sharing--the great stuff that can happen when we share our work openly: http://stories.cogdogblog.com/
