Category Archives: Open Access, open ed, OER

Davidson College workshop on Open Educational Practices

In May of 2018 I facilitated a two-day workshop at Davidson College, in Davidson, North Carolina, on Open Educational Practices. I created a site for the workshop on my domain (I have a domain with Reclaim Hosting) where I posted the schedule, learning objectives, and all resources.

Go to that site to see everything; if you just want to see the slides, see below! The slides are available in an editable, power point format on the resources page on the website for the workshop.

[I can’t see the embedded slides on my version of Firefox with Privacy Badger enabled. If you can’t see the embedded slides, there may be an add-on issue. You could try a different browser or turn off a privacy add on. Or you can use the links to see the slides.]

Day 1 slides

See the Day 1 slides on Speakerdeck

Day 2 slides

See the Day 2 slides on Speakerdeck

Creative Commons Then & Now (CC Cert assignment)

I am taking the Creative Commons Certificate course for Educators this summer, and the assignment for the end of the first week is this (this is one of the two options):

Create a video, slide presentation, podcast, wikibook content, an infographic (or choose another medium) in which you describe the key historical events leading up to the launch of Creative Commons and the state of Creative Commons today. Rather than a disconnected list, create a narrative (tell a story) that ties events and people together. Try to create something that would be useful and interesting to someone who just heard about Creative Commons and wants to learn more.

There was also a list of elements of the story that need to be included, and I just barely managed to fit all of them on the infographic I created! (You can see all of the documents for the course, including the assignments, on the Certificate Resources page.)

I made it with Canva, and most of the icons were purchased through a subscription to The Noun Project. Besides trying to make the elements look good visually and be readable, the thing that took me a surprisingly long time was working on the colour contrasts on the infographic to try to conform to web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) for colour contrast. The default colours on the template I used from Canva did not conform to those guidelines.

I used the WebAIM colour contrast checker to play around with the background colours and the text/icon colours to make the contrast fit WCAG 2.0 AA guidelines. I am not certain I 100% succeeded; it was a laborious process with Canva, to find the hex codes for each colour and input them into the contrast checker. I just made the decision not to make the dotted lines under the years conform to the guidelines; it’s not a problem if those are difficult to see, as they don’t convey any meaning but are merely decorative.

When will we get to the point where templates on tools such as Canva just automatically conform to accessibility guidelines, or at least automatically have a checker that can help you test if they do and fix if they do not?

Overall, this took quite a bit of time this week, and if I took even more time I expect I’d be happier with it, but at some point one has to stop and move on to the next task!

infographic on the past and present of Creative Commons

 

 

 

 

Tweets about open pedagogy & open edu practices

I’m archiving some Storify stories, since Storify is going away May 16 and deleting all content. I am following Alan Levine’s very helpful process and using his link extractor tool discussed towards the end of that post.

What I can’t easily figure out is where on this site I already have Storify embeds that are going to disappear. I tried to do a search for “storify” through the search function, but that probably only works if I actually say “storify” in the post. Which I don’t know if I did for each of those.

So, until I find posts where these Storify stories are, I’m going to create new posts so I at least have the tweet links in one place! Then hopefully later I can find where I put the darn things here on my blog. (Thanks a lot, Storify, for making our desire to archive really, really hard).

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Presentation on open pedagogy and open edu practices, Mt. Royal University

Poster for this event

For Open Education Week (March 2018) I was invited to give a keynote presentation/workshop on open educational practices and open pedagogy at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I titled it “Beyond cost savings: The value of OER and open pedagogy for student learning.”

They asked me to speak about open educational practices (OEP) and open pedagogy because, while the adoption, adaptation, and creation of Open Educational Resources (OER) was pretty well understood at their institution, the ideas of OEP and open pedagogy were not.

Being a philosopher, and based on my thinking about open pedagogy and OEP over the last year (see my blog posts on these topics), I used this opportunity to try to push my own thinking further around just how we might conceptualize these two topics. I also provided examples of what others had called OEP or open pedagogy.

There was a worksheet that accompanied the session, that people worked on individually and discussed in groups; we didn’t get as much time on this as I had planned (my fault…I talk for too long!)

OEP at Mt Royal, worksheet (MS Word)

And here are some notes I wrote up with plans for the session:

OEP at Mt Royal U, notes (MS Word)

 

Here are the slides from the talk…

You can download them in an editable Power Point file: Beyond Cost Savings, Mt Royal U, slides (pptx)

PressEd 2018 Conference on Twitter

I participated in a “conference” that took place entirely on Twitter March 29, 2018–PressEd 2018, about using WordPress in Education. It was a very interesting format: all presentations were series of 10-15 tweets over the course of 15 minutes, leaving time for questions at the end.

All of the tweets were on the #pressedconf18 hashtag, so you can see them by searching that tag.

Or you can see each of the presentations as Twitter moments.

I did a presentation about connecting student blogs together through syndication, in the Arts One program I taught in for many years. You can see the Tweets from this below.

I really liked this conference, for a few reasons.

  • It didn’t feel like something I had to travel to in order to get a full experience, which meant it didn’t feel like some people got a different and better experience than others.
  • It was something I could dip into and out of during the day and didn’t feel bad about it because I knew it would all be available later.
  • The sessions were in small enough chunks to digest without feeling overwhelmed. One could get bite-sized thoughts and ideas that could percolate later. And there are lots of links to go explore for the things one is particularly interested in.
  • I was able to keep exactly on time because I created the tweets beforehand and then I scheduled them to be once a minute during my 15 minutes. I didn’t go over time or feel like I wished I had just five more minutes, for maybe once in my life.
  • The small character count kept me from being too wordy or trying to cover too much (which are issues I usually have). I have to say, though, this would have been much more challenging for me back in the 140-character limit days.

I didn’t get many questions or comments afterwards, but that was okay … I felt like others were dipping in and out just like I was, and plus–the sessions were really close to each other in timing and there wouldn’t have been time to have long conversations on the hashtag without busting into someone else’s series of tweets!

Here are the tweets I sent…  And looking back, I realize I really should have had more pictures or screen grabs or something. These are all just text and links, and many others had nice visuals. I hadn’t been thinking this way, but it makes sense to consider these tweets kind of like slides for a presentation, and I wouldn’t have slides that are *only* text. So I embedded some images here in my post, even though I didn’t do it in the original tweets.

Oh well…next time! I hope this format is used again by someone/some group (something for me to consider myself!).

 

Structure of Arts One

Screen shot of part of front page of Arts One Open site

 

Ooops–the link in the above tweet is wrong. It should be: http://artsone-open.arts.ubc.ca

Tag cloud of tags on Arts One Open (you can find student & prof blog posts, plus lecture recordings, plus podcasts through these tags)

Poster for Karasik’s guest lecture March 27, 2017.

 

eCampus Ontario TESS 2017 keynote

On November 20, 2017, I’m giving a keynote at the eCampus Ontario Technology Enabled Seminar and Showcase 2017. They asked me to come and speak about students contributing to Open Educational Resources, so I wrote the following title and blurb:

Adding Value to the World: Students Producing OER

When speaking with students about open educational resources, reducing or eliminating cost of learning materials often resonates with them first; but we need not think of students only as consumers of OER. There can be significant learning benefits when involving students in creating or adapting OER, and they can thereby add value to the world outside of their classes as well. In this way we can reduce reliance on what David Wiley calls “disposable assignments” and practice open pedagogy. Christina Hendricks will discuss various ways of thinking about what “open pedagogy” might mean, provide examples of how students can be involved in producing OER, and share faculty and student perceptions of the benefits—and challenges—of doing so.

But as I was looking at the program, I noticed that the fantastic Heather Ross is speaking on virtually the same topic right after my keynote: “Open Pedagogy: Moving from the throw-away assignment to student creating learning resources.” Heather and I spoke and decided to move in slightly different directions with our sessions.

Mine has changed a little, as these things do–the title has changed entirely, though what I talk about sticks pretty closely to the description above.

I like to post the slides in editable format here on my blog in case anyone wants to reuse them, but the file is too big for this site! I stopped using SlideShare for various reasons, including that they stopped letting you re-upload slides to the same URL after editing them, and because you can only download slides if you have an account.

So until I figure out something else, I’m posting the slides in an editable PPTX format on my Open Science Framework account, here.

You can see them on Speaker Deck below (but that only allows PDFs, not editable files…clearly I need to reorganize my slide life!).

Oh, and here are some notes I wrote up to help me with some of the slides. There are only notes for slides for which I don’t already have the information in my head. This is not a transcript; it is mostly quotes from others to help me remember what to say about what they’ve done, or what they’ve said. URLs for all the quotes are included. The following are the same file in two different formats.

TESS-ecampusontario-Notes-Nov2017 (MS Word)

TESS-ecampusontario-Notes-Nov2017 (PDF)

Open in the Life of a College Student–initial questions

I’m participating in a remote do-a-thon with Open Con 2017: Open in the life of a college student.

The description for this project:

This project is intended to bring collaborators together to create a new infographic that presents the intersections of various Open movements and applies them to the daily lives of college students. The project supports the “connecting with other open movements” and “empowering the next generation” priorities discussed in Cape Town Open Education Declaration +10: http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/cpt10/

This resource is inspired by the Association of Research Libraries’ “Fair Use in a Day in the Life of a College Student” infographic: http://www.arl.org/focus-areas/copyright-ip/fair-use/3831-fair-use-in-a-day-in-the-life-of-a-college-student-infographic

The resulting resource will be shared with a CC-BY license, and the participation of all contributors will be acknowledged.

 

We are getting started by answering a series of questions, which you can see on the link to the project above. My answers were getting long there on the github page, so I decided to write them here on my blog and put a link to this post there!

Here they are…

 

1. Which of the Open movements (Open Access, Open Data, Open Education, Open Science, Open Source, other…) does your work connect most fully to?

Open education I think is the one my work connects most fully to. I am a faculty member at a university, and I am also the Deputy Academic Director of a Teaching & Learning Centre. Still, I know a fair bit about open access and am very interested in open data too.

 

2. What inspired you to begin working in Open? Where were you in your education/career?

When I was on sabbatical I took a connectivist MOOC called ETMOOC (educational technology and media mooc), and that’s where I learned about open education. Then I took a MOOC from the Open University called “Open Education” and learned a lot more! This was about four years ago.

Why did I start working in open? It’s hard to say…it just made sense to me that I would share what I’m doing in terms of teaching and learning in case it was useful to others. I am a teacher, and sharing things with others for the sake of education just made sense. And I am being paid in large part from public funds at my university; this indicates to me that the benefits of what I’m doing should be more widely available (besides just the fact that I think they should generally).

 

3. What values do you consider to be foundational for the Open movement you identified in question 1 (that which most embodies your work)? Why are these values important for the community?

This is a big question and hard to answer in a short span of time (which is all I have at the moment). Quickly, though:

  • equity: of access to educational materials and activities, of meaningful participation, of contributions to knowledge
    • so things like Open Educational Resources, plus open pedagogy, and accessibility to people with disabilities, etc., are relevant here
  • autonomy: students being able to guide their own learning (to the extent feasible), to choose their educational paths, to show their knowledge
    • this is a value in open pedagogy
  • diversity and inclusion: emphasizing the value of participating in teaching and learning activities with others who have different experiences, backgrounds, views
  • improving knowledge: by making it more accessible and by supporting contributions from many

Those are a few off the top of my head…

 

4. Which of these values are shared with other Open movements? What else do you have in common?

I think the idea of improving knowledge, or a product, or code, by including more and diverse contributors may be shared by other open movements (e.g., open source, open science). Equity and access are shared by open access movements I believe.

 

5. In what ways are you impacted by Open in your day-to-day activities? What open tools do you use? Where do you share your work? How do you discover/consume/engage with the work of others? What are some of the indirect benefits of Open in your daily life?

This is also a big question! I’ll just say a few things.

  • I share my educational and other materials with a CC license: slides from classes, assignments, syllabus, slides for presentations, etc. My course websites are public, on WordPress.
  • I also share reflections on teaching and learning here on my blog!
  • I discover and engage with the work of others mainly through social media: I mostly use Twitter but also Mastodon. I also read others’ blog posts and sometimes comment on them (I should do more commenting!). I work with others on projects partly through communication tools like Slack, partly through shared documents on Google Docs or etherpad, and also through video chat tools.
  • Indirect benefits: I know a lot of people from multiple parts of the world that I connect with daily and consider friends, even though I’ve never met many of them! But also, because of my work in open education I have gotten some professional benefits: I have been able to participate in conferences, be invited to give talks, publish papers, etc.

 

6. What concerns/risks limit or prevent you from engaging in open practices? How do these concerns intersect with the values identified in questions 3 & 4?

I am very careful about asking students to participate in open projects/to release their work into the open, because it is their work and they have the right to decide what happens to it. If they choose to make their work open, that’s great; if not, that’s great too. And when they do I try to ensure they always have an option to remove it from public view later if they wish, either by their own actions (i.e., they have control over it rather than me), or by contacting me if it’s a page I control–the former is preferable.

I am also paying more attention lately to when open is risky/problematic, such as noted in Tara Robertson’s post about a recent talk, “Not All Information Wants to be Free”. I also attended an Open Access Week session in Vancouver called “Tensions and Risk in Open Scholarship”; you can see a collaborative notes document from that session. One of the participants in that session was Dave Gaertner from the University of British Columbia, and he wrote a thought-provoking post called “Towards a Pedagogy of Closure”. This, and some of the notes from the “Tensions and risk” event are about the risks for Indigenous communities of openness.

I recently learned about Traditional Knowledge labels and licenses, which is a way to start more deeply engaging with the risks of open for Indigenous communities.

 

7. Which of these tools/activities/practices/values/beliefs also extend to students? Does Open offer benefits that are unique to students? How are concerns/risk similar? How are they different?

I think the benefits can include: ability to contribute to wider knowledge so that one’s work as a student doesn’t just disappear into the void after it receives a grade but does some good in the world. Open pedagogy often involves students having more autonomy, more choice over what they are learning and how, and how they show their learning through projects. Students can also benefit from being connected to wider communities, beyond the confines of their particular class, depending on what kinds of activities they’re engaged in and what the audiences for those are. They could connect with people who are experts in their field, with community groups from whom they can learn day-to-day realities of life that may not be obvious in a class, and more.

I think the risks include things like online bullying or harassment or even threats (if they are on social media or release their work onto sites like blogs or youtube). They may wish later that they hadn’t released their early educational work so publicly because later they may completely disagree with what they had thought earlier, and yet now the work is impossible to delete from the web completely. Those are just a couple of risks that come to mind.

 

8. What changes about the experience with Open tools etc. as students progress from high school to undergrad to grad school and beyond? What values/practices remain consistent regardless of age and expertise?

I think one has to be more careful with younger students and privacy; as students go beyond k-12 and into university and grad school, more autonomy with choices around their privacy makes sense (though some autonomy in high school makes sense too). In any and all cases, learning about the benefits and dangers of openness, including in terms of privacy, is critical. And being sure students and teachers know what data is collected about them through which platforms they choose to use, and for what purposes, and who has access to the data, is also crucial. That goes not only for “open” platforms but others as well!

Presentation: What’s open about open pedagogy?

On Oct. 26, 2017, I gave a talk at Douglas College in the Vancouver, BC, Canada area. This was for Open Access Week 2017. I have a number of blog posts with reflections on my thinking about this talk:

 

Here is a video recording of the talk.

You can see the slides on speakerdeck, and you can download them as power point here: WhatsOpenAboutOpenPedagogy-DouglasCollege-Oct2017

Here they are embedded from Speaker Deck…

 

Perceptions of Open Pedagogy

I am doing a presentation at the eCampus Ontario Technology Enhanced Seminar and Showcase in a couple of weeks, and one thing I’ll be talking about is student and faculty perceptions of the benefits and challenges/barriers to open pedagogy. I’m focused on college and university education, but am also interested in responses from those who teach and learn at other educational institutions.

I have some information along those lines, but I’m writing this post for people to comment on to provide more if they wish.

So, if you are willing, please answer one or more of the following in the comments below. If you want to be anonymous you can use a pseudonym and also a false email address when signing in to provide your comment.

Thanks!

Questions:

  1. Are you a student who has engaged in an open pedagogy project, or a faculty member who has asked students to do so? Or maybe a staff member who has helped design one?
  2. What kind of open pedagogy activity were you involved with?
    1. If you want, you can say what kind of course it was (topic, year level)–though note that this might identify you if you don’t want to be identified.
  3. What were the benefits of this activity?
    1. If you were a student, what did you get out of it?
    2. If you engaged in open pedagogy as a teacher or staff member, what did you hope students got out of it? Why did you ask them to do this? Do you have any evidence, formal or informal, of the benefits of the activity?
  4. What were some challenges or barriers you faced?
    1. What could have or did go wrong?
    2. What potential problems with this kind of activity should others be aware of?
    3. Any advice?

 

Remember that you can remain anonymous by not giving your real name or email address, if you want.

Note that quotes from these answers may be used in my presentation at the event linked above, and may be on slides that are publicly viewable. If you want to provide comments without them being seen here, but you wouldn’t mind me paraphrasing from them, please email me: christina.hendricks@ubc.ca

Update Nov. 11 2017

I got a fantastic set of comments from a student via email. She gave me permission to post them here, which I really am happy to do because they are so helpful. Here they are as a PDF: StudentComments-OpenPedagogy-Nov2017

 

 

Open Pedagogy, shared aspects

This post is part of my reflection on an upcoming talk I’m giving at Douglas College about open pedagogy: “What’s Open about Open Pedagogy?” I an earlier post I started collecting some examples of activities that people have put under the umbrella of open pedagogy. Then I did some reflecting on possible differences between open pedagogy and open educational practices . In my last post I looked at open education in the 60s and 70s.

Here I’m trying to summarize what I’ve got so far around open pedagogy. This is an extension of work I did in a series of posts on open pedagogy earlier this year, all of which are linked in the last one: Navigating Open Pedagogy Part 2. In that post I did a good deal of pulling together of various threads of how people define open pedagogy, and here I’m going to try to refine it even more.

So reading that post might be a useful precursor to this post, because I’m going to do some shorthand here, based on what was discussed there. I’ll also be adding some things based on what else I’ve read since then.

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