This past year, I helped teach AGRO 490, Special Topics in Agriculture and Digital Communications. Today, my teaching colleagues (Andrew Riseman, Kathryn Gretsinger & Cyprien Lomas) and I will be presenting about our course at the Open Ed 2009 Conference. Thanks to Brian Lamb, our colleague in OLT and the Open Ed conference organizer, for encouraging us to submit a proposal.
Having attended the first two days of the conference, I feel like our presentation will be a bit of a strange fit with the other presentations. Most of the discussion I’ve seen has focused on systems or policy. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone discussing openness in an individual course; let’s hope we meet the audience’s expectations.
Our course worked with openness in a number of ways. Broadly, the idea behind the course—and the audio documentaries that are at the heart of the course—is to share the knowledge of our students with those outside of the university, making it accessible both in tone (using storytelling & journalistic techniques) and in medium (downloadable podcasts in mp3). We used standard formats for all media and open source software, most importantly Audacity audio editor, which allows students to continue to use the software outside the university without having to purchase it. Finally, our students licensed their materials with Creative Commons licenses, allowing others to use, share and remix their work.
So—in the spirit of openness—here are a number of materials related to the course.
Course syllabus & grading rubric
Guidelines for creating final podcast
Final Assignment: Group Podcast
Alicia Hall, “Soil: The Life Beneath Your Feet”
Jason Patchell, “Dandelion”
Jenna Pfoh, “The Farmhouse”
Venessa Alain, “Where We Are Growing”
Afton Halloran”Agricultural Inspirations”
Ben Amundson, “The Chicken Man”
All of these materials are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License