March 10—Educational Technologies for Open Pedagogies II
[Nazlee] Thank you so much for joining us to celebrate Open Education Week. I am Nazlee Sharmin, and this is our second session on Educational Technologies for Open Pedagogies. Our presenters today are Lisa Gedak, Robin Leung, Chris Ryan, and Urooj Nizami. They are all from Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Thank you so much for doing this session for us. So, I will welcome the presenters to continue from here. Have a great session. Hello everyone, and welcome to this session and Happy Open Education Week to all of you.
So today, strategists from Kwantlen Polytechnic University's Teaching and Learning Commons bring you connections between educational technologies and open pedagogy. Throughout our presentation, we'll ask that the attendees think about the ed tech that's currently available to you through your institutions as we present and how we harness what's available to us that KPU to support open pedagogy. But before we begin, we would like to share that Kwantlen Polytechnic University is located on the traditional ancestral and unceded lands of the Coast Salish Peoples. This
includes the territories of the Kwantlen First Nation who bestowed their name on our university. We thank all First Nations for sharing their land and resources with us in friendship and peace. Before going on any further, the strategist team wants to take a moment to introduce ourselves. And so, we'll do that. And the next, I'll give a very brief introduction to Open Pedagogy,
followed by a brief introduction to Educational Technologies by my colleague Robin. After that, we will each present on a tool or platform used at our institution by tying it to at least one of Haggerty's eight attributes of open pedagogy. Before we end the session, our colleague Lisa will guide you through a virtual escape room exercise that will give you an opportunity to take a bit of a deeper dive into each one of Haggerty's attributes of open pedagogy. So, with that, I will share a little bit about myself and ask my colleagues to do the same. So, I'm Urooj and I'm one of two open ed strategists at KPU. We're lucky enough to have just brought on Amanda Gray to join the team. In my role, I support instructors' engagement with open pedagogy through a variety of different initiatives, including an OER grant program, a publishing program, zero textbook costs program, an Open Pedagogy Fellowship, and an Open Education Research Fellowship.
I also want to take a moment to share a personal land acknowledgment, and I think it's important to think through, you know, as land acknowledgments become more common, to highlight that they are insufficient. And it's really important that we dive a bit deeper, inform ourselves, particularly around calls from Indigenous communities like Land Back. This means for deep reflection, confronting possible discomforts and uneasiness. And I want to underscore that the lands that many of us work and live on are unceded, meaning that First Nation peoples never ceded or legally signed away their lands to the crown or to Canada. [Lisa] Hi, I'm Lisa Gedak and I am a teaching and learning strategist at KPU, alongside Urooj and the other lovely colleagues, Chris and Robin, that I have here today. And before I tell you a little bit about my role, I would also like to situate myself with where I work and live and I am fortunate enough to have my feet in two different places as I have a house in Pender Island, British Columbia.
And I also have a rental that I use in White Rock, British Columbia. And both of those places are on the unceded territories of the coast Salish people who were disrupted by the forces of colonization. And of course, in those systems that were created, there was some exclusionary systems that we work and teach in that have been created. And I do recognize my responsibility as an educator and a strategist in examining critically the systems that we are working within and challenging these systems at every opportunity, including today. So, about my role, I do partner with faculty and programs to inspire and encourage innovative teaching approaches and to support deeper learning experiences for our students at KPU.
In addition, I do design and deliver workshops and webinars for faculty, and I support their professional development. And I'm really passionate about learning design, instructional design, appreciative inquiry, and the intersection of educational technologies and pedagogy. Thanks for having us. [Robin] Hello everybody. I'm Robin Leung, and I'm the educational media strategist inside the Teaching and Learning Commons at KPU. and I currently live and work on the
traditional and ancestral and unceded lands of the Katzie First Nations in Pitt Meadows, B.C. As a settler, I think it's important to take some time to learn about the history of this land that we live, work and play on and honor the original inhabitants of those who were forced or disrupted by the forces of colonization. In my role, I bring my technical and creative experience to support faculty in creating implementing educational media content activities and assessment strategies in addition to supporting faculty, professional development, I oversee several educational platforms used to support faculty and students in the creation and storing of media content and reusable content.
[Chris] And hi, I'm Chris. I am I would just say I'm another Lisa. That's kind of... but no one can be another Lisa. So, it's impossible. But we do have the same role of teaching and learning strategist, which is again manifesting just good teaching and learning. And I'm coming from the... I live in Vancouver, which is home to the Unceded Coast Salish.
And, you know, it's fantastic to be a part of an organization that, you know, it isn't just, you know, in these in these call outs. Right. It is to everything we do. You know, we're always opening, and faculty are always asking and workshops and consultations how we can sort of start to describe different ways of knowing, you know, and really start to... if we're going to change the system, well we need to change the system itself. And it's kind of amazing to be a part of a team and an institution which is doing that because that's normally hasn't been the case in the past. So, I'm very, very blessed and thankful to have that opportunity. But I will turn
it back over to Urooj, who is definitely the leader in the open field of things. [Urooj] Open educational resources have really been at the center of the open movement. But with the movement maturing, there has been an increased interest in the application of open educational practices, one of which are this idea of open pedagogy. So, before I get into it,
I sort of want to lay the groundwork, and I know that many of us already know about open pedagogy, but I feel like having something to center the presentation is important. So, Robin DeRosa and Rajiv Jhangiani give us one of the most popular definitions of open pedagogy, an access-oriented commitment to learner driven education. It is also a process of designing architectures and using tools for learning that enables students to shape the public knowledge commons. So, this definition does two things. It keeps the understanding of open pedagogy broad and inclusive, but it also helps us understand that open pedagogy is made up of many different practices. So, they go on to say that open pedagogy can include creating, adapting, or updating, OER with students, building course policies, outcomes, assignments, rubrics and schedules to work collaboratively with students, or by facilitating student centered and created...
student-centered and student-controlled learning environments. To give an example of what open pedagogy might look like, I want to turn to one of the most popular manifestations, and that is the renewable assignment. And to understand the renewable assignment, it's also important to introduce the problem, which has been understood as a disposable assignment. Wiley and Hilton, two other big names in the open movement, have shared that disposable assignments are those assignments that those faculty and students understand will ultimately be thrown away. Essays are an example of assignments that frequently fit into this category. The students write the essays, faculty grade and provide feedback on the essays, and then return them to students. And students do or do not look through that feedback. And then ultimately,
they are either thrown away into a paper recycling bin or the delete can on your desktop. So open pedagogy in a big way challenges a disposable assignment by harnessing student labor towards something meaningful, something renewable that students can sort of share with others outside of the classroom. With that, I'm going to turn it over to my colleague Robin to give you an introduction to how we understand ed tech. [Robin] Thanks Urooj. So, for the purposes of this presentation, we'll be describing how we understand educational technologies as strategists. And technology plays really an important role in shaping our learning environments and at KPU, we collaboratively work with faculty and instructional staff to provide technology tools that facilitate learning. And these are two folds. There are technical requirements and the facilitation of using these tools.
And we do this by considering tools that are accessible and engage all learners. We take into consideration data and privacy implications of what personal information is collected by these tools and the integrability of the tools that work with our ecosystem. In this list you'll see a list of educational tools that we support faculty to enhance their learning environments. And this is basically our ecosystem, it includes tools that are integrated with our LMS. We use Moodle as our main LMS here at KPU. Tools that work beyond our LMS and external tools,
you'll see on the right there that haven't yet been adopted as part of our ecosystem that might be due to privacy implications or other concerns that we have. But still, it would add value to the learning environment. And so, we provide guidelines on how to use these tools safely in our ecosystem. And as you might have noticed, not all the tools represented on this diagram here are open. However, we see that these tools align with open practices and add value to the open pedagogical practices of instructors. [Urooj] So in a 2015 piece, our colleague in New Zealand, Bronwen Hegarty, honed in on what they see as eight interconnected and dynamic attributes of open pedagogy. These eight
attributes become really important because in a big way they hone in on the values that underpin the open education movement. So, I'm going to take a moment just to go through them briefly. The eight attributes are participatory technologies, people, openness, trust, innovation and creativity, sharing ideas and resources, connected community, learner generated, reflective practice and peer review. So, we're now going to turn to popular educational technologies and platforms we use at KPU and relate them to one of Hagerty's eight Attributes of Open Pedagogy. So, the goal is to demonstrate that tools many of us already use and have access to in terms of technologies at platforms can be harnessed for the implementation of open pedagogy. [Chris] I'm going to say there are eight attributes I'm going to speak to one which is sharing ideas and resources, and it's fantastic at our institution. We're going to focus on WordPress, and it comes from a very much an open perspective. And, you know, WordPress itself, of
the Four Freedoms is probably the most successful open movement ever. And it still continues. And so, what's amazing about it is we have created a multi-site self-enrollment program. Well, actually, our good friend Robin here does. And it's quite brilliant. So,
you know, hit him up after, because again, you may have heard of... it's common, I think, open that term or phrase a domain of one's own. Well, yes, you can have that with websites where you have an individual website that lives on its own space in a server, for example. But the multi-site system is simpler and easier. Well, I don't I can't
actually speak to whether it's easier. That's Robin's forte. But it's fantastic and easy to get a website because think of it like a tree is just, you're branching off in this core system. So much is easier to be shared and still be controlled within an environment. And this goes to what Hagerty had said, which is open practices are more likely when tools and resources are easily accessible and in common use. So, when students and faculty feel comfortable just getting a website, which is an incredible hill for a lot of people in the real world at any other time. Wow. That's pretty fantastic to underlie open practices.
The next that Hagerty mentioned here is an open environment, right? Production of new creative forms where media are used collaboratively, collaboratively and rearranged to create new digital materials. Well, that's WordPress right from the very beginning. Right. It was just a guy who said, you know what happens if we create infrastructure that can just run on its own or run by people that actually care about it, but it's easy. And there you go. And that mutuality is growing, you know, became... well the easy way to think about it is WordPress dot org. And then WordPress.com and a similar... it's interesting to me, similar trajectory to see that with H5p, which has recently just launched H5P.com, and it's priced service. So, it's kind of a unique
parallel and maybe this is something that open movements do. But you know, maybe the future will tell. Another aspect of our WordPress installation and application for are creating these concept of sharing ideas and resources in an open way.
Digital Replication Right. To facilitate personalized learning, educators need to be able to access reuse right. Again, this disposable assignment. Now, on the other side of that, it is important too, I think when there's such a freedom, I always think of the Mandelas, right? It's such a freedom in creation and destruction. And, you know, when it comes to software, the best advice I give any faculty is go in, make something and then delete it and walk away.
You know, what did you accomplish you went in and did something, and you didn't have to, and you didn't then have any stress with you whether or not you could within the environment. So, yes, it's amazing that we can - as Urooj has said - started to create these assignments that can take on a life of their own and continue, which can happen here. But also, in the other sense that it's really easy to play around and which leads us to the next point and make fearless mistakes, as Hagerty says here. Right. A safe space to experiment, have fun and play. And you could do that when you're
not afraid of losing everything, you know. And again, it depends what generation you're from, right? A lot of us still remember the days where stuff would crash and, you know, like what happened? You know, those are things that are deep-seated and, you know, not necessarily wrong, you know, but the problem is it's preventing more effective interaction with things like WordPress. You know, rather than being afraid of it. So, these are some of the points brought up in the article by Hagerty, you know, to show that, you know, sharing ideas and resources are important to creating an open environment. And that's how WordPress, from my view, is being used at KPU and our team to help facilitate this but now we're going to move on to reflection.
[Lisa] Thanks Chris! Pebble Pad. I'm going to talk about and Pebble Pad, how it connects to Hagerty's attributes of open education. And Pebble Pad is an e-portfolio - or personal learning journey, is how it is actually presented. And it supports students in reflecting on their
learning experiences and also can provide opportunities for students to reflect and then exhibit how their knowledge and skills and competencies have been progressing over time. Pebble Pad provides a space for students to collect, to curate, and then share those experiences. The cool thing about Pebble Pad is it does allow students to decide how and who they share with. So, it's always a personal space until they choose to share it, and then they can get some really valuable feedback from peers or external reviewers or people from the community, and they can reflect on those experiences and achievements. In addition, Pebble Pad provides a method for evidencing the competencies and skills, and it can support deeper learning in a culture of folio thinking, which is what I will talk about next. Next slide, please. So, for those that do not know, or for those that do know and want a little
bit of a refresher for reflective practice, what folio thinking is it is a reflective practice. And it happens through the process of curating, organizing and reflecting on one's learning experiences and then reflecting on what they mean their value how those experiences are interconnected over time, how they relate to each other over time. So, instructors at KPU use Pebble Pad to scaffold learning experiences they have built in workbooks and templates which are really great that instructors can access that are already pre-built, as I mentioned, so they can progressively guide the learner through making meaning out of their experiences, which is pretty neat. Also, they can create their own customized templates, which a lot of our faculty are doing for students. Additionally, there's a mobile app which is really cool because then
we can actually see reflection in action from our students. Pebble Pad Templates are underpinned by reflective practices and a reflective structure, so it helps encourage that. And it goes beyond really the what of their experience. It lets them dig deeper and make meaning from those different experiences. We've had some excellent examples from farrier programs, which is horse shoeing... shoeing horses.
Up to nursing programs that are using this so that students can actually reflect in the moment and then share their experiences and reflect deeper over time. The next slide, please. So, connecting it to Hagerty's attributes, it reflects - or sorry - it connects really lovely to number seven, reflective practice. So, using Pebble Pad to support folio thinking aligns, because the teaching practice, as we know, is changing from a broadcast model, from the expert at the front of the room to being much more of a model where people are curating in a personalized way, some digital artifacts and are able to reflect on those experiences in a deeper way. It also connects to the discovery collection and sharing of those digital artifacts, objects, links, pictures, templates, they've completed when they're on their mobile app or on their PC or device. And through sharing, as I mentioned, through the feedback they actually
can share with industry assessors. And this supports the deeper reflection, and it can inspire transformational change. So, it aligns really well to Hagerty's number seven, reflective practice as that is their experience collecting and reflecting along the way. And I will hand it over to my colleague Robin. [Robin] So I'll talk a little bit about our video management platform that we use here at KPU, that we use to support instructors and students to easily record, upload, manage and share video content. And that's Kaltura, for most of you who are coming from
B.C. will probably have heard of Kaltura. The platform is integrated with our LMS, which allows both instructors and students to create and upload content directly and shared in their core sites. This ability to leverage auto machine captioning also ensures that media is media content is accessible to all learners and Kaltura ensures that optimal media playback on all modern devices so that it is private and secure and also doesn't really matter which device you use. Taking the technical aspect out for the faculty and students so that they can focus on the creation of content. Next slide. So, while the use of video in education has only begun to grow in recent years,
there are a few theoretical frameworks that are applicable. Instructors can use Kaltura to deliver engaging asynchronous video content using video quizzes that help students become active learners and engage formative feedback. Or they could also use video or audio to complement their existing course materials like creating mini lessons, introduction videos, course tours, enhancing deeper learning both visual and text when both text and visual are presented. Most evident in the cognitive theory of multimedia learning and students can create and submit to video assignments, contribute to form discussions using video or audio, rather than contributing to text-base only activities, providing a much richer and authentic experience, especially with online spaces being more prominent in pandemic times. Providing options for students to utilize multimedia also promotes universal design for learning principles where everybody benefits. And media creation is really a collaborative and iterative process. So, tagging media content with Creative Commons licenses allows for collaboration and sharing of content more easily. Solving issues of authorship and copyright. And at the heart of media creation
is really about community building and supporting each other's creativity. Next slide. So, using Kaltura to support multimedia learning, UDL and collaborative learning really aligns with Hagerty's attribute number three Innovation and creativity and in the following way. So, video creates a line of communication and online modality and allows both faculty and students to reveal a more personal side of themselves.
Allowing new relationships to foster. And video creation is more than just an alternative method for students who have difficulties in written expression, advantages of using a broader range of media. So, for example, audio recording video film images, drawing, animation, allows the learner to build fluency with a wider range of options for communicating. And through Creative Commons, faculty and students are able to easily re-use content and share content more easily. So, I want to pass the time to a Urooj, to talk about Pressbooks and learner generated content. Thank you. [Urooj] So Press Books is a popular platform for open textbook publishing and has been a critical player in Open at tech ecosystems for years now. And many publishing programs really
rely on press books. And this is also true at KPU, where we support our publishing programs through the use of Pressbooks. And our catalog of open textbooks is hosted on a Pressbooks catalog. So, something important about Pressbooks is that they do makes their code openly available, and at KPU, what we've been able to do is enable single sign-on so that students and instructors can seamlessly sort of be integrated into Pressbooks without having to log in separately. It's also important to note that Pressbooks is hosted on Canadian servers, so that really helps curtail some of the issues around privacy that we often have when having students on a platform.
In recent years, as we acknowledge the incredible potential open educational resources have had on cost savings for students, there's also been an increased attention to open pedagogy, and the transformative potential of moving away from traditional disposable assignments. So instead of having students produce artifacts that will only be shared between the student and the instructor, practitioners of open pedagogy are moving toward a model of harnessing student labor towards adding to the public knowledge commons. And one popular manifestation of this is through creating renewable assignments using Pressbooks. So, thinking about Hagerty's attributes, the idea of learner generated content. So having students create artifacts that will be useful to others offers an alternative to what Paolo Friedrich conceptualized as the banking model of education, where students are simply receivers of knowledge.
With this model, students are seen as agentive and contributors and creators of knowledge. And so, in this application here where you see a textbook cover, one of the open education advocates at KPU - an instructor Andrea E. Niosi - worked with students to create content for an open textbook. So, the assignments and assessments in this course were all around contributing to this student author's textbook. Now, this is unique because it's a renewable sort of assignment. It's shared publicly through the use of Creative Commons licenses, and it's done so in a way that allows for a revision and reuse.
So Hagerty also hones into the idea of empowering students by sharing how transformative learning can be for students when they take the lead, solve problems, and work collaboratively to produce artifacts that they share, discuss, reconfigure and redeploy. This is just one example of a way that an instructor at KPU has used Pressbooks to engage in open pedagogy through learner generated sorts of assignments and assessments, and there are many others that are in the works now in some ways that we support this is by providing one on one consultations within classrooms with students and with instructors. And we really depend on the library and our publishing program to help with that as well. Thanks for joining us today as well. It's been great. I hope you enjoyed the exercise and hearing from how we harness our open ed technology. Not just open,
that is, but our edtech technologies towards open. And if you have any questions for us, we can always be reached at the Commons email at KPU. Thank you all and have a lovely end to your weeks.
[Nazlee] Thank you so much. Can we all use the reaction to just thank our presenters and thank you everyone for joining us today.
2022-04-13 04:04
