March 10—Educational Technologies for Open Pedagogies II

March 10—Educational Technologies for Open Pedagogies II

Show Video

[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

Show Video

Other news