 Good afternoon everyone and welcome to this afternoon session on OER 22. I'm delighted to welcome Yolanda Heymans who's going to be our presenter today on exploring the use of open education practices in undergraduate interprofessional collaborative learning. So without any more delay Yolanda I'm going to hand over to you. Thank you. Any questions or comments just leave them in the chat box and over to you Yolanda. Okay so Emma thank you so much and also thank you for watching the chat colleagues. I'm just going to stop my camera for bandwidth purposes. I hope that everybody can hear me so I just want to share my screen and I can you confirm. Yeah I can hear you I can't see oh yeah I can see your screen now do you want to and I can still hear you okay can I can I start yes okay perfect okay so good afternoon everybody and welcome to this session where we will look at exploring the use of open educational practices in undergraduate interprofessional education. I'm Yolanda Heymans I work in the Center for Health Professions Education the Faculty of Health Sciences in the Northwest University. So this is a SOTL project that we've been doing last year and ethics approval was granted. So although I will be presenting please allow me to thank a few colleagues our entire research team this was a big team effort every member of the scientific RECS institutional ethics committees who approved the study as well as the 1145 second-year health and social care students who gave their willing consent by signing the informed consent form. The university capacity development grant thank you for the grant for doing the study and then a special word of thank you to Prof. Yakuulifir he is at our university the UNESCO chair on multimodal learning and open education rules and he has been fundamental in this research. So my presentation is structured around the following I will start with giving a little bit of context and background and then discuss our framing of understanding and to get clarity in this sea of openness then how we applied this in our teaching and learning components and adopted open educational practices to enhance student learning. I'll share with you our research the research that we did in this and then lastly I will finish off with conclusion. I'm going to short video now I know that the sound is not good but we will share it later. It's just a short introduction on the faculty of health sciences at our university so my apologies for the sound not coming through. Faculty of health sciences is one of the youngest faculties in the Northwest University family and also one of the most innovative faculties. Since its inception it has ground to one of the largest of its kind with our distinct focus on holistic and multidisciplinary health teaching. The faculty not only is raised to the standards set by the World Health Organization but also trains health professionals who champion good health overall well-being for the people of South Africa. Faculty is made up of five academic schools offering excellent training postgraduate studies and research in several specialized fields within the health sciences sphere. Some of these fields of study include human movement sciences, biokinetics and kinder kinetics, psychosocial health, pharmacy, physiology, human sciences, nutrition, occupational hygiene and nursing. We are looking forward to welcome you in our faculty and to become part of a winning health science family of health care today and tomorrow. Okay so within this context we have about our university has about 48, sorry 58,000 students in all modes of delivery and we have three campuses one in Maffa King which is in our province one in Potchasturum that's where I am teaching and then one in Kharting of our Triangle campus and I teach a compulsory second year module. It is presented on the three campuses of the university. It is a fully aligned module so the students get the same learning experience online although they are sitting in three different campuses or enrolled on three different campuses and programs. The module is facilitated fully online. We've got 1,734 students from 14 diverse health and social care disciplines. I've listed them there. The nature of this module is theoretical and strong philosophical and the module aims to develop a critical mindset by exposing students to diverse disciplinary views and to foster interprofessional and collaborative learning. So if you look at over the last few years there's been a fast growing trend in the use of open learning materials and associated platforms and practices in higher education. During our engagement with the literature we found the overlapping similarities and the interchangeable use of these concepts such as openness, open education, open educational resources, open educational practices and open pedagogy at times very confusing so it's important for us just to frame and provide our lens of how we do view this. So let's start with the concept open and this is how we perceive this. So the rapid expansion of the World One Weapon ICT integration have enhanced the notion of openness. Gruyennan states that open refers to artifacts and their use, learning, teaching and institutional practices, the use of educational technologies and the value underlying in educational endeavors. According to Ciarpi and Adami it is essential to ensure that educational access, effectiveness and equality in the 21st century and for this to happen higher education needs to adopt a sense of openness. Based on that if we then go further and what to what is open education, openness provides in the context for us for open education and according to Gruyennan again open education initiatives are often understood, perceived and prioritized differently within different context and we experience, I experienced this over the last two days with all the sessions that I've watched. According to the Open Education Consortium, open education encompasses resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness worldwide and we share this view. Open educational resources then the UNESCO defines that as the open provision of educational resources enabled by ICTs for consultation, use and adaption by the community of users for non-commercial purposes. Initially open educational resources started with a development of free open textbooks to counteract the notion of formally very expensive textbooks but however over time we have seen that it expanded into the including assessments, articles, lesson plans, open technologies and interactive software platforms and this movement according to us has set the scene for the use of open educational pedagogy and practices in higher education. The Cape Town Open Education Declaration states that open education is not just limited to open educational resources should include open educational practices. This implies the use of open technologies and teaching practices to facilitate collaborative, cooperative and flexible learning and it can also expand into new learning, teaching and assessment approaches. Additionally the OPAL report beyond OERs shifting the focus to open educational practices emphasize the call to extend the focus beyond the use of open educational resources in higher education to innovative open educational pedagogy. In this study we define open educational pedagogy from the work of Corinne who describes it as a broad description of collaborative practices that include the creation, the use and the reuse of open educational resources as well as pedagogical practices, sorry I just lost my way, sorry pedagogical practices employing participatory technologies, social networks for interaction, peer learning, knowledge creation and empowerment of learners but this is quite a mouthful for us so we would like to show you what we did. The NWU is committed to open educational practices and open educational and open educational resources and in 2018 this university senate approved our open educational resources declaration echoing our commitment to using and promoting open educational resources and ultimately open educational practices. In an attempt to promote open education at the NWU the NWU OER fellowship program was initiated. The fellowship aims to support lecturers such as myself in their open educational teaching, learning and research endeavors and aligns with the NWU's open educational resources policies which we are currently in the process of developing. Aligned with the NWU's approach to dealing with COVID and the impact of that namely explore, expand and evolve and also with the purpose of the NWU to excel in innovative teaching and learning and cutting edge research benefiting society through knowledge we then entered this open educational or applied for this open educational fellowship program to do the following. The first thing that we did in our teaching and learning is that we analysed the curriculum and then by analysing the curriculum we looked for a topic that we can introduce these open educational practices and then after identifying a suitable topic in this case it was the dimensions of wellness we then applied the 5R principle of open educational resources which is to see what we can reuse, retain, revise, remix and redistribute and one of the things that we found challenging as educators or as teachers during this process was to work through this vast material on the internet and to search for open educational resources specifically on this topic giving the uniqueness the interprofessional nature of this module students from 14 different disciplines working collaboratively etc as well as the philosophical understanding that underpins this module it was very difficult to find an open educational resource on this topic that we could use as is. I do want to note that we did find open educational resource assessment rubrics that we could use and that was already a very good starting point. As a result we then started and we designed and adapted our own learning on the topic basically that we will then now share on an open educational resource site with other lecturers to use and reuse. Now that included the development of the learning development and the editing of the assessment rubrics that we used as well as developing an interactive learning tool that students would use as part of the learning activity. Students then worked in their interprofessional teams now these teams had five members for example there will be a nursing student, a psychology student, a human movement student, a social work student, a bio-kinetic student whatever and they will then conduct research and what they had to do is based on the wellness dimension that they identified they had to search for open educational resources on this specific wellness dimension and I will elaborate a little bit further on that later on in the presentation and based on their what they found they had been to develop and learning artifacts in this sense an infographic using open technologies that they also searched for as part of the teaching and learning in this module. All of these artifacts were then assessed as part of the module mark and then with their consent we then asked them if they would be willing if we can share their learning artifacts or the infographics with others basically on the open educational resource site as well as with the community. These are just some of the work that our students included so I just want to show you very briefly these are the work that they provided or compiled in their groups of five and as I said we have 1,700 and so something students so we're looking at about 300 and wow a lot of infographics and what was nice is we're not only going to upload these on our site to show and for reuse we're also sharing this currently in the process of getting this in hard copy and sharing it with the local community to make sure that we also have that social responsiveness with regarding to sharing this is also one of the the infographics or the learning artifacts that our students designed okay so within the domain of open educational practices and the emergingness that we could find we also struggle to find any research that's been conducted with regards to including open educational practices in in in professional education we couldn't find any study so we conducted this this subtle research project and we wanted to know what is up what what are the perceptions of our secondary health and social care students when it comes to the use of open educational practices this includes looking for OERs adapting OERs looking for open technologies looking for open sources you name it in our in their interprofessional education meaning working collaboratively with members from other disciplines our objectives included establishing a deeper understanding for us on the use of OEP within this collaborative learning environment and to explore how our students are perceiving this as undergraduates we did a literature review with certain keywords but for the empirical study we adopted a qualitative approach we used all inclusive voluntary sampling and 1145 students gave consent the data collection was a written reflection it was an open-ended questionnaire asking them about specific things how did they how did they experience developing the OER how did they how did they experience finding resources things like that so it was open-ended and I think there was yeah there were six questions and then we thematically after the the students who did not give consent their information was removed we only use with use the data anonymized data of the students who did give consent and that daughter was thematically analyzed from the data set two distinct themes emerged the one in the first theme OEP is a way of learning and in the second theme that emerged was learning gains through the use of open educational practices and three sub four sub themes sorry emerged knowledge to empower others and self the development of transferable skills which was an extremely big one learning and enjoyment using open educational resources and then lastly the challenges that they experienced in this process I'll quickly just brief you in everyone each one of them OEP is a way of learning emerges the first theme our students felt that they had the opportunity for a deeper engagement with their content the peers during this process looking for content sharing what they found discussing the content evaluating the content etc made allowed for that deeper engagement they also value the opportunity to apply the knowledge and this is something that we picked up it wasn't only the regurgitation they had to develop something they had to design something they had to evaluate something and being actively engaged with the co-creators of knowledge to help others strongly emerged in this in this topic then sorry colleagues I just want to get to this one slide sorry why is it standing still I'm sorry okay no suddenly it froze on my side okay the next one that emerged very strongly is OEP as a way of learning and also including OEP as part of the interprofessional learning activities the students said that through the process of using open educational resources and applying these principles that it enhanced their interprofessional collaboration communication and peer learning within these interprofessional disciplines and it provided the ideal opportunity for students from different disciplines to learn about from and with each other and for example if you look at the quote there at the bottom it says getting to create something that will benefit others was more beneficial than just receiving marks that only benefited me and not only others in the sub theme two that emerged the learning games using OEP in the sub theme knowledge to empowers others also came out very very strongly the development of the open educational resources can be can be used to promote educational equality and this was also mentioned yesterday by previous speakers and this is something that we realized that our students said that by creating open educational resources they felt empowered and that they can make a difference beyond beyond the classroom context and that knowledge is power and that they have the authority that that learning I'm taking autonomy of their learning and using that knowledge to empower others the second theme that emerged in the sub theme in theme was the development of transferable skills and the students here said that including open educational practices by asking students to develop an open educational resource using open educational technology assisted in development of new skills something that the other modules wasn't doing and they highlighted the transferability of the skills so they can also within their discipline and when they enter the world of work they can also look for open educational resources they can reuse them they can adapt them the fact that they were that they could use open technologies and it was a new skill set that they had to apply that was very very it was highlighted as a very strong point and then they will also be able to apply that skills to their daily lives in other contexts and in future during the world place and for this this was for me very important when they said I learned a lot from creating this open educational resources and will be a resource and we'll be able to use programs just as Canva and picture in the future for developing other content and what we also found after that is for example our pharmacy students and our nursing students they do service learning and when they do go out to our communities they would use these open educational resources for their own or to communicate with with their patients and things like that so suddenly there was a new skill set and that was very good if we look at learning and enjoyment of open educational resources what we found is that it allows for the active engagement in the co-creation of knowledge it wasn't only our knowledge we sent them out to go and see what is out there to evaluate that knowledge and then basically bring that back and based on that decide then bring into the picture also their own knowledge and reference that so that was also good learning through researching and collaboration with others learning through others especially in South Africa where you have with a cult where there's so much cultural diversity what we found in the wellness dimensions is that they started to learn from each other and the different views that they have with regards to wellness the design of the OER makes learning interesting fun and stimulate creativity and they valued having the creative freedom to internalize knowledge and to share that knowledge with others during the learning process there's just a quote to confirm that we also had loads of other quotes I just selected this one and then in the last one that we found in the challenges of open educational resources is that a small number of students stated that they did not enjoy the collaborative learning opportunities we did analyze the data and what was interesting is in many cases we found that those students had a service approach to learning they just wanted the module to be done they didn't want to learn from it they didn't they just had to give me the test so that I can write the test that I'm camp and I can pass so we found that as well one of the other things that they did not in some of the students did not view the development of the open educational resource as an important skill to master as part of their learning and I think this analyzing the data it brings us back to it was a new experience for us but but we have to realize that it's a very very new experience to our students we were the only module in the faculty using open educational resources and sending them out to find resources and remixing those resources etc and this was quite a new skill for them and it was unfamiliar territory and we didn't prep prep them enough we didn't give them enough guidance and that was one of the things that we think really we need to to to enhance in this year they also found their assignments very challenging this this open educational assignment to go and look for stuff to to edit stuff to to search through the content to evaluate the content and we realized that analyzing the data definitely it comes into giving more guidance and support and one of our presenters this morning also shared exactly the same that students need that guidance and support in the development oh but also evaluation of of open educational resources when is it quality I think it was the the session on will you use it on assessment I think it was yesterday so some of the suggestions that came from the students is that a video will help us to do to what what can we look for what must we look for we did provide some information but not as enough as not enough as as the students would have loved the limitations in the studies definitely surrounding the ethics we found it very difficult remember we are playing a lecture research role and and due to that dual role responsibility and the power relationship we were not allowed to engage as research participants we could engage with them on the teaching and learning component but when they had a research question or something like that they were vulnerable so we weren't allowed and for this although we use the research support team we thought that it not being able to engage with our students during the process made it difficult at times the other thing that we also did we that we also think is that we only heard the voices of the students who gave consent some of the students about 400 of them did not give consent what did they have to say so we also think that it's important to hear those voices unfortunately due to the research process we can't share that and we can't analyze this because they didn't give us consent in conclusion our findings confirm that open educational practices has a place in higher education and definitely a place in health sciences as it provides an opportunity to apply knowledge and active cooperation collaboration in a group setting and this is something that will be expected of our students the moment that they start working or in our students value the opportunity to actively engage in the co-creation of knowledge and apply this knowledge to empower themselves and others and I think that in the beginning we were scared what our students is going to do with this and we were we were amazed how they took ownership of this and how they love the fact that they are sharing to empower themselves but also to empower others learning gains included the development of transferable skills and this they were very very happy that we that we did that although it was difficult and the other thing is it was high order thinking skills they couldn't just refer to red content they had to evaluate they had to apply they had to to design and that implied immediately taking ownership and self-directedness and this is something that we value and the challenges definitely reported that some of them and we need to be more transparent and why are we using OERs why are we using open educational practices why do we have an open educational pedagogical approach to our students and then lastly provide them with efficient information and support in the development it was a big learning curve for us but it was a massive learning curve for our students so that is it that's my story so if any if you need any additional information please feel free to contact me I made some notes during the conference so I'll be contacting some of our colleagues after this conference just a year I saw that some of you have also big modules how are you dealing with this etc etc so it's been a pleasure sharing our information with you and please be in contact if you need any additional information thank you thank you so much Yolanda I just loved the infographics that your students produced it's really impressive and it's great to see that creativity being shown in educational activities I just have one question before you go and it's about if someone else was going to adopt this approach what would you advise them where would you advise them to invest their time or what would you advise them to do before they get started on the journey um I think the first thing once again we we were not we were very babies and I'm still a baby in open education so my apologies anybody if I don't know what I what I don't know because it's scary now I know a little bit I was I was actually scaring myself with a little bit of knowledge that I had prior to this and we we just we just wanted to do and make something different so the first thing is we've definitely and this is where there's this fellowship helped a lot there were training courses there were research there were engagement with literature um so that would be my first really empower yourself on what is it and was it what is it not um the second thing is in the design while you are busy with this starts more we we did start small but during that we learned lessons which is part of our learning journey is as as educators as well so we made reflective notes throughout and I think this research doing a research project on this really helped because our students were honest and they know that it was um anonymized so they could share very important things for us to grow things that we didn't know um and that we will improve so this year for example we are using some of the content that our students created last year as part of the learning content this year um we are working in more communication and more more more detailed information we thought that they were 20 they have these magical technology skills and they will be able to do this and do that and they weren't not all of them so we will definitely have a support structure stronger support structure for our students and then definitely get some kind of mentorship yaku um prof yaku is like my mentor if i'm sure i'm sure soundboarding i still soundboard i still ask where can i get open educational resources on this where can i because that was my biggest challenge i didn't know where to search i didn't know because it's it's it's everybody says yes just go to these repositories and i just go but where's the repositories i don't know so i'm still learning and it's fine and we are still learning um with our students and and that would be my first step um we are we are in the process of designing this open educational website and once again these activities will be in word format they can edit that they can use it we will we will have little reflections on where do we think you need to adapt certain things in your own context but they are there and i think that is what lecturers should start doing they should start sharing because we are we can help each other emma i can't hear you i'm sorry sorry i can't hear you excuse me okay there we go sorry like that i was just saying that we've we've gone over but i just thought maybe if we could briefly just address glenda's question about the power relations did you talk to the students about that as a researcher as a as a teacher researcher yeah in the beginning during the research information session remember how it works is we can do research information session but we're not allowed according to the ethics in South Africa to ask the students for informed consent due to the power relationship and possible cohesion or cohesion so what we then do is um all of this was online so we had the research information we were in the waiting room then we would come in right um then we would address the power and say this is the reality we're teaching but we're not allowed to answer this is the people that would do the research component so if you have a question about the research you can contact them they will contact us they will contact you back blah blah blah blah and then we will be put back in the waiting room so that we don't know who what question asked of students but they are fully aware fully informed about the fact that we are both the researcher and the lecturer what is the roles and responsibilities as the lecturers and what is our roles and responsibilities as the researcher so we weren't allowed to know who gave informed consent we weren't allowed we only received the anonymous data set once it's been cleaned by the research team um for us to to analyze and then start working with that the independent neutral individuals who worked with the students asking consent are addressing any of the questions yes so it's a it's an interesting dynamics absolutely thank you so much Yolanda that was fascinating and um i know you're on discord so hopefully um if you'll see if there's any other comments or questions there i really enjoyed that presentation just once thank you Emma thank you Emma thank you colleagues looking forward to this good bye