 of open knowledge using a prototype and textbook platform and your presenters today are Erwin and Michelle so please give a warm welcome to Erwin and Michelle. Well hi everybody it's nice to see you here and Michelle I don't know how your voice is going to be working we did have some audio problems this morning so Michelle do you still want to try your audio right now? I'll try my audio. Okay so I think we're still having the same problem with distortion and so on so I'll kind of proceed for now and hopefully things will sort out so hope you don't get too tired just listening to me. I talk a lot so but anyway I also want to acknowledge that Dr Michael Pascovacius is also part of this development team he's not able to be here today and then also Tannis Morgan has been quite involved with early stages but in the later stages she just became very busy with her work and was unable to participate in this but we certainly want to acknowledge her work as well too so welcome to this really glad to to have you do this join us especially at the end of the sessions and we know that's usually when people are thinking about getting back to the hotel and the airport and all that so thank you for participating and I hope you find this interesting and helpful okay I just I'm not able to advance the slide here are you able to see that okay all right so I'll give an overview I think what excuse me for a moment because I've lost my slides okay so I'd like to give a land acknowledgement and it's something that we do in Canada and I think in many other countries around the world that have to acknowledge the fact that we do live on land that was colonized many years ago and so and our universities exist on these lands and we acknowledge with gratitude that the universities where we work and learn are situated on the traditional and unceded lands of indigenous peoples we're teaching and learning have taken place since time immemorial and that's something that we keep in mind as we share the knowledge not only that we create here but that we've gained so richly with from the peoples who were here many many years before us as well too so as an overview open textbooks some of the thinking that Michelle and Tana's and Michael and myself did was thinking about open textbooks we saw some examples of where not only were they some of the gains of my open textbooks just better access to students in terms of cost which of course was a wonderful thing to have and also sort of the traditional five Rs the so-called five Rs of reusing but also the fact of open pedagogies how to design into and part of open textbooks and we thought how can we extend sort of that traditional use of the textbook as a traditional textbook when we're using new textbooks just beyond you know having an ability to distribute them at lower cost and so one of the bigger questions was how how does particular reuse and of content work within our instructional environments and so that's something that we kind of put our minds to you're familiar I'm sure with the five Rs of openness retain reuse revise remix ability to redistribute and so the two areas that were interested in particular were directing more focus on these three Rs beyond redistribute so reusing and revising how does that play out in the textbook how can we extend those concepts to making open textbooks even a more active and open part of our of our pedagogies kind of the early roots of this and this is a blog post that a couple of us put together after OER 17 so actually come to think of it this is kind of like a fifth year anniversary it's amazing how long this concept has been developing but several of us were in the cab heading back to our hotel after OER 17 which I think was in London is that London Michelle yeah yeah and that was probably one of the first OER sessions where the notion of openness beyond just OER sort of the sort of the bare bones idea of OER and the copyright issues and creative commons and so on started to really open up for us I think in terms of the wider picture of social justice and it was a really buzzy conference because I think there were just new directions of thinking opening up and so we got together in a fondabridge tradition we sat down in a pub which is a great place to get some thinking done and we thought what are some of the other Rs beyond the ones that are tied in with copyright and these are just ones that we just kind of brainstormed over time such as here's a few examples like resist, ruffle, reflect, reframe, reclaim, ramble, read and so on with the idea that there are so many more ways that we can extend just the letter R which is just one letter of the alphabet into different ways of expanding on the possibility as of open educational resources and in this particular context open textbooks if you look at the last column we think a lot about indigenization starting from a place of respect recognizing what has happened relearning our histories retelling our histories and learning how to reconcile so that was kind of like a I think a trigger moment for us when we thought we need to do some more thinking and how do we relate that back to textbooks where in some ways I think we're still using old older forms of pedagogies and just writing them over the potential of open textbooks so how cool how can we move ahead from that and so Michelle do you want to try your audio and see how it's going how is it now I've changed not bad not bad okay so we'll try for a moment okay okay hi everyone I might not last for long so Erwin please interrupt me if I start to go wonky so just as we were rethinking this the starting we thought that a design-based research method might be the best way to try to work through all the thinking around coming up with a different format particularly for OERs and OER textbooks so we've been going through a process of analysis exploration design and construction evaluation and reflection for about the past three over three years four years almost now as we've gathered feedback and moved through the process so I'll go to the next slide so we started with the analysis and exploration and we did some data collection and analysis I'll just we'll go into the details of this as we sort of go through the next few stages so we tested the concept we collected some data and then we actually through that feedback from people came up with some research outputs already so we've done a paper that kind of looked at what it might look like to rethink the textbook and rethink OER resources based on that feedback we've developed a platform and an activity framework that we hope can work with students to sort of honor the kinds of things we were looking at from that feedback from from colleagues about what an open an un textbook possibly could look like and we are now in our stage of evaluation and reflection and a couple of phases of that where we've conducted some course pilots and developed a learning design focused reader based on this platform that we are just starting to launch and use again with students so we're hoping that as we move through our project and we're just in this final phase of collecting data for another year well this spring mostly that we can then really think about sustainability and maintenance how we keep this thing that we've built going how we can spread and share the different use cases the platform the reader and we'll talk a little bit more about that and how do you maintain a user community of around this this resource and platform and idea really of trying to bring in more student voice and as and sort of that critical approach into the learning design right am i still good or when are you good okay i think i was supposed to do sorry we're distracted now that i haven't had my audio so our first analysis and exploration and this actually goes back to like OER 19 and where we were asking people for their ideas and thoughts about how we open up our OER to bring that as everyone was talking about earlier the social justice perspective more equity agency student voice and so we gathered feedback at four different conferences and did analysis on those on all of that feedback so now a little bit more about the concept and one thing that i just want to emphasize here too as well is that a tool like this is not necessary to generate this kind of a pedagogical approach however with with sort of an entanglement entanglement of technology and pedagogy and the fact that textbooks are used so much particularly in some western countries to mediate teaching and learning we thought it would be helpful to have a tool that can kind of promote this this kind of an approach in the data gathering that we got talking to people all around the world as michelle was describing these were some of the main data points that came out of the analysis that we did from from many many big amounts of feedback people wanted multiple perspectives or lenses rather than just linear univocality so how can we build more perspectives or lenses into the learning into the textbook the classroom discussions how can we have bring in forums reflective writing and community generated text rather than just text that kind of comes prepackaged into the learning environment also knowledge beyond the fixed object of study in other words having a way in which it can be continually co-created connected to the communities of learners from where they're at and from the needs that they bring to that particular learning environment knowledge is more contextual and distributed um that it lives outside of the classroom again what the settings of the teaching and the learning in the classroom itself all influence the knowledge and how it is perceived within within that learning environment the wisdom of indigenous ways of knowing and connection which involves relationality and how do we build relations to from our the communities that we live in the communities that we work in the communities within the classroom and within the learning environment itself how do we build that within the knowledge that we're building itself um how do we conceptualize the ownership of knowledge uh within within that same setting and there was a lot of people said why can't we have more shift in power relations among students uh instructors and institutions how how can we actually arrange a learning resource that can actually help facilitate some of these things and so um just so the so that kind of led us to a framework where we thought if learners can take the content that's there and actually be involved in and by content that's there i mean that's originally seeded into the into the open textbook how can they continue to extend and reframe and you remember the that um multiple ours framing that came earlier how can they repurpose re-extend reframe rebuild that knowledge respond to it from different aspects whether it's if they say i want to look at it from a different issue um i have a different role perspective one student is an administrator another one is a teacher another one's instructional designer um or different lenses the BIPOC lens lgbtq plus and so on a decolonizing lens a lens from the global south so um we invite students to take the original content that is provided in what would be traditionally like an open textbook and say okay you write another chapter um and we use the word chapter loosely but another section that can continue to grow that particular resource or what setting do you come from do you come from a professional workplace do you have a community setting are you within the health setting a certain discipline um so that's how we try to build it so that students can bring different perspectives different settings different issues different lenses depending on what is important to them and use that as an exercise to continue to develop content and open up um for the perspectives on the original content that was provided okay so based on all the feedback we worked with uh tom woodward who is a wizard of building platforms um and designed it with we met with tom multiple times um and tried to build in some of the following pieces into a platform that would kind of honor some of the the the pedagogical processes that we were hoping for um including the framework that erwin just um presented so we were it ended up being a wordpress theme that we're using um that has some customization and it focused on agency so allowing students to um be authors and in at the moment we have chapter but we also have a section called voices and so students can respond to um a chapter they can then rewrite or respond to it um in a voice they can also then communicate with each other through via comments and we'll show a little bit of how that's working um we looked at voice and again empowered to speak with our own voices and i think that's been very powerful for the students it's a little bit different than them writing a blog um as they're engaging with the content directly they can actually um the way it's built students can if they want or participants can contribute anonymously so there is a sense there that they can choose and there's lots of choice about how they want to contribute if they want to put their name or not um we tried to add in structure that's a little bit more non-linear so that we're not recreating the idea that a textbook is going to guide you step by step through something that you can enter at different places um so that's not as easy to do as we had hoped um so in the end we do have various topics that are organized and sort of linearly on a page but they um there's no structure for the textbook about how you should work through it um we built an accessibility with udl principles and we also encouraged when we were doing our call for contributions to the learning design specific reader um you know inclusion of multi multimedia and different forms of media and then we wanted to ensure that it was quite interactive and so that framework encourages the extending and reframing and i think the framework um from what we've heard from students who have used it has been really really powerful for them um and one of the things that we talked a lot about is that this kind of um space could be quite chaotic um and students sometimes don't know how to contribute so that framework really gives them something to um build on it's a really nice foundation for them and it's really got them to shift their thinking which i think has been really really important so in this this is just an example of the um rethink learning design topics and it's probably a little bit hard to read but here's an example of how we try to introduce non-linearity um the topics are organized um but you can on the main page you can choose all um sort of anywhere to go um and so this just came together a final kind of in january february we had our final versions that we shared with authors and we're still just thinking through um how we want to to launch it for people to use and we'll talk a little bit about that in next steps so in each of these chapters there's a framework provided that students can or participants can respond um and create their own voice so how do we how do we engage that outside um we're using it in the classroom right now and i think that's its intention but looking for feedback as well on others who might want to use it and how they might want to use it everyone do you want to add anything you just have five left by the way everyone yeah um just giving our time left i yeah we'll just let's just keep keep going okay sounds good um and we just wanted to highlight very quickly the peer review process that we um and we did an open peer review process for this so that was part of it um and really the criteria is about um that representing um being respectful of diversity representing different kinds of knowledge and we really looked for in each of those chapters ways and activities for people to actually engage directly with the content so it's not just a chapter it's also a an interactive engagement okay and so very quickly we'll just talk about the research that we're currently doing because we'd like to share so on the right hand side is an example of one of the test activities that we did in one of my courses at Royal Roads so the prototypes now we've been used in two different instances at Royal Roads um students have completed the these activities in both courses and we're actually in the second year right now so we're gathering another round of feedback after they use it again which is nice because they will actually be able to engage with the student content from last year so if you look down on the right um you see that the issues roll perspectives lenses and settings framework is actually built in that's at the bottom of each page and we have quite a few responses in each of those sections so students have have responded to the original reflect respond and reframe activity there's some content there and then they're also commenting so you don't actually see the amount of comments so there's three or four comments usually also on each so we've done a first pass of coding um and interviews with six students and uh we are um I'll keep going so we'll talk about our results everyone so far early yeah so this is our first pass of coding we're not going to get into this just to show that we're getting some really interesting feedback on everything from comparison to other resources to positionality um about critical educational technology the value of their contribution things like the value of openness um and the utility of the framework response and so on so a lot of there's a lot of kind of uh good reflection on from students on what it is they're actually doing here kind of a medic medic cognitive mirror of of of how their thinking is expanding as to how they're interacting with content that's given to them what's the some of the processes involved in extending and reframing it and this is just another way of looking at the at the data so we'll continue to process this data and both Michelle and I are using it in our current courses the graduate courses in the learning and technology program at roller roads university and then once we've done two rounds then we will start getting more deeply into analysis and publish some more of the results and continue to modify the um the tool as well because you know we are that we always had the design-based research framework in the back of our mind so everything that we do with it continues to fold back into improving learning and improving the tool and just a few comments from students and I'll read the first one I'm from a very corporate learning environment interested to see how the same material or the same educational issue could be spread almost into into almost like a spider web so many different layers depending on the setting in which you work and the setting in which perspective from which you are learning so it was really good to see different interpretations of one article from my peers who are in a very different setting for me yeah and I really liked the next quote this is a different way of engaging in content which is looking for what you said building and reframing and building and framing so that that shifting is really coming through the next one you have to give up a little bit of control it's a little bit like putting yourself out there it's demystifying the academy like this idea of I don't know everything and I want to engage and I want people to engage with me so that we can learn together versus just always kind of relying on certain people who have all that knowledge so that's kind of a reflection of more of a democratizing approach to learning within the classroom setting and the final one it's about me I mean I'm the one living in this course in this moment in time and I have my other job and I'm engaging so maybe I should give it my all like invest a bit so I think seeing that they're engaging with others outside possibly the community too I think also has been impactful for them all right and I think we're out of time but just the final wrap-up so we're looking at different use cases for this so the we have the reader itself that's sitting on a platform but we also have built the platform so it might be that people are interested in the framework itself and the way it works with students so we're looking at that how an instructor might take the current rethink ld reader and the link is there if you would like to take a look it's some fantastic work from 12 authors 12 author teams really and about critical approaches to learning design a variety of topics and if you would like to contact us and use it there's a contact form on one of the pages in the reader and then also maybe you want to take a copy of it and redo it like use the whole thing in a course so we're just trying to think through how all of those might work and what hosting might look like doing a bit of further testing and analysis so we can make some changes from student feedback and then continuing the research as well and I think that's it for now and we don't want to wear