 Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good whatever. British Columbia there. I'm so looking forward to this because we're going to have a bit of medievalism and game of thrones. I mean, what's not to look there. So we're not delaying anymore. I'm going to hand you over to Alan and Palace. Great. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm Tadis Morgan. And this is Alan Levine as everybody knows that he barely needs any introduction. And we're here to show you some stories from the voices of instructors who are using the Open ETC. And I don't know if anybody's been to some of the other Open ETC presentations that have happened at this conference. But I'll just explain briefly. The Open ETC is an ed tech collaborative that's being that was started by myself, Brian Lamb and Grant Potter and now has the addition of Emery Scott and Clint Lalonde and numerous other people in the background as well, including Alan who was brought on this year to help us with some community coordination. But basically what you need to know for this presentation today is that we're really about providing a cooperative structure to Open ETC. We have a lot of work to do with educational technology. Contributions not contracts. We look to people who use the Open ETC to contribute back to keep this going. And it's been running for about five years now. So what we are starting to cultivate is a real collection of really interesting things that have happened in the environment in the Open ETC. And in combing through what's been happening in the Open ETC we pulled out a few examples. We contacted the instructors who actually were responsible for their creations and asked them in their own voice to share what they did in the Open ETC impacted their teaching and learning what it allowed them to do what worked for them. And that's what you're really going to hear today is a couple of stories of instructors in their own voices talking about the Open ETC and their teaching and learning. And then Alan and I are going to come back and really the question we have today is does Open do Open Education practices require Open Ed Tech? And that's really going to be the question that we're going to leave you with today. Excellent. Let's get to the stories. Especially for the WordPress. This is open to all BC educators and students. It's kind of a self-service thing. So we're going to hear first from Dana Wessel-Lightfoot at UNBC about a fascinating history course and I'm going to let her tell it. I can't hear it. Oops, did I goof up? Did I mess up? That's just me. It worked great five minutes ago. Oh boy. Next screen time. Okay. I'm going to share it again with the audio and we're going to start over and reset the clock. This semester I taught a 400 level course on game drones and medievalism. Using two resources from Open ETC a Mattermost chat board and a WordPress course website. I wish I could convey how amazing both of them were in a clear and concise way. I wanted to support my pedagogical vision and the framework I had for my course. Through the course website I could map out the core components of the course for students in a logical way but also through a variety of different structures. Each page I built connected to the others in a relational way so students could see how the whole course fits together but also follow it in a logical fashion. I also created a podcast for the course and the students loved to watch each episode and listen to it when they wanted but also untethered to Wi-Fi or data and I think for our students this semester getting away from screens was so important. It's really crucial to me that the course website was open access so that anyone could use the materials I presented readings, handouts, podcasts and I've had lots of people who have as a result been listening to my podcast who aren't my students but are starting to think about and the way it impacts our society in lots of different ways which is super exciting to me. So alongside the WordPress site I used a Mattermost chat board as a means of communicating with my students but also providing them with a space to discuss course material and connect with one another. While I created separate channels for each group I put the students themselves in charge of establishing the weekly conversations and keeping them going. They loved the chat board framework so much more dynamic than a traditional discussion board on an LMS. It gave students the opportunity to engage with conversation with one another in real time but also when it suited their schedules and it was easy for them to follow and I became an observer. I was only an occasional participant when they would tag me in those discussions but really the students were the drivers and wow did they have amazing conversations. Plus I have to put a plug in for the DM feature as it helped reduce my email and really who doesn't want less email but also stay connected with my students more easily. Email easily gets missed in my inbox which is always overflowing but the DM I would just leave until I had a chance to look at it and I knew it was there. So it was a great tool. So overall I can't imagine teaching a course now without using these resources. They've completely changed the way I think about how I interact with my students online but also the various possibilities that I can use such as the podcast for example to make my class connect to the broader world. We apologize we had hoped we could sort of page through her site as you're talking and it really is worth looking at and also to mention that these stories we created the site that this presentation is embedded in as a place for anybody in the Open ETC who has done a site or used a surface to post a story and audio, text, video and so it's a way of we're asking when we say contributions not contracts is to say like one way you can give back to this community is to just share your work so others in the space and outside can see what is possible but obviously there's so many things we could spend the whole presentation highlighting some points that Dana meant but I hear it kind of transform the way that she looks at her course. She has a fantastic concept but the way this course is structured and I really hope you spend some time visiting it is really impressive. Yeah, I would agree and I think there was a lot of creativity in just taking a WordPress site, adding a webcast to it and then figuring out that the communication space could also be in Mattermost which is the other highly used service that the Open ETC is providing the sector so just the combination of these simple tools and resulting in something really different and unique so and you'll see that in that we'll be sharing, if you want while we're playing the audio for the next one there will be a link in the chat as well that you can just explore because the next one is a great example of I think a mix of community based learning so learning in the community but using WordPress as a way to share student work and also just take the course into a more open way. I used the Open ETC website instead of a conventional program like Blackboard or Canvas for my experiential learning course that I taught first in 2017 and then again 2019 it was on the suggestion of the IT person and IT teaching person Grant Potter at my university University of Northern British Columbia and he just sort of said in passing why don't you just make it all online and open to the world rather than putting behind a walled service in the way that you normally would share course content and messages with students and I like the idea because the course I was doing was an experiential learning and community engagement course at a national historic site near Prince River British Columbia in Port Edward at the North Pacific Canary and it just seemed to really work with the overall goal of the course but thinking about it it actually could work really well with any course. There's no reason why my syllabus needs to be accessible only by a login in fact there's no reason why my assignment descriptions or anything like that needs to be accessible by a login and to communicate with students I can do that of course by email I don't need to do it through this online system so I really like the openness of this OpenETC WordPress website I had experience working with WordPress just making my own professional page and it's a very user friendly interface and so on the one hand just for running the course it was an enjoyable kind of way to run a course and then it really helped with the community engagement and delivery of the course because a huge part of this course and unlike other courses I would teach the students projects were based on their own research in archives and to read interviews with people on site in Port Edward and Prince Rupert and then instead of writing conventional essays which would be normal in a history course they instead have these public history projects and so then the website also served as a way to share with students agreements so the students submitted their essays or their assignments by email but then I said I'd like to put this on the course website and in the case of written assignments sometimes I had minor corrections to a Word document and then they would send me a revised version and we sort of then published it on the course website so this is again another wonderful thing about this OpenETC WordPress website that you can then also show the course deliverables for the students to read, to do so and it was just a wonderful interface and experience teaching with it it's something that now on reflection it could be used more broadly in lots of my teaching there's no as I said already there's no reason why I need to be using something like Canvas or Blackboard to communicate with students because also it's a way to share the things we're doing in the classroom even if it's a conventional kind of class it's a way to share things that we're doing in the classroom with the broader world to be sort of open about course content and hopefully some of the things that students are learning about could actually be used by other people elsewhere So I really love this one because what he had he had a face-to-face sort of class experience but where students were going into communities, indigenous communities up north and northern BC where there used to be a lot of fishing and canneries and they were interacting and interviewing and gathering, you know, looking at historical artifacts and that sort of thing to create this collection. So he has this collection on this website now of student research projects that included audio, video, artifacts that really get at the history this rich history of British Columbian canneries and there's a newspaper article that was written about what he was doing which is also really interesting, I'll get our background people to pop that in the chat as well just to give you a sense of just really the blend of open education practices that was very much community embedded and facilitated by making these artifacts more open and as a result this is a really rich sort of history site around BC canneries which I think is also a great contribution beyond the course so how much time do we have left probably not much I thought we'd go back to the site itself so we could just give an overview, Tainas, of the other stories typically when I've done these kind of presentations I pay a little snippet but I think what they said was so compelling that we wanted to do so just to let you know we got a message from a student from the EdTech program at University of Victoria really profound thing about their Mattermost community which again is an open source version of more or less what Slack or teams do but most of the faculty we hear from say it's a lot simpler for them and their students to use we have from Langara College using an open ETC site to create a book club to discuss current topics we have some more history history sites seem to be well featured here which I really think and then from GIBC Jennifer McFarland is that right Jessica Motherwell yeah teaching a research class which I thought was fascinating she has her students do hand draw comics as a way to practice their understanding of the concepts and then they share them in an open ETC site and sort of it's a community gathering so you can see others people's work and reaction to the same assignment prompts and it's one of my favorites in there so again what we set up is this place where people if they if we can sort of gently encourage them and we say got five minutes they can post their story here and there's lots of ways they can do it they can link it to something they produced they can upload a file or an image and they can even record it directly into the site and then we ask them for some information about it so we're just at the beginning here but we hope that we can sort of encourage this as a community practice within open ETC for people to think as they create sites because there's a lot of things we didn't even show you so there's what we've been able to do in open ETC is to set up more or less sites that are already built out as templates so we've got 10 or 12 that are sort of portfolio style templates for different course areas so students instead of getting an empty WordPress site they get a starter site so there's like hundreds and hundreds of portfolio sites within the mix. Yeah and I think one of the interesting things about doing this process as well is just seeing for example Clint LaLonde is using Mattermost to teach a course and he actually posted a blog post that step by step lays out how he structures it so that in the event that somebody else wants to go well how would I actually move my students out of the LMS into Mattermost and how would I structure Mattermost to make it an effective teaching environment he's already contributed that of his description and audio clip that he provided as well so there's more examples on the site that we created for this presentation there's more examples on the actual site which is what are we calling it openetc.opened.ca is where we're collecting it and I want to say too I want to shout out to Alan who made this really easy as well because one of the things that it allows people to do is just record audio directly onto the site so they don't need to upload anything and I think that's really been helpful in getting contributions as well and also in the dog fooding category this is a site that's also available for openetc members that this template that we use for the site is just within the mix of things that are available there's also people do project sites so you know you heard from the community effort for 25 years of ed tech that site for that is hosted in there we have a couple project many project sites that are in there so there's a nice array of different kinds of sites and I don't do you want to mention or you I could quickly share on Josie's site do you want to talk about that why don't we we'll put the link to Josie says well while you're doing so Josie Gray is a student who's doing a masters in accessibility and design at Okad University and she's just created a really wonderful podcast where she interviews various people around epistemic justice but it's a wonderful site as well and again it's it's a student who's using openetc to create and make possible her graduate work there it is magically showed up thank you and it's really it's a really wonderful podcast it's really worth checking out as well and I think I just want to include that you know there are students that are doing really interesting things as well with the openetc I see Kyle's mentioning yeah it's actually a bad metaphor and I tried to stop using it but software developers had this thing like about 10 years ago about eating your own dog food meaning if you're creating a software product that you actually use it I actually have understood it's got bad connotations and other cultural areas so I generally tried to stop using it but I kind of fell into that but yeah eating your own dog food it's not something we recommend so yeah we encourage you to go explore and the question we have is really maybe it's just one that we leave you with which is do you need open educational technology to actually do open education practices it's something that I've been thinking about quite a bit I do feel like just having seen what instructors are doing what students are doing that definitely it's an important enabler for that but that's really the question that we were hoping to leave you with today and whether that's really where some of our institutional focus may need to go if we really want to level up with open education practices in our institution put some investment into open head tech thank you now I think if you've done great and you've been so welcoming and sharing your material because I think there's a lot of people who philosophically are attracted to open education but they're not quite sure how they actually go about doing it and I like the idea where you have I know you didn't use the term wizards but you also almost have sort of pre-half you know they're sort of IKEA versions and it's if you just join the dots and I don't mean to sound as bad as you but I do think it's really important I think a lot of people would genuinely welcome the opportunity but they don't know what they don't know so I think by showing examples and taking the steps of how to do it and so yeah I think that's really well done I think it's gone really well I think you've answered so many questions people have just been more just sort of acknowledging the work that you're doing the links are all up there and I think they're really really useful and anybody watching the recording because as soon as this is over I'll be certainly jumping on to some of those links so can I get a round of applause from everybody there to sort of acknowledge the work from Val and Christina so yeah oh Clint is in there like that so it's been wonderful so I think look I think thanks very much for that it's only the last last thing you'd like to sort of just one final shout out where's our countdown in Irish yeah I just wanted to be warned by Martin Weller not to oh who listened to him what is he yeah that's all so now look at next time I'm back I was twice in BC two years ago so I happily go out and count Oscar earlier so you know closing Brian video excellent yes we have a closing video so from Deb has been behind the scenes there like that so round of applause from everybody because there's lots of stuff here lots of great comments coming in there like that so thank you very very much thank you Tom Om nom nom