 All right, welcome everyone to our spring 2020 webinar on open pedagogy with faculty and students by the community college consortium for open educational resources part of open education global. We have a great lineup for you today with a number of practitioners of open pedagogy, exploring different approaches to the engagement between faculty and students in ways that engage students and learning opportunities that go beyond the board boundaries of the classroom. And engage them in the curation and contribution to global model. We'll start with some introductions, talk a little tiny tiny bit about CCC OER what we do, and then we'll get into our special guests today. Our special guests here, I'll just give each of you a very quick opportunity to introduce yourself and just say your name where you're from if you want. Go ahead Jessica. Hello, I'm Jessica Parsons and I'm an OER specialist at Paradise Valley Community College in Arizona. Excellent, thank you. And David, did you want to go ahead and introduce yourself as well since you will be speaking greatly. Sure, my name is David Dwork from Paradise Valley Community College and I am math faculty and the chair of the OER committee for our college. Excellent, thank you. And Karen. Hi, I'm Karen Cancellusi, I'm a professor of biology at Keen State College in New Hampshire, and also the open education faculty fellow there. Great, thank you. And then Zev. Hi, I'm Zev Kossin, I'm an archeologist and a faculty member at Montgomery College in Rockville in Germantown. Excellent. And Eduardo, did you want to introduce yourself. Sure, my name is Eduardo Chavez. I'm an international student currently in Montgomery College in Maryland in the Rockville campus and I am working with Zev Kossin. Excellent, thank you very much. Before we get started with the discussion about Open Pedagogy today, I just wanted to briefly remind everybody what CCC OER is all about. As I mentioned earlier, we're part of the larger Open Education Global Network. We're an organization that spans the globe supporting open education, Community College Consortium for OER is primarily North American node of the larger OE Global. Our goal is to expand awareness and access to high quality content OER, providing support for a lot of our members and also those who are not members. Many, many people who are not members of CCC OER benefit greatly from the website that we have for our community email, which you can sign up on at the website. We also try to do our best to help lead or help leaders of open in open education do their work. It's not ourselves, the leaders, it's really just a network of folks who try to get together to support open educational work across the network. And ultimately, the whole goal of everything that we do, as you probably put a guest is student success in the end. That's what we're looking for. We also just want to remind everybody, if you haven't heard yet, that we have put together a website, you can see the URL right there. The website is an opportunity for folks to share the extraordinary stories of the work that they're doing during this time of this COVID-19 crisis. And so if you have a story of something that you're doing at your institution, or if there is something that you've heard about, then this is an opportunity for anyone to go out there and go ahead and share the story and have it published. There are a few options. You can insert an image, you can do a brief description and provide a URL. And we've already got a number of really great inspiring stories about how people are responding in this time when so many people are transitioning. Teaching or remote teaching and dealing with all of the additional stress and challenges brought about by the pandemic. So without further ado, I'm going to go ahead and get started. Just allow our guests to take over here. What you will find, I think, very quickly is that we have a variety of approaches to open pedagogy and this kind of innovative way of engaging faculty, students, and recently the learning environment. So at this point, I would like to just go ahead and turn it over to David Dwork and Jessica Parsons from Paradise Valley Community College, which is in my district, the Maricopa Community College District. Thank you so much, Matthew. I'm going to jump in. This is David Dwork. I'm going to jump in and just, again, just introduce myself. My job at the college as the OER chair is to help faculty adopt OER and support them in that process. And we were fortunate enough to find out about the program that College of the Canyons was running about where they were using students to help support that. So I was lucky enough to approach my administration with this idea, and they essentially said, run with it. So I was lucky. We found Jessica Parsons. She was one of our first OER specialists that we were able to hire. And essentially, we got her going and got out of the way. And she has just run with it since then. So, and I'm going to do that exact same thing. I'm going to get out of the way and let her take over from here. Jessica. Thank you, David. Can everybody hear me now? Great. Thank you. All right, so thank you, David. So let's talk a little bit about what is an OER specialist. So an OER specialist's job is to support our content experts or the faculty who have been studying their field and are ready to help their students learn without the cost of a traditional textbook. We also help them to verify ADA compliance. And we're here to help them make OER accessible to our busy faculty. And just help them to know that there is someone there to act as a research assistant and to assist them in whatever range that they need help with. So our projects range from everything from traditional textbooks to what we call resource banks, which are in our LMS, we use Canvas. They are groups of resources and links as well as chapters and textbooks that we've organized to help the teachers teach right out of Canvas instead of having the students need to get a physical textbook. We've completed quite a few courses and learned a lot along the way. I am a theater major as well as a web design major. So to me, one of the greatest things about this is the ability to learn lessons and learn from classes that I wouldn't otherwise normally be able to take. And then we're currently working on quite a few projects. I will say that COVID-19 has slowed our progress a little bit, but I am still looking at having all of these available in fall of this upcoming fall, fall of 2020. So we're going to work hard and I know the teachers are really excited to keep going with all of these projects. Now our impact. We have been working since the end of March of 2019. So in our first couple of projects, we were just kind of working to get a feel for what are the faculty interested in and what what opportunities are there as we're learning. And our first live semester where we introduced five different five different projects, we were able to save students about $26,000. The following spring 2020 semester this semester, our total savings to students is about $43,000 a little closer to 44. So that $70,000 over the two semesters that we've published textbooks and resources for our students has really brought an awareness to students that there are options out there. Many of them are taking OER classes for the first time and are beginning to ask other teachers. Can, is there an OER option for you. We've also done outreach programs where we've encouraged and sort of taught our students how to enroll in and find OER classes and that has helped quite a bit, not only to bring awareness to the fact that students can save money, but also bring awareness to our faculty members and how they will be able to encourage them to maybe adopt OER whether it's a full course or simply just resources. It's really helped us and we did a survey at our college and found that 70% of part time and 60% of full time students struggle to pay for textbooks or simply just skip them. So this impact that we're seeing is actually having an effect on enrollment, especially for these classes that aren't necessarily required for most majors. So I thought I would share a little bit about me. So before I became an OER specialist, I was a homeschool student. I completed homeschool from kindergarten all the way through high school. And one of the things that that really taught me was this idea of sort of the patchwork quilt way of building a curriculum. My mother was my primary teacher and she would give my sister and I multiple resources as we were learning and we would sort of bring them together to create a more comprehensive curriculum. So I feel as an OER specialist that has really helped to set me up for success. A lot of what we do is also as many of you know through licensing, asking for permissions and understanding what we can and cannot legally use. And I actually was first introduced to that through a Photoshop course that I took. One of the lessons was dedicated to learning about different licensing and the Creative Commons was covered in that and that was sort of a first eye opening moment for me that there are all of these different licenses out there. And then also a love of research. I was always the kind of student who if you asked for a five page paper, I'd probably give you about six or seven pages and then probably two more pages of resources at the end. So having that experience and having just that love of research and that love of continually learning things really helped me to grow and to I feel be successful in this position. We recently just hired another OER specialist to help us out. And we're working to grow the program multiple colleges are now looking to adopt the College of the Canyon model as well. So there are definitely some lessons that we've learned from our first projects. We tend to work a semester or two ahead simply because we want to make sure that we have enough time to complete everything. And really it's not about the full course. It's about finding the resources needed to support what the faculty are already using so often faculty are overwhelmed by the idea of working on an entire course over the course of a month, a couple of months, or a semester, working to build up from the ground up a course and it's not about the full course. There have been so many opportunities that we've had to simply supplement a course or to help a faculty member with a resource that wasn't quite working for them and help to kind of introduce them in that way to OER. So and we also following up with faculty constantly we're in constant communication with faculty who we are currently working on projects with, as well as those who we've completed projects for. There's always opportunities for these courses to grow and evolve into the change as well. Another thing that we've also learned is always asking about copyrighted content. We've actually been very surprised a lot of big companies and creators and publishers are sometimes willing to allow us to use their resources in the OER realm as well. So, and of course there's always room for rewrites there have been several courses that we have rolled out one one semester, and then we've started to look at how the students are responding to them and we're making adjustments. Next semester we're actually going to be doing quite a few tweaks along the way just to make sure that we're polishing these courses and that they're relevant and ready for these students. And then we save absolutely everything that we find we try and save everything so that we can continue to share resources because as a student one of the things that I've noticed is as I'm going through my different courses. I've found that the same topics or the same ideas pop up in multiple courses in multiple disciplines. So sometimes those lessons can be shared to create more of a continuity for the student along their degree path. And then also keep talking about OER really we're our best advocates those who use OER and teach from OER. We're the ones who are out there on the front lines if you will and we're the ones who need to keep talking about OER that's the only way that it'll get out there. So, thank you so much. Hi, I guess I'm next. Hey Liz, is it okay if I share my video? I guess I'm just I'm just going to do it. I have no problem with you doing that. Go ahead. Thank you. All right, I just I wanted to do that because I wanted to start a little bit before I get into the slides just to talk a little bit about how I am struck at this moment. How the COVID crisis is really a moment for open pedagogy and obviously there's a lot of negative aspects to this crisis and I'm not trying to pretend that there's not but but if there's any little tiny bit of silver lining it's the ways in which open pedagogy has emphasized some of the things that some of us have been doing that others are starting to realize oh yeah maybe some of this stuff is important. What's really been interesting is that when we've been forced to sort of suddenly teach online. That it's kind of created a kind of triage like we have to ask ourselves what is most essential to us as instructors what is it that we really need to keep. I'm really fascinated by the fact that a lot of institutions just said let's just drop grading that can go right let's focus on our students on supporting our students. Let's focus on how our students can really be able to be successful in this new environment and so we're actually examining how issues of access are affecting our learners, something that those of us in the open education movement have been talking about for quite a while, talking about access. Looking at ways that students can help us design our courses right to say how do we center student agency in our in our classes. And we've talked about how social justice is absolutely integral to our discussions of open pedagogy. And now is an opportune time for us to be addressing anti Asian behavior that we're seeing around our country and around the world. This is something we can do in our classrooms. So, let me just kind of go on to this slide. If I can get there. My buttons are not advancing the slides. We should have had that practice Matthew. Yeah, you've got you've got control so you should be able to. There we go it was just a little bit. No. Let's do this. Of course we practice this and now it's not working. So go ahead and request the remote control. Maybe that was all my problem. Okay. Sorry. No problem. Okay, great. Okay, here we go. So I want to talk about what open pedagogy is. I could just get that next slide up. Okay, okay. Sorry, folks, I'm real really apologize for the delay here, but So now that we've got this all worked out. You tell me and I'll and I'll put the next slide there. Okay. Okay, let's just go with this slide for now. And so what I wanted to put here was talking about how these essential elements of open pedagogy that I was just talking about a slide that I've used a lot in different forms in the past, where I'm talking about emphasizing community and collaboration over the content of our courses in our within our courses and again in this crisis this is something that's really come to the forefront for us. I'm connecting to the wider public how we can be a resource for others in the community, talking about how learners can contribute to not just consume knowledge how do our students actually contribute knowledge and not just be passive recipients of information. And again, how students can be driving their own learning processes. What is the extent to which giving students agency, allowing them to decide what they need best in order to learn. And so also talking about the critical approach to the use of tools and technology. I don't know how many of you guys out there are getting lots of emails about, Oh, by this and tech product. That we're in this crisis. Here's this free version of this material that you can have from us or free software, only to probably get turned around and cost us money later so we need to be sort of critical about the kinds of technologies that we that we might be using. And I put the open licenses up here on this slide to remind us that when when students are creating content that when we're creating OER that it's not just faculty that can create you are but students can do that and that it's not just about text books right so we're talking about all the ways in which open pedagogy can really bring a lot of revolutionary ways to think about how we can transform our teaching and how we can kind of maybe utilize this moment to do that. So let's try the next slide there, Matthew. Thank you. One of the open pedagogy projects that I've used quite a bit in the past and we can be talking about a lot of different kinds is the idea of domain of one zone. I don't have to talk about this today because the domain of one zone is absolutely an important way that students can create openly licensed content of their own by giving them their own little slice of the web where they're able to share the kind of knowledge that they're interested in where they can put an open license on their work where they can think about their digital identity where they can learn how to be digitally fluent and engage with others online as we think about them as digital citizens. And so the next slide will talk a little bit about here's an example of a student domain where students are creating the kind of content that they that they're interested in getting across to the public. And so the fact that students can have an audience beyond their professor really changes the nature of the kind of work that they want to get out there. And so when we think about how these spaces are not just static places of broadcast but they can be interactive where students can comment on each other's work where the larger community can read what they're doing and they can provide comments back on the work where it's a space for students to be collaborative or there can be ways in which students are constantly revising and keeping the work dynamic that these kinds of spaces can be these renewable assignments or these non disposable assignments where the work can live on past the end of the semester if the student wants it to right we're talking about giving students opportunities giving students choices and not mandating that they be on the web because we don't want to enact exploitation. We want to really be able to give our students opportunity. And the next slide is a quote from one of my students when we talk about changing the audience for our students. One of my students wrote this a long time ago. It was a drastic and honestly scary change going from a traditional learning course where I only have my instructor's opinion to worry about. And so when we think about when our students are creating assignments who are they creating that for is it just for you. And the paper that you have to grade and at the end of the semester you hand it back or the student never picks it up and you throw it out. So when students start to think about the value of their work in terms of the audience that they have. It really makes a huge amount of difference. On the next slide I want to show you some other examples of thinking about like right now in this opportunity my students are thinking about what they've wanted to contribute. And we've been actually talking a little bit about the corona virus since February. And then obviously things really ramped up on our campus where a couple of students were writing about the biology like what is a virus what is the corona virus. How does that actually get transmitted to other people talking about the epidemiology. So I've just allowed my students to think about what is it that you want to say what is it that you want to be talking about right now. And so a number of other of my students started to say yeah this is really this is really what's at the forefront for me this is what's on my mind right now. On the next slide. You'll see students talking about how they were starting to feel hopeless and so we say how can you contribute to the community and what you're in right now to feel maybe a little bit less hopeless or think about what's going on for other college students. This didn't put together a variety of resources that maybe help people think a little bit more positive she talked about vaccine developments that are happening in different parts of the world. And she was talking about antibody testing and other kinds of things that showed a little bit of some of the positive trends that may be happening out there not that there aren't negative things that are happening. But it seemed important to her for there to be information that felt a little bit more positive to others so again when a student has their own slice of the web where they can just put whatever they want to up there and but at the same time they're learning about the biology they're learning about the statistics of it they're learning a lot of content while they're contributing to their community. This is the real essence of open pedagogy. The next slide is another example of a student contributing here about mental health in particular and I don't know about many of you spent a lot of time online with my students one on one just asking them how their life is going right now. And some of them are just talking about how they feel both overwhelmed and bored at the same time, which which is really interesting and I asked my student to kind of write about that what is it that you're feeling. What is the anxiety that you're feeling and so when they're talking about this in their online spaces and other students have an opportunity to respond and say yeah I'm feeling that to what is it that we can do to address that. On the next slide shows an example of a student who is writing about a hoarding and bulk buying is it really necessary, like what's going on with that why are people doing this and so there are other examples where students were writing about social distancing and all of the things that are probably been on all of our minds but connecting what's going on currently in the world to ongoing concepts that we've talked about in class like what is exponential growth and what is the biology of this epidemic that's happening right now that those connections are really the value in the learning. And I think on the next slide if I remember correctly, oh I just wanted to put out the fact that you don't have to necessarily have a really fancy reclaim hosting domain of one's own project at your campus. There are some free tools, and I put free in quotes here because, of course you can have free versions and then things don't always stay that free or you get ads that can come up and so we can be a little bit critical about some of these tools. I think of some of these tools as starter tools, and then we find ways to get around and using more independently designed tools or tools where we can get rid of the ads but these are good places for students to start as their their own space for creating a domain. And the next slide is talking about how one of the ways that students can drive traffic to the sites that they've been creating is to use social media. And again, another tool like Twitter, like LinkedIn, not perfect, they can be fraught with all kinds of problems, but when students know how to leverage social media connections in a way that can really get their ideas and their energy out to the public. It can be quite powerful. And so students here we're talking about in a Twitter chat that we had about what's going on in their classrooms, how some they felt some professors were maybe assigning three hour lectures and 10 different videos they had to watch and in other classrooms they felt like it was going wonderfully they felt so incredibly supported by their professors. And so it's just a really fascinating discussion and by making it public students from other universities and a few other people kind of jumped in on this a little bit as well. So on my last slide I just want to end with a quote by Robin Derosa, because I think it really highlights what she was talking about when she wrote this a long long time ago I've used this quote and some of my other talks, we're thinking about access, access to knowledge. When my students gain access to knowledge I want it to be part of a larger invitation, right that we trust that you have important lessons to teach the world. The trust of the knowledge you're accessing today will be changed by your perspective that you'll open doors to new ideas that we your current teachers never could have taught you. And I love that idea that what we're doing as teachers is trying to empower students to learn and share information and to learn things that we don't necessarily even know ourselves right now that we're not just dumping content on them. I probably went over on my 10 minutes I'm gonna, I'm gonna end right there and let our next speaker. Well, thank you very much Karen I think that that was, I mean that's really wonderful and so far I think it's clear, most probably clear to everybody that there is many different approaches to whatever this thing called open pedagogy is and in all these examples that you just shared really are very inspiring to me. So, at this point I'd like to transition it over to Zev and Eduardo. So, if you want to control your slides then just go ahead and request that permission and I will pass it on to you. All right. Thank you very much question access, and it looks like I have it. So thank you very much and this will be a nice transition particularly in the discussion of renewable assignments and the impact that that can have in the classroom. I'm going to go ahead if I can move these slides along, which not happening. Well, I guess I'm going to have to do it here too. That's what we get for rehearsing. Okay, so if you can go one slide back. Okay, perfect. So, I'm really pleased to be able to participate in this webinar and just want to thank once again the organizers and fellow presenters here. I'm really happy to co present with a former student of mine Eduardo Chavez we'll hear from in just a few minutes. And I guess the way that we'll approach this is sort of in two parts I'll start by giving a broad overview of one particular method of the open pedagogy movement and that's renewable assignments so I'll go into a bit more depth of that discussion that we just heard. And Eduardo will then share his experience of actually doing those assignments from a student perspective. And those assignments were specifically created as part of a faculty fellowship program at my institution of Montgomery College. I mean you can see it there on the slide it has a long but very informative title of the United Nations sustainable development goals open pedagogy faculty fellowship. And so, just like we heard in the previous presentation I take open pedagogy to refer to this sort of values based movement. Right of in a series of teaching practices that seeks to involve students in these more participatory inclusive experiential more relevant and engaged exercises. And it's supposed to be learning that's that student centered and also flexible to diverse student abilities diverse student knowledge and skills. And so that UN SDG project as all as I'll refer to it here is what from space to develop that sort of teaching practice, while at the same time the point of the of the fellowship is also to create assignments that could have impact in addressing some of the serious crises like those UN sustainable development goals that the 17 goals that the UN has created. So if we go to the next slide. You'll see that as an as an archaeologist I'm accustomed to doing quite a bit of participatory experiential and hands on work. Because that's really the foundation of becoming a field archaeologist or you need to go to the field and learn to do these things. So you can see here some former students in Ecuador, where I run a field project doing various activities in the highlands there. But what I realized was that having that same sort of teaching impact in the classroom of course is a whole other sort of challenge. So moving on to the next slide. As part of that UN SDG program. I was paired with two colleagues from Quantanlin Polytechnic University. And on the next. There we go. You can see I was paired with Kathy Dunster and Michelle Franklin from different disciplines right there were from sustainable horticulture and urban ecosystems and I myself and anthropologist. And they create together a series of these renewable ascents that combined their respective disciplines. And those renewable assignments are as we as we just heard they're opposed to the so called disposable assignments right like a paper or an exam that essentially students sort of throw together. And then they turn it in and then maybe the next day or a few days later they've essentially forgotten everything that they just put into it. So ideally a renewable assignment lives beyond the semester of completion. So on the next slide. Together we decided to create assignments targeting SDG number two which you see their zero hunger, which of course as with all of these goals is really interrelated with several others and so you can see them highlighted there in blue. And then on the following slide I'll share as two in three which are the ones that we created three assignments but I deployed two of them so I'll review those here. And what we like to her to you as a weed bio blitz. The key point for this assignment was to rethink this category of plants called weeds and to consider how they might actually provide readily available sources of nutritious food all around us. And also to consider how some plants are treated and consumed very differently around the world so what we might consider a weed in our backyards or in the gardens or on our campuses. In other parts of the world may actually be a really important part of a cultural practice or a local diet. And so this was really important course which was human evolution and archaeology because one key point in that story in the story of human evolution. Over millions of years is that intimate relationship between humans and our environments or those broader local ecologies. So on the next slide I'll go into a bit more detail of that assignment from my classes on my end of this. I decided to do this as an archaeological survey. Instead of searching for ceramics or other sorts of artifacts on the ground surface, which is what we would do as as archaeologists students were instead looking for weeds around the campus, and then recording them through this open source app called naturalist. My students got a taste of what pedestrian survey was like what it was like to actually go out into the field and do something like an archaeological survey. While the horticulture students at at quantlin were identifying the plants that we recorded. And on the next slide you can see just sort of a screenshot of the naturalist app. What we used for this project and what anyone here listening can can download and use. If you want to, you know, you're taking a walk and you see some amazing looking flower blooming with the spring. You just snap a picture of it submit it and then the broader naturalist community will identify it for you so it's really a nice resource. In the following slide we scaffolded the assignments by asking the students to do an ethnobotany. And in my case I had them do a two part ethnobotany. You'll hear more about this in a few minutes. But what I asked them to do was to do two things first to take a deeper dive into one of those weed species. One of the weed species that any of the students had identified on our own campus. And then to research its botanical history and its properties, but also the ways that it could be used in edible, in edible ways right edible plant or for medicinal purposes, or even another cultural practices. We can think of using certain plants as part of rituals or different religious practice. Part two involved choosing really any plant any plant that students had some sort of personal connection to that student, and then do the same research and explain what that personal connection was. So the idea there was to not sort of force everyone to be researching the same thing, but actually give the freedom to student for students to choose their own path to choose something that was of more interest to them. In the following slide. I'll say a bit about the challenge of trying to integrate renewable assignments into already established courses, and that's that's one challenge. And so I tried to do that through at least three ways. So on the next slide, the, you'll see one way that I tried to do this was to shift the focus of the class. Right. And so the next couple of slides are taken from my actual lectures that I gave in class so I won't, I won't actually give you an anthropology lecture here. But in this example I stress the taking the lessons of human that the human evolutionary journey to reflect on and try to think of solutions that we could actually use to solving some of the contemporary crises of our own human making today. And that was a focus on this idea of the Anthropocene we go through over millions of years we go through different geological epics. And so the idea here was to focus on this, this period of extreme human intervention in in local ecology. The second one which you see on the slide here is was the opportunity to actually teach an experience field methods, like archaeological pedestrian surveys this is a picture not from our campus, but actually from Ecuador again. On the on the previous slide, you can see students in walking transect lines and so I introduced these methods to students in class so that we could actually go out and do them on our own campus. And then the third way I tried to integrate this into the course was to to make it locally relevant. So in this case, the slide with the map. You'll see a map of Montgomery County. So the idea was to take this issue of food insecurity, right which was again SDG number two the zero hunger goal that we were addressing make that locally relevant to the class. So that's the statistics regarding food insecurity right here in our own county in Montgomery County, as well as at our own college the issue and and some of the, the ways that the college trying to address food insecurity. And you can also see in the map. But the following there with the map of Montgomery County, you can also see if you know anything about the county. It leads to discussions about how food insecurity often breaks along racial and ethnic lines. Okay, so if you could move, maybe two slides forward now. Perfect. So, so the challenge was to integrate the sense into the course outcomes and then try to gain that student buy in an understanding of the urgency of the moment. And so it was time to actually deploy them into the class and so as I wrap up my portion here I'll just say that we had a lot of fun if you if you go to the next slide. I ended up dividing the two different courses that I deployed these assignments and I divided them into survey groups to survey distinct of the campus who here you can see the Rockville campus in Montgomery County at Montgomery College. This is our campus and so I just divided it into into grids and then had students break up into groups and actually survey those as if it was an archaeological survey. In the following slide, you can see several photos where students are actually recording the weeds there. They're actually going around this taking pictures of them and submitting them immediately to iNaturalist and of course you can see some class selfies that we took as we did it. And this is both from the Rockville campus and the Germantown campus. And so in the end we had created really our own project page which you can see on the following slide. We created our own project page in iNaturalist with participation from both my classes at Montgomery College and also the students at Quantlin Polytechnic University. So there you can see all of the observations and that project page is still living. It's still still available and still being added to. Additionally on the next slide you can do all sorts of spatial analyses, statistical analyses, and then I had students just respond to some reflection questions in the form of a field journal and Eduardo will give a brief of that as well. So let me leave it there and turn it over to Eduardo to describe his experience as a student actually going through and doing some of the assignments. Good afternoon. My name is Eduardo Chavez and I'm here to talk a little about this project as well from a student perspective. I will try to request remote control here. Hopefully it will work. But otherwise, let's see. So again, this is an anthropology 215, the human evolution and archaeology is the name of the class, the SDG that we're working with is zero hunger and their renewable assignment at the botany. And yes, it seems like it might not be working. So I would ask Matthew Bloom if you don't mind going to the next slide. Thank you. So our initial survey took place in Thursday, October 24, 2019. It was 30 minutes, it was only from 1130 am to 12pm, but in that time we managed to survey quite a lot. The groups are split, the entire class was split. The group that I was a part of took zone five, which was half the parking lot in the Montgomery College campus in Rockville. It was mostly parking lots that was part of the Robert E. Perilla performing arts center, the welcome center and the athletic fields, which included the baseball field. We were, I was personally tasked to survey the area outside of the welcome center. Next slide please. The visibility on the ground was high, thankfully, because the grass was cut and maintained, made finding the plants and the weeds very easy to see. Next slide please. There were several plants that were grown between the cracks and the pavements and such, as well as many that were growing next to the welcome center building itself. But one that really caught my attention was this small white flower that I found in the trail between the welcome center and Maniki Street, which leads outside of the campus. I took a picture of it and I sent it to iNaturalist and somebody at KPU likely identified it through iNaturalist as an American aster. The specific species was not made available clear, but I still decided to focus my project on this lone flower that I managed to find. Next slide please. The American aster itself, as I was doing some research on it, I learned that it's a perennial plant, which means that it lives longer than two years. They are flowering plants. That's how you most easily distinguish them because of their pattern. They kind of look like a star, which relates to the name aster, which is the shape of the flower. Next slide please. The aster themselves are very common and often seen as garden flowers. They're small and colorful, which makes them very attractive to a lot of people. They have been around for a long time, especially in Native American and Chinese medicine, and they have also been used as their leaves have been cooked to serve as greens. The roots have been used in stews as well. Next slide please. I found a small recipe on how to make aster tea, which usually involves cutting the aster during the full bloom in early morning, making sure that you make a precise cut four inches above the soil level. You would then have to hang it upside down on a dark area. The flower itself becomes white and fluffy and easily crumbable, but it becomes usable as a tea. You would then store the dried aster leaves and flowers in a sealed glass container and that could keep up to one year. The important part is being able to use the aster as a tea during that time. Next slide please. And for my personal connection plant, I decided to choose the African Baobab, the Adon Sonia Digitata. Next slide please. The African Baobab itself is found natively in Africa and it has a very delicious fruit that a lot of people eat in Africa. It can grow over 30 meters tall, 25 meters in diameter. It's a very, very large tree. It can leave over for 100 years and there was said to have been a specimen found in South Africa that was carbon dated to 6000 years old. The Baobab itself is derived from the name of in Arabic, father of many seeds. It was named after Michael Addison, who is a French naturalist who worked in Senegal, who also said that the Baobab is probably the most useful tree in all. Next slide please. The Baobab itself has a lot of cultural significance in a lot of places in Africa. The Baobab can survive prolonged droughts. It can store up to 30,000 gallons of water. To drink this, Calahari Bushmen actually use grass straws to be able to penetrate and suck out the water from the trunk, which is a good method for survival. The hollowed out trunks are also really good for storing water by themselves, and they're often used to store water for villages because of this and because of the fruit, they're often known as the tree of life. The Baobab seeds have been discovered in ancient Egyptian tombs, even though they're not native to Egypt, which means that they were traded to the pharaohs and that they enjoyed them enough to be able to be buried with these seeds. The bark is virus resistant and is used for making cloth and rope, which is very important in Africa as well. The leaves are used as condiments and medicines and has been the source of food and income for centuries for a lot of people. Next slide please. There's also the idea of the Baobabs in The Little Prince, but Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, I'm sorry if I did not pronounce that right, but the idea is that in the story The Little Prince, the Baobab trees symbolize obstacles in life. They start as very small seeds, but can grow very quickly and can actually destroy the small planets that the prince usually lives in, as you can see in this drawing, for example. I read the book back in middle school and the tree itself resonated a lot with me as there were small problems that could grow bigger. Next slide please. So I want to give also a little background about myself. I am an international student and I was born in Venezuela as well as where I took most of my classes in high school. While I was there, I worked in the community service for Jardim Botanico de Maracaibo, which is the Botanical Garden of the city of Maracaibo. Here are a few pictures of it as well as the location where it's located in Venezuela. Next slide please. In the garden itself, we have a Baobab that was donated by the Royal Botanical Garden in Kew London in 1983. It is the hallmark of the entire garden and from this single tree, six others have been planted in the garden itself and others have been planting around the city. In fact, my father and I, we went to a park nearby park and managed to plant a few of them with the warden support as well. Next slide please. I was volunteering during this time in 2007 to 2010. Here are a few pictures of the group that I was volunteering with, as well as in the right here you can see some of the saplings that I was also planting around the Botanical Garden. So this tree actually had a lot of its significance for me. And just as a small finishing note, here is the Baobab fruit and how you can make juice out of it. Here a large Baobab fruit, water, ice, sugar, honey or other sweetener. And from one fruit, you can actually make around three servings. It's about cracking the fruit open. It will reveal the chalky meat as it's seen in the first picture there. This meat has to be removed along with the seeds and put into a bowl which needs to be left to in water for overnight. Then the seeds can be separated from the pulp and the pulp itself can be put in the blender. Blend it for around 30 seconds to make a smoothie like juice which is actually very tasty. It tastes almost like pear juice and it can be served with ice and sweetened with your sweetener of choice. One thing to note is that the Baobab fruit has around 300 milligrams of vitamin C, which is a very good source of vitamin C, five times more than oranges even. It is used to boost immune function, promote younger looking skin and keep energy levels high. And it is often used for medicinal purposes in various parts. And yes, the juice itself tastes very nice like a pulpy pear juice. With that, I would like to close out and say that this project itself allowed me to have a very personal connection with not only the aster itself, but also to be able to show the personal connection I had with the African Baobab itself. And I feel that in an SDG project such as this, it's good to have that personal connection, not just make it about the society itself, which it is, but it's also supposed to engage a student and it's supposed to make it a connection with them so that they can also identify with this problem. That is the way that I believe that we can actually solve these issues by making them sustainable and also make them specific to each student that they can have a relationship with it. Thank you very much. Thank you Eduardo that was fantastic and the some comments in the chat have also reflected that I think that everybody rushes to the store right now and gets their their Baobab fruits. It's not going to be a run on them, but it does sound delicious. I wanted to let everybody know that we do have a few minutes left and probably enough time to address one or two questions. A question or two have already been posted in the chat, first of which I wanted to bring up actually refers, I think back to Karen, and something about grading concerns about grading and the different ways in which you approach grading with open pedagogy assignments I think is something that folks who come to open education and come and hear about open pedagogy or new to it, or sometimes kind of concerned by that so I'm wondering I guess we can start with Karen but if you have any thoughts about what's the considerations with that grading apply. And then of course, you know, said if you also might want to respond to that. That would be great so did you want to say one or two things follow up kind of on what you had mentioned about reading. Yeah, sure. I'm happy to talk about grading. I think that's always one of the first questions I get whenever I do a talk anywhere. And my point was that it was interesting that grading was something that was first like just off the table when we needed to figure out what we are going to do in this crisis situation that it made us kind of realize like how essential our grades to learning anyway and I think the comment or the question about, huh, maybe this will allow us to realize that there are multiple ways in which grading can actually be an inhibitor to learning where students are worried more about their grades than they are about what it is that they can accomplish and learn from their experiences and so there's a whole lot more to say about grading. I can put some links in the chat about a lot of people that have been writing about grading. There was a recent webinar at Plymouth State University about grading or ungrading and I will put some of those resources up there but I think it's a perfect moment. Like I said, this is an open pedagogy moment in so many ways. So I would love to see the ungrading movement take off in favor of actually inspiring students to learn and I'll just say one more thing if there's anybody out there that's really worried about surveilling your students so they don't cheat and they're on the same team and you're watching them, you know, think about just not doing that anymore. I don't think we're actually doing our students a service by really trying to surveil them right now so I'll stop because I know there's not a lot of time but I'm happy to answer any follow-up to that too. Yeah, thank you very much Karen. I think that's a really great comment. Zev, did you have anything you wanted to add about that from an instructor's perspective? I agree completely with everything we just heard and I look forward to also reading those resources that Karen just mentioned. What I can speak to in terms of the way that I handled this last semester, it is a challenge because at the same time you're trying to get the option to do this in many different ways and so I allowed students to do this with PowerPoints or with, you know, a pamphlet or a photo story. There's all sorts of different media that students can use to do this and so you have to figure out some way in terms of the grading process and often times students really want to know how am I being graded and so I was pretty flexible and I sort of laid out the kinds of information that I expected students to be including in the projects but other than that I really just made it flexible and allowed students to kind of use their own creativity for that. I also, I just happened to notice a comment popped up in the chat and that was about library resources. I worked with, I asked a librarian from our campus to help creating a sort of like a list of resources that students could consult that would help them in the ethnobotany project. So that was a really helpful resource relying on other professionals on campus. So the grading was a challenge and I do look forward to reading those resources that Karen was mentioning. Well, thank you very much. I do think we have enough time to give the last word to one of our students who are on the webinar today. So I'm wondering, Jessica, or Eduardo, do you have any thoughts about this ungrading concept from a student's perspective? If I may, I will go ahead and put in my input, I suppose. Please do. I believe that the ungrading system is a good idea and I believe that there are a lot of like issues currently with people that, for example, in Montgomery College itself there are a lot of nursery students that are also working in the health sector. And because of this current crisis, many of them have had difficulties keeping up with their great work. And for me, I believe that in empathy and in the show of like this being unprecedented times that we are living through, we should probably have a little bit more leniency with the students themselves as they are also dealing with this situation. Thank you very much. Thank you. Well, it is one o'clock. And I think that everyone, thank you so much for joining us here today. This is going, this has been recorded. So this will be on the website and you can always refer folks to it if you've got something out of this. And thank you for all of our panelists and thank you to all of our guests here today. This is a shameless plug. We do have two more upcoming webinars so keep an eye out for those and mark your calendars May 6th and June 3rd. And if you have any other questions or anything like that, you can always go on the community email and see some other information at our website. So again, thank you very much today for joining us and I encourage you to join us next time.