 Now we'll have Joanne who will talk about the Liberated Learner and for those who don't know it's been featured on Terry Green's podcast Getting Air. I do suggest it I'll post it on Twitter associated with this talk, but I think she'll talk about it and specifically about the the funding that has been through but really empowering students through collaboration with students as co-designers. Merci, merci. Hello everyone. I'm really happy to be here. We just wanted to come and play a little music for it to start. Wait a minute. Hang on. I might have to ask for some assistance and oh there we go. There we go. We're settled. Okay. There. All right. So that little bit of music wasn't just any music. It's called Lo-Fi Music and if you're familiar with Lo-Fi Girl on YouTube so it's L-O-F-O Girl on YouTube. So it's this intentionally imperfect lo-hum hip-hop music that is supposed to help our frontal lobes of our brains focus and help put our mindset to focusing. So I know many students at McMaster actually I've talked to them and listened to Lo-Fi Girl and while they're studying and it's supposed to help. So this is also one of the many elements that students helped design as part of the Liberated Learners Project. So all of the students who are in this clip right here were part of the project and there are Seneca College College in Ontario students in the independent music program. So they created our own beats to study to using that lo-fi music. There were many other elements that students were involved in but this is one of the I think the most fun one. Go forward. And my co-presenter Terry Green is not here as you may notice. He is doing the most Canadian thing ever in this picture playing pond hockey in Peterborough Ontario which is in northern Ontario which is a lovely place to live but one of the issues with living up there is when there's a storm the we call it hydro in Ontario the power or electricity goes out so he has no power right now where he's living so he's unable he was going to join by Zoom but so he's not able to join unfortunately but if you've met Terry you know he's an amazing guy he'd be way more funny than me but if you want to check out his podcast as was mentioned it's a wonderful podcast called Get In Air the link to it is there I also posted the slides on the pretel system so you can get to all the links but Terry is really sad that he can't be here usually is quite he's a big open it up as you can see by his open pedagogy podcast. So how did the this is a lot of information but I thought instead of creating a bunch of slides I'll just take you where we go with this liberated learner project through links and it was actually came out of a project from eCampus Ontario which is a hub in Canada for the province of Ontario for the 45 colleges and universities and indigenous institutes and we do a lot of open education projects a lot of collaborative projects there's a lot of fortunately government funding for these projects and one of one of the projects I think around five years ago that was created with many people including Terry and Alan Levine actually who's one of our amazing behind the scenes people for OE Global was Ontario Extend and it is an open suite of modules for educators on how to become better tech enabled teachers so there are you can see there are the the six modules there when you get all of them you become an empowered educator so it's a it's a scaffolded way of becoming this getting this like master badge and being an empowered educator so we had a lot of great uptake from educators across the province on this program and Terry was the one who thought why don't we do a version for students how to help students become better more empowered digitally literate online learners good timing with the pandemic and everyone switching to online learning so we decided to do to apply for some funding through the through the province and the funding at that time was called the virtual learning strategy and the link here will take you to the Ontario Open Library which has all of the resources you can see there's that number 700 I know it's going up because of this funding I think there are more than 400 that are being added from this recent round of funding lots of open projects to take and use and adapt for your own context one of which being the liberated learner project we also had Terry and is from Trent University I'm from McMaster University which is in Hamilton Ontario we had other collaborators from Windsor University Windsor Cambridge College Seneca College Brock University I'm missing one there Cambridge and Brock Seneca Windsor Trent and myself yeah that's good and so each institution had a lead as in a full-time teaching a learning professional but we also had a great team of students so that we had most of the money that we received we received from the funding was used to pay students for their work on the project so to kick off this project we looked at the the Ontario the original modules from the educator version and thought okay we're just going to make alert we're going to make student modules then we thought after talking to the students we thought is this really what they need so we decided to have a design sprint so we had a week long design sprint and over 200 students participated we received 99 what we called wicked problems so those are you know those tricky sticky problems where you might not necessarily have a clear-cut solution so I'll show you a little bit what they ended up looking like so here are this is another wonderful Terry Green project here so here's a lot of the projects that the students came up with how they were motivated when the dog ate my focus I'm a procrastinator I don't like group work I don't feel heard I I'm not motivated I don't know how to take notes and so there was a whole bunch of different stories that the students generated and what we did was kind of theme them and just and come up with the modules that worked kind of captured all of the stories that we heard I'll show you a little clip too of the let's see here I think this is hang on right here so just it kind of better illustrates what the what the design sprint and creation of wicked problems was that's here I think it's right about here my wicked problem stems from the struggle of always saying yes there's a stigma that goes along with all throughout undergrad I was able to float by in school because I majored in the subject have you ever felt like you were trying to live your life inside wonderland filled with I found that my phone is an extreme distraction that often inhibits my ability to pay full attention I started my educational journey after having three children at some point I would want to raise and just smash my laptop the monopork would give an after the biggest struggle that I've raised in the most recent academic year was that I overcame this problem years later I can confidently say that I'm really truly learning so as you can maybe tell reading these stories was quite empowering and motivational for the project team as well we really wanted to try to help these students so that how is how we came up with our four modules which are the learner the navigator the technologist and the collaborator so the students were involved in the formation of the design but they were also involved in all the content development we did we used press books to create the modules and host the modules we developed h5p interactivities I know there's a session on h5p I believe tomorrow which would be wonderful we also had students from graphic design programs design the look for the for the for the hang on let me find it for all of the materials within the within the press books or I didn't have that completely bookmarked and then we're also working with a group of students on doing a French translation to the project so that's how the students really were involved from the get go and we had a wonderful team so if we let's take a look at what the typical learner what their journey might be for them if they're participating in this you really can dip in it out as you would like because some students don't have the same problems as others so this is how we envisioned it so we have our first module on the learner so this is more about strategies and this is the university of Windsor team and students developed that how to improve learning then we had collaborators so how to be a better collaborator enjoy collaborating appreciate group work no one to when to be able to feel confidence and not feel imposter syndrome navigator is you know a lot of students come to higher ed for the first time not only as a first a new student higher ed but also new to online learning so how to you navigate all the systems that are aimed to support you if you can't find them and technologist which is about using some of the technologies to enhance your learning and then all four of them each of the modules are bad so you would have this if you complete all of them we envision that you would be a well-rounded online learner so we also have you could take all the modules at once or you can do this takeout menu which is again an h5p branching um interactivity that our students develop so prompts that make you consider what maybe what pieces of the project would be better for you than others or what might be more suitable for your learning so you can check what is your main concern maybe my I don't know how to create videos and I want to learn how to do a podcast it will direct you to the section of the module that is about podcasting so you can really customize that so that was a good use of h5p branching for that I'll take a look at the module too and we'll go back to that video here I think it's we'll look at the technologist just to demonstrate what it looks like the technologist module has three main components and one sort of mini component and the three main components are all about teaching students how to create digital artifacts so we go into video editing graphic design and audio editing and sort of the the point is not to get bogged down in the details not to create something that you know is career oriented but really just something quick and just delivering the basics so that a student can come in kind of finish the module and then they can create a really nice flyer or something or you know the basics of audio editing it's born out of this trend we see in pedagogy that's been around about authentic assessments one of the challenges that arise is that instructors are like students don't know how to do this I don't know how to help students do this do they have the skills to create a video do they have the skills to create a podcast is it fair that I expect them to so I think create something to kind of fill that space so that's so our of all of the modules the video that is in the link for this presentation can go into a deeper investigation of all of them so basically this is the project we use we had students involved in all not only in creating but also in evaluating the content and each module had activities one or more activities in them and all of the students also completed those activities so they were used as exemplars for other students who are who are looking to engage with the liberated learner project so now we're about spreading the word this is here now look and we really would love to see other institutions use and adapt the content in our project use and adapt the process that we took in involving students right from the beginning in shaping the content so I just wanted to thank you for your time I know that we're running out of time we're looking to my illustrious facilitator over there but there is the bitly link if you do want to check it out the press books landing pages bitly slash learn with style and thanks so much I guess we'll take questions after you yeah well we do have a few minutes okay yeah so if you have questions would you have the microphones here I'm sure have some I knew I could count on someone thank you so much I'm Gino from South Africa hi so how do you deal with students who who enter into this process from sort of different levels of competence that's a really good question I think from the development side we had that representation from the students so we had students who were grad students student who were just starting their first year of college multidisciplinary students so we had those voices in the mix to kind of create that and we also acknowledge at the beginning that this was this product project was created by people with different perspectives the voices the voices may change throughout and we're trying to have at least a touch point for you to think okay I see myself in this person but yeah and I think that branching scenario that I showed where you actually can ask answer some of the questions you can kind of get down to the more personalized individualized content that you need so I'm sorry I'm Dominique Cheffoldina I am from Ontario and I live next to you okay so we're gonna have a talk it's nice to meet in France I like your idea about the students are developing their own OER now my question because I have a similar project in school boards in Ontario how do you make the link then from the students to the teachers because you want the teachers now to support to scale those I guess opportunities yeah is there any planning on engaging the instructors as well yeah are the students mentoring younger students that's a really good the latter the latter piece that you just mentioned about students mentoring younger students I don't think we've considered that so that's a great phase two of the project but as far as the instructors or teachers engaging we have had we all all because it was a multi institutional collaboration all six institutions connected with their student success center or their student support services in embedding the content in those as your as first year students as students are entering into university as part of that transition and we also know that some instructors who like teaching and learning centers most of us came from teaching and learning centers when an instructor comes to me for example and says I want to do a podcast in my course I don't like I know how to do it but I'm like well there's already some great instructions in this module you can take and adapt it for your context so we have those kind of mechanisms embedded where we are including it into our existing programming for instructors yeah thank you very much this is very enlightening and interesting congratulations and I want to ask how do you integrate this in the curriculum of the students how does it count towards whatever qualification they are aiming at well we intentionally don't at the moment it's more of a self-service that the students as they're coming into online learning can do so that's why we connected with the student success centers so it's not a requirement that they complete the activities so far but I as as instructors start to use the content then I can imagine where you know that podcast example that I gave we have a podcast assignment that means you must read this section of the module or complete the module and then produce this deliverable at the end as far as an assignment goes excellent thank you very much thank you