 Hey, everybody. Welcome. Good morning. This is Veronica Howard with the University of Alaska Anchorage Psychology Department. What I want to do today is talk to you a little bit about open-enabled pedagogy. But again, just orienting in the language. Remember that when folks use terms like open, they can mean lots of different things. Open pedagogy can mean anything from being transparent and very public about your learning experiences or the practices that you use in your classroom. All the way to what we're going to be talking about today, open-enabled pedagogy, which has a very specific characteristic, makes it a little bit different. Now, as defined by Hilton and Wiley in 2018, open pedagogy or open-enabled pedagogy is this idea of a set of teaching and learning practices that are possible or more practical in a specific context. They have to include open educational resources because of the permissions that are characteristic of OER, specifically those five Rs. We have previously talked about those five Rs in our OER 101 or in our, you know, Creative Commons and copyright licenses and fair use modules. So if you haven't seen those before, check those out. But just a quick overview, the five Rs permissions that we're talking about with open educational resources are things like the ability to download and retain material, the ability to revise material and re-release it under an open license, the idea that you can remix or combine lots of different sources and you can redistribute it to others. So you need to have some of those permissions so that you can do this open-enabled pedagogy work. So just taking away what we're talking about here is this idea that in open-enabled pedagogy, that label is largely determined by whether what we're doing includes OER as a vital source of the practice. The reason that that's so important is what we ask students to do with the content once they've created it, which invites us to talk about the spectrum of different types of assignments. Now, when we've heard people talk about and have concerns over this idea of disposable assignments, and when we're talking about open-enabled pedagogy, we want to have this conversation, disposable assignments. What they mean by that is a student creates an artifact. They create some sort of intellectual property, but it only has value for the student in the moment. And typically that value is to provide a score for the student, although as instructors, we hope that it also has value in helping them learn and understand the material. An example of a disposable assignment might be, for instance, me asking students to write a half-page reflection about the value that this course had for them, and they can earn a few points for that. Now, they're going to write the artifact. I'm going to read, mark, and give a score for the feedback, but that's where it ends. It doesn't have any value there. It's kind of an assignment where we score it, we assign the credit, we shred it. We're done. Now, students are savvy to that, and I'm going to share some feedback from my students a little bit later in this presentation, but students know when presentations or when their creations have value, and I think that that's part of why we have these conversations about moving away from disposable assignments. We want those learning experiences to have more value. We want the motivation to be higher. We want them to be the student that is embedded within a community of learning. So that's where we start getting into this idea of an authentic assignment. An authentic assignment is one that has value not only for the creator, not only for the student who creates that material, but also for their larger learning community. And I mean, it can be the students that they're surrounded by. When I ask students to do a brief video introduction of themselves and who they are and where they're coming from, it has value not only for the student to reflect and think about who they are and how they are influenced by their learning experiences, but it also helps other students learn about each other. It helps them build social connections. It helps them find colleagues to support them. We can move one step beyond that when we're talking about constructionist assignments. So these are assignments that, again, they support the students' learning. They support the community's learning, but they also can potentially help other stakeholders because they become public. We share them with a larger community here at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. This might include some of the wonderful work that's being done around e-portfolios. And we've seen some really wonderful examples of that in the English department, in the history department, things like that. Finally, renewable assignments are what we're going to really be talking about today because not only does it involve helping the student improve their learning, improving the value of those around the student, becoming a public artifact, something that others can use in reference helping those stakeholders, but the fourth element there is openly licensed material. And that's important because then the product that's created becomes part of the larger ecosystem of learning. It means that not only did it help the student, but it can also help hundreds or millions of students beyond the creator. And that's what we want to talk about today. So when you're thinking about whether or not what you're doing is open-enabled pedagogy, there are four questions. The first is are we asking students to create new artifacts? Because this is open-enabled pedagogy that we're talking about, are those new artifacts based on existing materials that are openly licensed OERs? Does that artifact have value beyond simply supporting the learning of the author? Is it something that we share back with the class? Is it something that can be given to others to help them? Third, are students being invited to share their new artifacts publicly and that word invited is really important. Fourth, are students invited to also openly license that material? Because again, when to openly license that material, it becomes something that others can use, reference, revise, remix, build on, it becomes part of the larger fabric of learning. Let me give you a few examples of these open-enabled pedagogy projects. First, one of my favorites is this study by Zhang Jiani. Zhang Jiani, Rajiv Zhang Jiani is the vice provost for Open Educational Resources at a university in Canada. He's also a really prolific creator in the Open Educational Resources community. In 2017, he had a new social psychology textbook, and you know, we know as instructors that it can be challenging to create questions, just full stop questions for class, questions for supporting the learning of our students, but has a new textbook creator. It's also incredibly challenging to come up with an entire test bank of questions. That's why so many times we see that the creation of test banks is actually outsourced to folks, and it's not always the author who's creating them in a commercial textbook. Zhang Jiani had a new social psych textbook and did not have a test pool. So in a pretty creative use of student involvement, he offered students the opportunity to complete a scheduled, rather than doing like standard homework to help write questions, multiple choice questions for the social psych textbook. He also involved the larger class as part of the learning community to peer review and provide feedback on those questions. So imagine what that looks like. It means that not only is the student being a creator, they're writing that question. So it involves the production of language and involves the critical analysis of the content that they're writing about. It requires students to come up with pretty good distractors. So they have to understand the concept and they have to understand closely related concepts to create a question that's that's a good question. But we're talking about involving peers as people who give feedback. So you have that ability to read and understand and give critical feedback to help other people improve the quality of their writing. So now the students, their peers are involved and they also are starting to build that kind of learning network. And finally, you're talking about some of those ancillary skills that we want students to have, citing your sources, being able to communicate clearly, being able to give and receive feedback. So this is a pretty amazing assignment. Plus, a tertiary benefit of it is that now there's there's more questions. Some of the students were comfortable having their questions included in the test bank and they're part of the fabric of this learning ecosystem. If you were to download the instructor resources for that textbook, you would get some student generated questions. So really clever use of resources there. In another example, Maiden and colleagues, using an assignment or replacing an assignment in a Queen's College writing course, invited students to write a piece on what education what the purpose of education was for them. And then for the students who were interested taking that content and submitting it to a journal so that it could become part of the larger ecosystem. It's a really beautifully written article. It really reflects the learning experiences of the students being supported at Queen's College writing. So not only are students writing, that's the purpose of the course, of course, but they're also becoming published authors, right, which then facilitates their ability to be successful, gives them a sense of pride, they're establishing an identity as a writer, and it improves the quality of their CV. So if you're talking about students who come from marginalized backgrounds, students who are not reflected by the typical makeup of higher education, now they've got street cred in higher education. So this is amazing. And then third, another example, another flavor of open-enabled pedagogy, is this idea of the work of Robin de Rosa and her colleagues. Robin de Rosa is really big in the field of open educational resources. And in one project, she, some former students and some colleagues worked together to review and curate a collection of early American literature. The purpose was to really replace the commercial textbook reader that was used for this course, this kind of commercially licensed standard textbook that's used in a lot of interlevel courses. Students are involved in finding openly licensed stories from a more diverse group of writers, finding materials, evaluating whether it's a good fit, getting it involved in putting it into the publication software, in this case it's press books. So if you want to check out this resource, it'll be in the description box along with the rest of the resources I'm going to cite for you today. And students then become editors, they get that experience of finding, reviewing, and critically analyzing, but also of combining and building a larger project. And the beauty of this also is that when that open anthology of early American literature was developed, it became the primary textbook for this course. And that means all subsequent students did not have to purchase a commercial textbook, which saves students $85 per semester per student. And that's a pretty amazing gift to give back to others. It also means that students in subsequent classes can be finding new resources, adding new resources, suggesting changes. Students become not just a consumer of the content, but they become part of the teaching team for the course. And you can really see that there's some common themes here around that. First, students are significantly involved in the evaluation, curation, and production of new learning materials. Like I said, not just a passive consumer of literature, not just a sponge that we pour information into, but rather they're working with it, they're experiencing it, they're interacting with it, which we know improves the quality of learning. Second, all the products that we've talked about are shared under an open license, which means anyone can use them and access them. It has value not only for these students and the peers in the class when they were working together, but also it becomes part of future courses, future courses in this institution with this instructor, but also potentially these become products that are used in dozens or hundreds of other courses around the world. So that's an amazing thing that our students can help contribute. Here at University of Alaska Anchorage, we've also done some open-enabled pedagogy projects. First, I want to talk to you about one that I've done. In Psyc 400, a course called Strategies of Behavior Change, there is a standard kind of upper division course. This is a senior level course, but what makes it a little bit different is the idea that students who are in this course are working toward professional certification. These are folks who are going to go into the community, they are going to be practitioners, and they have to have the skill and ability to communicate incredibly complex nuanced information to a lay audience, to folks who've never heard of this before. Now, when the course was first developed, it included a pretty standard, and I think pretty good, course design. It involved study guides helping to clarify exactly what students were meant to know when each unit was complete, evaluation or assessment quizzes of the basic content. We also had a research-focused major project that varied from semester to semester. That would be things like, you know, evaluate, find and evaluate an article on a specific treatment topic like eating disorders, develop discussion questions to bring back to the class and share with your colleagues, and students enjoyed the course. The evaluation of the course was pretty good, but there's still a pretty major problem with the course, which is that any of the assignments students created, research reviews, discussion questions, any of those sort of died with the class. So while it might have supported the learning of the students doing the project and even the other students in the class, it ended there. The other problem is that in our field, there are no high-quality open educational resources, and I'm going to say that with a caveat. There are a couple of notable examples. There are a couple of things, for instance, from special education or from really specific nuanced titles, but there's not enough in the field of behavior analysis, at least at the time of recording this, that you could create or supplement a introductory level course in behavior analysis. I cannot do in behavior analysis what I can do in an intro to site course where I can have all open resources. So this is a significant problem for our field because we know that cost is a barrier that is keeping people out, is reducing our diversity. We asked students, or rather I asked students, in two subsequent semesters of this course, would you like to be involved in a project? Would you, for your major final project for this course, would you like to do a standard project, a research article discussion, a research review paper, or would you like to be involved in an open educational resources creation project that is designed to build that basic behavior analytic content? It would look a little bit like this. Now, students were given the choice of what they would like to do for their final project. And naturally, of course, my excitement may have biased them, but two out of two times, students selected the open authoring project. And what I asked students to do was, in any format, in any way that they wanted to, take a concept from our field and explain it to the students who come behind you. So what I mean is, this is a site 400 course as a senior level, explain it to the students coming into the field, site 200 introduction to behavior analysis, what is some stuff you would have liked to have had when you were first in that class? And the students did just an outstanding job. These are some of the samples of what students have created. And these materials, again, were shared with permission. I have the creators permission to share these. And they're available for you to have a look at if you'd like to. But they came up with just exceptional content, everything ranging from understanding the epistemological foundations of the field, to practical applications of how to define and record behavior of how to graph or analyze data, like just amazing, amazing results. I was shocked by how good some of these materials were. And though I have not included many of them in the 200 level course yet, we're starting to get to the point where the quality of the projects is such that I can be using these as resources to give to students in the 200 level class. The students seem to, for the most part, enjoy the project. Not quite everybody, but let me share with you a few comments from the students. First, one student says, I really enjoyed this assignment. I didn't mind writing papers or discussion posts. These are standard projects that are used in other classes. But in this project, I actually felt like it mattered. Another student says, this project provided a sense of pride and accomplishment knowing that my work may actually be used to help educate others and was not another necessary requirement that will go into a shred bin after a period of time. So this is what I'm talking about when I say students know. Students know that their work is disposable. Students know that the reason that they're writing these papers is for the purpose of evaluation. And involving students in open enabled pedagogy makes them content creators, makes them proud of their work. A third student said, knowing that other people would be able to access and view this material served as a motivating operation. That's a technical term from our field. As a motivating operation for me to put forth my best effort and create something that would be informative and educational. Not only did I continue to learn during the process of creating the project, but also others can learn from my hard work as well. So I could not be prouder of the students who have been involved in this project. Not everybody loves it. And what's interesting is the students who struggle are not the students that I would expect to struggle. The students who struggle the most here were the folks who perform really, really well under normal circumstances. The students who would do well in a course that had research papers or discussion posts or things of that sort, because this required something a little different. Let me come back to that in a moment. Now, students did have, of course, some suggested improvements. First, they wanted examples. And I think we all want something to make us a little bit more comfortable to give us an idea of what does success look like so that we can approximate that for ourselves. Students also suggested that they really wanted more instructor feedback. And the first time we did the project, excuse me, there was only one opportunity for feedback at each stage of the project, selecting the topic, selecting some sources, etc. So now I've tried to change it so that not only can students receive feedback multiple times, but I can give feedback more easily if we do something like work in Google Docs rather than through the Blackboard Grade Center. Third, students really indicated that they had some technological challenges and, you know, it's a combination of kind of waiting a little bit and not having clear instructions on how to use different technology tools. But they did struggle a little bit with trying to fit instructional technology to the project that they were trying to create. And then finally, students were really disappointed because we have not been able to share those resources back publicly. This particular comment came in the context of the 2019 earthquake where we lost a couple of weeks of instructional time due to that natural disaster. And students really wanted to be able to share their work that they'd been working on the entire semester with their colleagues, but because of the adjustments because of the earthquake, we just weren't able to do that. So students have a lot of pride in their work and really finding ways to share it publicly is important. Now, a couple of things that I took away from this as well from my experience was first, it really highlighted, this project really highlighted the inconsistent preparation that students may have when they're coming into my course. Some students are going to require a lot of support, a lot of feedback and a lot of help to create something of value. It also, however, helped highlight poor understandings of content because we know that it's one thing to be able to perform well on a test, but it's quite another to be able to explain that content cogently, articulately to another person. And it really helps me see the subtle nuances of where students understand a concept and where they don't. But finally, oh boy, this project requires a significant amount of time, grading time, revision time, feedback time, training time, support. And I've been able to cut down on that and blend that into other parts of the course. I'm really remodeling the course around this project. And I think that that has value in our field, but it may not be appropriate for all courses. With that in mind, a few things. When using Open Educational or Open Enabled Pedagogy, students are able to experience learning materials that are both generative, so they can use materials they can build on and refine materials rather than replacing them. And they're also iterative. So not only can my students be revising the work of others, but they can also be including more recent contemporary local involved community level ideas. They can suit the materials for our unique communities. There's also another beautiful example here at UAA of involving students as content creators in an upper division dietetics course. So Dr. Redman in the College of Health replicated this experience with her students to help fill a niche in their course on a particular topic. You'll have to forgive me. I am terrible at remembering this specific subdomain. But you can look for yourself. You can have a look because Dr. Redman and her students have made these materials available. Remember, I'm going to put this in the description box down below so you can have a look at these wonderful, wonderful resources that Dr. Redman and her students are creating, but really exceptional quality content. And going back for a second, you're going to be able to see if you watch this video, some of those wonderful projects that the projects are also available at the website. So have a look at some of these amazing materials, visually engaging, technologically correct, articulately described, like beautiful projects. Like my students, Dr. Redman was really, really surprised and pleased by the quality of work that our students were creating. Now to determine whether this is right in your course, a couple of things. Remember to respect your students' intellectual property rights. I keep coming back to the idea of inviting your students to do this. You cannot force a student to openly license their material. It's their intellectual property. Let them decide if it's right for them. Second, make sure to include just a tiny, just a brief review of how to credit work. This is because, you know, it can be easy to fall out of practice of giving proper credit for work. And so if you were to include a brief review of how to cite a source, even by citing a student's idea in your own course, this is one way to reduce any potential academic misconduct that comes from writing. Like I mentioned before, the students who struggled on this were not the students that I expected to struggle. The students that I expect to struggle because maybe they don't have the same level of knowledge, they will need support. But the students who are going to have a small existential crisis are the students who are used to completing assignments, who are used to writing papers, who are really well skilled at writing a paper from the perspective of making their instructor happy. And I think if nothing else, this is an incredibly valuable learning experience from the perspective of, you have to be flexible in the way that you're able to produce knowledge. So this is, for no other reason than this, this is one of the reasons that I love this project. But it also gives folks a way of giving back to the community. Remember that students were asking for more models, more demonstrations of what good or correct looked like. But bear in mind that the more models you give, you are going to produce a better quality product more quickly. It's going to be easier for students. It's also going to reduce variability and variety and creativity. So it's kind of a balance there. Finally, plan small. Don't don't start with a huge OEP project the first time because it's going to require a lot of work. And make sure that you are incorporating opportunities for revision and having tools that really give you an opportunity to help students refine their understanding of that content. It might even be helpful if you have the flexibility to replace some traditional assessments with an open enabled pedagogy project because it is going to take a fair amount of time. However, it's a deposit in a potential better future because you could end up with educational materials that are better than what you have now. Finally, see if it's a good fit for your course. It might not be right for everybody. Consider can you invite? Can you replace? Can you restructure and replace something that's more disposable with something that's a little bit more renewable? And remember it's a spectrum so you can have purely disposable assignments used for the purposes of assessment all the way up to a perfectly renewable open enabled pedagogy project. Can you move a little bit more toward renewable? Second, can you involve your students as active creators of the content? It'd be wonderful if you could, but there's a variety of practical limitations. Some students may not want to do it. Some students may not be adequately prepared. The learning ability of your students, the amount of time that they're willing to invest, factors like that can make a huge difference in whether this is a good fit for your course. So not every instructor has to engage in open enabled pedagogy, but every instructor could. And what would that be like? What would our environment be like if everyone knew that they could contribute to the fabric of learning? Thank you so much for your time. If you have any questions, please just let me know and remember lots of resources in the description box below. I'll talk to you guys later.