 Welcome everyone to listen my presentation on sprinting to student empowerment, the case for student-centered open assignment sprint. Before we get started, we would both like to respectfully acknowledge the lands upon which we are on. For myself, my home is located on the traditional and unceded territories of this Leilatuth, Squamish, Stolo, and Musqueam nations. And I am located on the traditional and unceded territories of the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations, known as the Lekwungen speaking peoples, as well as the Huysanich nations as well. And we invite you wherever you're located to check out which territories, traditional territories you are located on by going to native-land.ca. You can type in your city, town, postal code, and learn a little bit about whose territories you're on. So as Darcy introduced us, my name is Alyssa. I work at Capilano University. I am a librarian by training, but I have experience in cultural, nonprofit, and academic settings. I currently work as the open education faculty coordinator at Capilano University. And I'm also a public services librarian with the Greater Victoria Public Library. And I am Darcy. I am also a librarian. And over the course of my career, I have primarily focused on copyright and open education in academic post-secondary settings. I am currently the incoming chair for the BC Open Education Librarians Group, and my current role at the Justice Institute of British Columbia is both copyright and instruction. Perfect. So just very briefly about the university that this project took place on. So Capilano University is located in North Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada. It has three campuses. So the main campus is on the North Shore, and then there's two smaller campuses on the Sunshine Coast and Lonsdale. The university has approximately just over 6000 FTEs, and about 40% of these are international students. So with 94 programs, 13 bachelor's degrees, and six post-bac programs, the institution provides a wide range of educational opportunities for students, including several signature programs, such as animation, tourism management, a bachelor of legal studies, and Canada's only Indigenous independent digital filmmaking program. So to talk a little bit about open education at Capilano University, prior to any formal budget line being made available for open education work at the institutional level, a working group had been brought together, but wasn't highly successful in really building up open education awareness across campus. So there were always librarians present at these early meetings, usually the head of the Center for Teaching Excellence and possibly one or two really enthusiastic faculty members, but generally the same faces would appear over and over again and it was a really small group. But in 2019, Capilano University applied for and was successful in receiving the BC campus open sustainability grants, which allowed the institution to really kickstart a more fulsome open education culture on campus. So under the terms of the grant, I was able to get a section of release time as the open education faculty coordinator. We also were able to hire a part-time research assistant, a student research assistant, and then we were able to designate four faculty members, one section of release time each from four different departments. So psychology, kinesiology, communications and STEM as well. The grants itself outlines several different projects that our group would undertake, which included an open education showcase, an open textbook adoption audit as well as the open assignment sprint. And so planning for the sprint began pretty much in January 2021 and the event was hosted in May 2021. And the goal of the event was to have students and faculty collaborate to gather and customize open assignments that were linked to specific courses and specific learning outcomes. While promoting a culture of sharing and collaboration, we also wanted students to help us identify creative ways to approach assessment in their in the classroom by asking them what assignments they would be interested in completing so really kind of engaging them from the beginning. Then the assignments collected were then adapted during the sprints. And the idea was to have them as part of an open assignment bank that faculty across disciplines could use at the institution. And really our vision is to be able to host this spring every year using faculty from rotating departments, as well as students from a range of departments as well. So now I'm going to turn it over to Darcy who's going to talk a little bit more about our actual process. Thank you, Alyssa. So the sprint itself required quite a bit of prep work as I'm sure we all know most events do. But in this particular case, we had extra work to do because we couldn't really find colleagues who had done something similar. We did thankfully get quite a bit of help and quite a bit of advice from colleagues who had ran sprints before, but we couldn't find anyone who had specifically ran an open assignment sprint. And then on top of that, at this point, a few or many people hadn't done online sprints as well. So we did have to kind of start from scratch on quite a few things. And so the open the group as a whole had quite a few discussions at the beginning about sort of what the structure of the event would look like. For example, would the students that we have be in discipline specific groups, or we have it be multi disciplinary. Would the disciplines all each be working on the same type of assignment, or would they work on different assignments, would faculty collect examples of open assignments ahead of time or would we leave all the gathering up to the students. So that was some of the questions that we sort of worked through at the very beginning. And so we quickly realized that we needed to set goals for the event in order to be able to plan sort of what the outcomes would be. And some of these goals were, you know, the goals for the overall sprint. So what do we want to have achieved by the very end goals for each day of the sprint. So after day one, what do we want each group to have accomplished, and then also goals for each section of the sprint. So we broke each day and day down into different sections and different activities that the groups would do. So by the end of each section, what do we want to have accomplished and therefore what activity will we do in order to accomplish that goal. So what we realized to actually help us set these goals was that creating the agenda quite early would help us help guide us. So we started working on the agenda quite early in the planning process with the understanding that it could be modified and updated throughout the process. It really helped pull the group together because once we could sort of structurally see what the day would look like. It was easier for us to identify what the goals would be and what the actual sprint event would look like in the end. Next slide please. We recognized that most of the students, if not all of the students would be coming in with no prior knowledge of what an open assignment is. And because of the nature of an online event, it would be harder to sort of answer questions as they come up, because most of the time the groups would be spent in breakout rooms. So what we did is we created a number of handouts that we sent to participants at key points throughout the planning phase. And we have a shortened link at the top of the screen there which we will also be putting into the chat. This link leads to the Google Drive folder that holds all of these documents in case anyone wants to have a look. And all of the materials are licensed under a CC by share like non commercial license. But a little bit of information about each of these resources, the open assignment info sheet was used to actually recruit faculty and students ahead of the sprint. So just a little bit of information about what the sprint in the event was going to be. And then we have two versions of the what is an open assignment, a longer version that we sent to faculty and then a shorter version that we sent to students. And we sent this a few weeks ahead of the sprint so that people could sort of start to familiarize themselves with what an open assignment is. And then finally the list of open assignments. So in the end we did decide to send a list of assignment examples to students just a day or two ahead of the sprint. And then this was also a document that they could use while they were actually gathering assignments and choosing what assignments they might want to work on during the sprint. I will point out though that if you have a look at this list you'll see that it is quite a long list. We really didn't want to limit students by only giving them a few examples that they could pull from. So we listed different types of possible assignments, we linked to individual assignments that have been posted online and then we also linked to blogs or other repositories of open assignments so that students really had, you know, the freedom to choose whatever assignments they would be interested in working on, but we still narrowed it down so they weren't sort of searching the whole worldwide web. Instead they were, they had, you know, a little bit of guidance to get started. Next slide please. One other document that you'll also see in there is our detailed agenda and a few of our planning documents as well. I'm going to put those in there just in case if anyone is interested in running this event in the future that they can sort of see what our agenda and our goals all were. And I'm going to turn it back to Alyssa who's going to talk about our outcomes. Great, thank you Darcy. So at the outset of the sprint, we defined a series of goals and we had a high degree of success in meeting each one. In terms of open assignments themselves, the sprint resulted in the identification of over 40 unique open assignment ideas through student and faculty research and collaboration on the date of. The completeness of these open assignment examples, it really does vary. So some don't have full descriptions or they might require a little bit more detailed information in order to deploy in an actual classroom setting. However, they're really the start that we needed in order to meet our second goal, which was to create an open repository. So we sort of have this next year to do that. This year we'll be working on setting up and then curating a repository of open assignments that will store everything that we were able to gather in the open assignment sprint. And we're going to make this available to faculty students and really anyone online to view. The goal is really to promote the work that has been done and that was achieved through the assignment sprint. And then to support instructors who are seeking ways to incorporate open assignments into their classrooms with examples really tailored to the programs that are available at our institution. We also really succeeded I would say in elevating awareness of open on campus. The faculty associates themselves recruited colleagues to participate on the day of the sprint. But they also took advantage of opportunities to speak to fellow faculty members at other times so at departmental meetings that instructional retreats. So really taking advantage of those conversations and those formal and informal discussions and opportunities. Student volunteers in the sprint were also really enthusiastic following the event which was exciting for us. A number of students even mentioned their interest in continuing to be involved in open education activities on campus, beyond just the sprint itself so that's something we were thrilled about. And then a little bit more to speak to that so in terms of feedback itself from faculty that participated, and this is both the open education faculty associates as well as the colleagues that they recruited to participate in the sprint event. They were consistently positive about their involvement in the sprint and they were really pleased with the event itself, as well as the outcomes. And although not all faculty participants plan to adopt those open assignments into their classrooms. Three of the four faculty associates did incorporate open assignments into their 2021 2022 academic coursework. So that's a big win. And then in terms of specific, you know, student feedback. So I have some we've gathered some quotes here from a survey that we administered. But again, overwhelmingly positive. You know some students felt it was amazing they look forward to seeing the evolution of open education, and how it would really give students greater and more unique learning experiences. Someone else commented that they found it very inspiring and thought it was a wonderful opportunity for collaboration and development. And then another student said I had a wonderful time and feel very lucky to be a part of this. And really that enthusiasm and, you know, that ability to embrace open is what we, that was a big goal of ours we want people to feel enthusiastic and have expect more out of open education opportunities on campus. So I'll shift it back to Darcy now to talk a little bit more about some of the challenges that the sprint presented. Thank you, Alyssa. And yes so as Alyssa mentioned the overall event was a huge success she went over a few of our outcomes the positive ones, but we did want to touch upon a couple of the challenges just so in case anyone is interested in hosting a similar type of event we can you know give some advice and say maybe some of the challenges that you might come across as well. So our number one challenge was recruitment for both faculty and students. So each of the four faculty fellows was tasked with all, most of our recruitment. So each faculty fellow recruited between one and two other faculty members from their department. And so trying to get faculty who were not already not involved with open involved was a little bit of a challenge. The event may have been held at a bit of a tricky time of year. It was between winter exams and the start of summer semester. So some faculty had other PD events that they already had planned, and then others were preparing for their upcoming courses. And as Alyssa mentioned the faculty fellows had a few ways of recruiting other faculty so some of them spoke at their departmental meetings about open education in general and then about this sprint in more particular more specifically. And some of them just held specific meetings that they invited their department to, and then of course reaching out to faculty individually. The students were also recruited by our faculty fellows. So we aimed to have between three to four students per discipline. And for students, we would say that the most successful form of recruiting was actually faculty talking to students in their classes and students that they already knew. We focused on a volunteer board and we also marketed through the student union, but I think the majority if not all of our students actually came from that those faculty conversations with students that they already had a relationship with and had in their classes. We also do want to note that all the students who participated in the sprint received a co-curricular record for participating. All of our recruitment did end up coming down to the wire, but it did work out in the end. And we recognize that this is one of those challenges that, even if we run the sprint again, we will probably come across recruitment challenges again. Another one of the challenges was sort of, you know, accommodating all ideas, as I mentioned at the beginning, you know, within the open ed group we all sort of had ideas of how we wanted the sprint to go. But as we mentioned, sort of having those conversations and determining the actual goals for the event really helped structure that and guide it. And, you know, due to the success of the event, that may be something that future events will be a little bit more streamlined because we already have a plan moving forward. Another challenge, as I'm sure we all come across, is the complexity of open assignments in general, so both for the faculty who were recruited by the faculty fellows and then also students who had not worked with open assignments before. So just trying to make sure that everyone fully understood what an open assignment is, and so that we knew that the material that we ended up with at the end would fit that criteria. So I don't have online format on here, but I would like to say that the online format is both a challenge and a success, we believe. So there are some challenges with holding an event like this in an online format. For example, not being able to answer sort of those ad hoc questions as they come in, because your groups are all in breakout rooms, it's a little harder to gather everyone together and answer a question to everybody. And also just not having sort of that same level of group energy that you have at an in-person event when you're on the same room and feeding off of each other. But there were also some huge positives to hosting the event online. We were able to reach some students who may not have been able to participate in the event had it been in person. And then also we had participants work on their own documents online and group documents within Microsoft Teams, which is the platform that we used. It's really easy to sort of keep and gather those documents at the end, because they all sort of already live within that team hub. And I'm going to pass it back to Alyssa again. So the central feature that really set this type of event apart from other post-secondary academic events was the direct involvement of students throughout the entire process from the design and planning stages through to the co-collaboration with faculty at the event itself. So a major thing that we want to acknowledge and recognize is the benefit of being able to hire Aliyah, who is the student research assistant, to support our open education work throughout the academic year. This really enabled our planning team to have real-time access to student perspectives, which informed a lot of aspects of the event, including communications with student participants, the format and timing of each day, and even the prize-draw gift that was awarded to those who completed a post-event survey. In this way, the student research assistant was an active contributor and an architect of the event itself, and we strongly feel that this input and perspective was invaluable in setting the stage for a positive sprint experience for the student participants. At the early stages of planning, it was really challenging to find research on and, pardon me, I've just lost my section here. Yeah, we want to mention that we want to mention that at the early stages of planning, it was challenging to find research on or examples of open assignment sprint events. So most of the sprint examples that we located were faculty-focused. So these were things like open textbook sprints. And emphasis was typically on the content that was identified and curated by faculty and then selectively passed on to students through assigned classroom work. So the major advantage of including students in the sprint itself is threefold that we found through our own event. So number one, students become involved as active participants in leading the direction of their own, as well as their peers' educational assessments and outcomes, which is really rewarding and kind of provides a lot of enthusiasm. Students also really provide a unique perspective. And they might even present viewpoints that and identify novel strategies that faculty alone would not be able to identify. So really valuing kind of the experiences and perspectives that they're bringing in and having a platform for that. And then finally, involving students from the beginning really creates a shared responsibility for identifying and gathering content. Or to put it in other words, it spreads the responsibility across a larger and more diverse group of people, which really creates a richer experience overall. And just to mention, so again, just the feedback from students was really encouraging. We did administer a post sprint survey. And students were overwhelmingly enthusiastic about their experiences. When they were asked about identifying the strengths of the sprint itself, students provided feedback such as, you know, it enabled new ideas and discovery. It created motivation for students and emphasize student-centered opportunities for learning. It was a really positive experience bringing together faculty and students. And they also found it highly collaborative and accessible as well. So with this level of enthusiasm, as we look forward, we want to shift our focus on continuing sort of open education initiatives on campus. So how will we keep the thread going across multiple terms or years with possible changes to faculty and also shifting attitudes towards open education and different levels of support depending on the administration. We really feel that the enthusiasm and word of mouth advocacy that can be harnessed through students is invaluable in building and sustaining open initiatives in post-secondary settings. Students want to feel like active participants in the design of their educational experiences. And with this specific type of events, students get a taste of this and we anticipate they'll continue to seek out experience and expect further opportunities. Also, students represent a really essential partnership on campus in the goals to expand open education in post-secondary institutions. So they're a huge ally and huge champions of open education and so that energy can be harnessed in a really positive way. And then another method for gaining student support and advocacy is through really strong partnerships with the Student Union. So as we proceed into the next academic year, this is probably going to be more of a focus for us in our ongoing open education work on campus at Capilano. So just some concluding thoughts as we wrap up here. So the Sprint really has provided an incredible springboard to continue open education work on campus that advocates for ways to bring together students and faculty. The positive news is that ongoing funding for open education work has been secured into the next academic year 2021-2022, which really should enable us to hold another Sprint event, which is thrilling. We really want to try this again and so the goal is to go for it and host another event in this academic year. Another really great piece of positive news and we were confident some of this is from the advocacy and the sort of word of mouth enthusiasm that spread across campus was that open education is now included within the mandate of the upcoming strategic plan. So kind of being infused into that strategic vision of the institution, which should create further opportunities. And then through the Sprint event, you know the visibility of open education work on campus has really been elevated overall. And because of the commitment of faculty of students and advocates for open, we're really optimistic that the momentum that we've built will continue for years to come. So we want to thank you for joining us today, and please feel free to reach out to either of us if you have any questions or like to chat about designing your own open assignment Sprints.