 Good morning. Good afternoon. Welcome everybody. We have another session for you. This is a Canadian All-Star Superstar session coming to you, I think, from right across Canada today from Western Canada through Alberta and over into Ontario. So my name is Ann Marie Scott. I'll be helping to facilitate the session. I'm not going to take too much longer. I'm going to introduce our speakers. We have Marina Roberts and Helen DeWords, and they're going to be talking to us about intentional open learning design and action. So ladies, over to you and take it away. Just waiting for this slide. There we go. Go ahead, Helen. And we just want to take this opportunity to share some ideas, some thoughts, some connections, and we have a padlet available for you to share your thoughts and we'll build some more connections. Excellent. So this is a picture right outside or down the road from me in Calgary, Alberta, and we welcome you to intentional open learning design in action. Next slide, please. So I just first want to acknowledge that I am on Treaty 7 territory in Calgary, Alberta. I acknowledge the past, present, and future generations of Stony Nakoda Blackfoot, Tsutsina, and Métis nations who help us steward this land as well as honor and celebrate this place. And I acknowledge that I am on Treaty 2 and Treaty 35 land in the area of Windsor and Detroit, and I honor the past, present, and future generations of those who are caretakers of this land and honor and celebrate these places. And we are here together because Helen and I had the opportunity to work together at UBC with the education faculty as learning designers, and it became very apparent very quickly that we have similar approaches, but we have come from very different perspectives. So I'm a K-12 or I was a K-12 educator until February, a school leader and adjunct assistant prof. I've taught classes on assessment with pre-service teachers, issues in English language learning, and most recently ed tech ethics course. I'm located in Calgary, Alberta, but moving to Montreal this summer and I'm doing some social research and higher ed open learning design and I'm part of the GOGM, open education for a better world network and social research networks at my university. And you can see some common threads between what Marina has shared and what I have shared. My background is as a K-8 educator, school leader, became a teacher, faculty of education instructor, and I'm located in Ontario currently working on a PhD in open research, part of the GOGM and virtually connecting networks. And we're here today to share a bit about how would you do our kind of open learning design? So go ahead Helen. So as we talk about this we think very intentionally about the design of the courses and the learning opportunities that we present to the students that we teach and really we base this on Catherine Cronin's research where she talks about negotiations. And as I was reading I developed this this graphic to help me figure out how I'm dialing up or dialing down depending on the specific factors that are listed at the bottom for the students. So thinking about the students in terms of their agency, their efficacy, safety, security, their experiences, their facilities with digital technologies and not dialing up when they may not be ready for those to be dialed up. We recently had the opportunity to write a little bit more about our authentic assessment practices and how we design authentic assessment experiences for the students and build that into the course design with some real intentionality and our course assignments we in order to assess student learning we realized that we needed to be very intelligent and give students an opportunity to show what they know in very authentic ways that honor their individual life journeys that sets their own goals for the course content and really thinking about their future goals as opposed to our intention for getting them through the course material. Thank you Helen. That's a good point about the future goals. So everything we design for goes beyond the course if you can imagine that like that's always how we're thinking. So this comes from my dissertation research. It's called the OLDE, the Open Learning Design Intervention. It's based on four stages as you can see, building relationships, co-designing learning pathways, building and sharing knowledge, and building personal learning networks, all the while focusing on reflections and reflective practice in multiple ways and forms. The key parts to this are in online learning environments, I develop, I ensure that we have what's called social pods which are not usually not assessment groups but like or groups that are doing projects but groups of support so they come together and they're always there for each other to come together each week and talk and interact and that supports some of our participatory social media integration as we develop our PLN personal learning network. Next slide please. And from that research in the Open Learning Design Intervention, I did come up with some principles of open learning design in any learning context and I just wanted to highlight here that this is important that the learners have an opportunity to co-design in any context and what we mean by co-design is the opportunity to have that discussion and voice with the instructor to figure out which direction they're going in their own personal learning journey. They share their learning experiences through open and closed feedback loops in multiple ways. They transparently demonstrate their learning in meaningful ways dependent upon the context of the course that it's we're adamant that the learning occurs through stages and continuums and is a personal learning journey so it's not something that we will expect everyone to do each time and we always emphasize the learning process over the product. This comes from theory and current literature and you might see some names on here that might be in the room today which is rather exciting. So while at the bottom you'll see by Gotsky, Dewey, Barth, Scardimalia, and Barrett are really help support the theoretical foundations for what I believe we consider open educational practices. It's also really important to bring in current ideas and emerging researchers and scholars like Kuros, Kanol, Jenkins, Ito, Drexler, Cronin, Greenhow, and Boyd just to name a few. And that brings us to the application practice that I believe both Verena and I have used this empathy map as we intentionally begin to design a course or as we intentionally review and reflect on how the course worked and applying this empathy map really helps us focus on the learner at the center of it all. And in a lot of ways I use this empathy map in conjunction with a pre-course survey so that I get to know what my students are bringing in to the course and what they're hoping to gain from the course and where the pain points and the gain points are as they step into the course and it really helps me kind of refigure or provide strategic support. One of the other, sorry, one of the other options is using a week zero. I love the concept of using week zero. Yeah, both of us use week zero so you'll see that we spend a lot of time ahead of the course so that people have described in flipped models where or flipped blended models where they add the content before and then they talk with the students during the class time. We do a lot of the preparation and design ahead of time so that we have the opportunity to connect with the students and figure out what they want to do when we start the course. Now the following slide is just a quick example of how I set up my ed tech ethics course for example. So I instantly think about who will be taking the course so you'll see I ask myself questions like how will the students see themselves in the course so what kind of resources can I use to ensure that they instantly feel that they're apart how do I build those relationships where are they in their program so I understand their skills and competencies how will I connect and interact with the students but and previous instructor or other global experts but how will the students connect with each other as well and finally what learning tasks will they find meaningful what so I have to ask them those kind of questions as well and how can co-design how can learners co-design their own learning which will be different for everyone. And as we're building the design of the course I'm very cognizant and conscious of of building in this notion of UDL universe of design principles for for their learning and and this is intentional in the pathways and opportunities that I designed for the students and where their where their choices and agency can can be made and it's not just in this case we're really looking at how they become expert learners throughout throughout the course but not just within our course but within the whole course of of study that they might be in and how we're engaging in the why the what and the how of learning through these multiple multiple ways and multiple pathways for example in my course an inquiry project is the the ultimate outcome but it's a very iterative and responsive way of them building to the concluding project and I think both Verena and I can speak to them we love this graphic by Phil Hill in and I don't think I got it into the pilot but we'll get it into the pilot so it's there as well but it really flattens the the the territory for learning it provides multiple different tools and mechanisms for students to show what they know and giving them some choice in that so that I'm not dictating that they must create a blog site with with blog responses unless that is what the intent is using announcements strategically building you know the safe spaces for them within the learning management system because that's where they may feel most comfortable and where they have the most experience but then slowly finding ways to move them outside of the the boundaries of the garden and from the oldie um sorry for the next slide we I have modified the open learning design and it in the courses it looks more like this so you you're you're seeing a a continuum for a process to product that balance between the two and to do that you think about internal feedback and external feedback and a reflective process over and over in iterative stages that you're constantly checking in throughout the course um and finally based on some of the current findings of my social research on the ed tech ethics project we're seeing an increase in engagement and learning because students identify their choice and authentic learning environments we see feelings of support because of their peer groups and check-ins and timelines and we see connections between each other and personal learning networks due to the external feedback and experts themselves um being a part of the class and my students developing into becoming those experts in the field and that's where we're going to end it and and questions and comments are welcome yeah oh thank you um there was as you were talking there was a I would say perennial debate raging in the in the comments um so I'll I'll try and kind of frame it because I think people might be interested in your practical experience there was a a bit of the old um if students set their own goals how does how does that line up with learning outcomes um and and then and then quite a bit of chat about you know how you work around that but I'd be interested in you know as you've applied this in in various contexts have you come up up against that challenge and how have you managed that challenge um in terms of assessment we integrate the learning and comes into the rubric so the rubrics highlight some of the learning outcomes and then we emphasize that for the students throughout the course so in terms of meeting that balance with our institutional needs um that has resolved that problem but on the other hand I use the learning outcomes throughout the course for the students to reflect upon so I ask them where they're at continuously by throughout their participatory activities or whatever we're doing and if they don't think that they're meeting those course outcomes then throughout whatever journey or pathway that they are taking then we have a conversation about it yeah and likewise it's it's taking that those outcomes that are dictated by the institution and making sure that the students are are really caught aware of and saying okay so this is how I can show you what I know to do and this is how I'm going to show you that I can do these things and and having those conversations with them as as we work through the projects and the assignments yeah it's all about them showing us how they can or how they perceive themselves to demonstrate evidence of the learning outcomes one of the comments that was in the chat was around the possibility of students setting their own learning goals as one of the learning outcomes so you you define the scope of what it is that you are aiming to get out of this and then demonstrate it is that something you've had the opportunity to do or I can't change any of my learning outcomes at my university um specifically however in that what do we call it module zero I do set up surveys to ask them about their goals so I guess I modified that idea Ann Marie but yeah that would be a dream if I could influence though I would say and at the end I meet with my director and we talk about the learning outcomes and how we need to reshape them or change them at the University of Calgary I do want to say that to be fair Helen can you change your learning outcomes but but I think out of those if the students know what they are their outcomes so if they've they've already figured out why they're taking my course they know they've got a goal in mind and and and they will find themselves in those outcomes and yeah and as they go through the course they'll find themselves I like that they find themselves in the learning outcomes I would agree but it's super scary as the instructor when they start and you're just like okay go for it let's see where we get and Helen and I have said that we never have the same outcomes of course design ever ever although for the pandemic I would say that I didn't have to make many changes I was we were flexible responsive caring and we were we were good and and for me for my pandemic reaction response was to dial back on a lot of the dial back on a lot of the those open those open things and and do do less of some of those and some students push themselves to the other end by themselves because they wanted more open they wanted more public they wanted more dynamic for sure go and I'm just looking at the comments to see if there's any other questions for you um I did see a little comment about your avatars on your slides there was a lot of love for the there you go Catherine's comment right there a lot of love for the Helen viewing and I thought if you speak to which slide very nice I was Helen I I've done that with other presentations where I've got co co-authors or co-writers or co co-presenters and it's so easy to figure out okay so who's talking now instead of trying to remember so we've got a question here from Jane who's asking wouldn't course outlines or outcomes come from curriculum committees approved by senate and universities yes I mean changing stuff once they're in motion is hard is my experience although as I say we can't we have had the opportunity to make adjustments after the course but that just ensures that as an instructor I have to give evidence as to why I want to make these changes so it's not a bad thing necessarily and and Leo's put a comment about the writing of learning outcomes is a bit of an art form this conversation is reminding me of a course structure that exists at the University of Edinburgh um where I was prior to to Athabasca which is a it's a student project course but it's an empty shell and so one of the learning outcomes is that students define the project and they write the plan they write the kind of learning agreement all those for what they're doing and that's a really flexible model the learning outcome is very clear but within it there is total scope for the student to define the work yeah I think we could and in my case I like to structure it so that the students can find and figure out why they're doing why I'm asking them to do certain things um and and then stepping off the diving board and trying something different because as I think that once they know that they know that they can find their own way through the the course yeah content activities yeah helping them find their own way yeah that's exactly it Helen it's how do we and then once they find their own way and some of them never do I'm not saying this is successful for all students some of them just want me to direct them the whole time that doesn't work as well but if you can help them find their own way and that's what we mean by we're designing for sustainability beyond the course they understand that this is about beyond the course we are I'm a bad bad bad post I'm sorry Tim you should check it later um thank you everybody thank you Helen and Marina for the conversation and enjoy the rest of the conference thank you so much round of a virtual applause for everyone