 My name is Christian Williams and I am a assistant professor in the Department of Human Services and Rehabilitation Studies at Ascension University in Worcester, Massachusetts. And for my presentation today explores the results of a research study that compared project-based community-engaged learning when it was employed using open pedagogy versus when it was fully curated by the course instructor. This study specifically explored how students perceive community-engaged assignments in these different pedagogical iterations. It also looked at the influence of project design, the renewable versus a disposable assignment, and how this influenced both their perspectives and their overall satisfaction with the assignment. And so in the face of these ever-changing educational terrains and delivery modalities of the last few years, it's become increasingly important to evaluate teaching and learning approaches to maximize student learning, engagement, and performance outcomes. And to provide successful educational opportunities, educators, and systems of education must find ways to not only respond to the changing needs of students who have experienced disrupted, disjointed, unprecedented learning environments, but to also recognize the context that students exist in, working down to break down those barriers that have existed to engagement. Traditional learning models have emphasized the educator as the expert at the center of the teaching and learning experience, and they are often being replaced now with active and experiential learning models. So the more longer is the preferred method of information delivery, the instructor as the sage on the stage. But we're regularly seeing this being replaced as a pedagogical design and more of a facilitation approach to extending this learning process, extending it beyond the classroom and emphasizing the student's role as central to the learning process. And so not only have active learning approaches really gain widespread acceptance, but they've been taught to increase student attendance in classes to increase their engagement and to enhance that learning experience for them. And so learning by doing approaches to classroom design have also been correlated to increase retention of concepts and knowledge for students and a deeper connection to the course content through practical application and reflection. So this shift in approach creates a learning environment in which students are actively engaged as co-constructors of a learning experience, right alongside their instructors and their peers. Now, while there are many iterations of models of active learning, the current study focuses on community service learning and open pedagogy. So when thinking about this idea of community service learning or CSL, as we'll refer to it moving forward, it's a pedagogical approach that connects course learning to community-based service, right? So this through an ongoing commitment to civic engagement, to experiential learning, and reflective practice. So course activities are designed to create a direct link between theoretical content and practice opportunities, right? By the infusion of organized experiential learning that meets an identified community need area. So this is typically done in collaboration with community organizations that students develop reciprocal relationships with of engagement and of citizenship. The practical application has been found to increase critical thinking skills as students are challenged to explore and problem solve real-world situation. It serves as a connection point for students between the academic classroom and their roles as thoughtful citizens in the community. So this approach is more than just combining, right? Hands-on experience with traditional class materials for students. It also provides opportunities for critical reflection on service experiences, and it facilitates a deeper understanding of the course content. And in many cases of the field of study, then compared to traditional learning models. So despite the widespread acknowledgement of the role that CSL can actually play in enhancing student learning outcomes, particularly those critical thinking skills, as well as communication, moral development and problem solving, its implementation has been quite varied. And there's little consensus on best practices when we look at those implementation strategies. What we do know is that CSL is best implemented when the community-engaged assignments and the course content are cohesive and when it allows for each to assist with synthesizing that information and promoting deeper understanding. Student feedback has also echoed this need for cohesiveness between course content and the service learning experience and has identified the importance of in-class reflection and discussion to build connections between course content and service learning activities. So CSL has many overlapping qualities in educational approaches, particularly with open pedagogy. So pedagogy grew out of the open education movement that sought to increase students and our learning approaches and equity in education, right? By decreasing those barriers to accessing course materials and content. So in addition to increasing access and equity, open pedagogy includes practices that empower students to be the creators of their learning environment, the creators of their knowledge. And so it shifts the classroom from a place where instruction is delivered to the students who are expected to absorb it, to one that is co-created with students as partners, and where learning is viewed as a process within a product of teacher delivery. Now open pedagogy does require that shift in power dynamic and requires us to create an educational milieu that empowers students to take ownership, right, and direction of this learning process. And so we've seen that this increases their capacity for collaboration, it increases their confidence and their self-efficacy. Implementation of open educational practices has taken many forms and we've seen many strategies that we're going to see at this conference that we're at right now. Some of which include creating opportunities for students to create course content that will be available for continued access either for future students or beyond the classroom using open licenses. So this idea of renewable assignments and artifacts has replaced, in many cases, that traditional disposable assignment, right, the assignment that's completed only for the purposes of grading and is eventually discarded. Right, so these types of open projects have included creating and ending Wikipedia pages, developing multiple choice quizzes, providing demonstration examples or tutorials, things like social annotation, student created syllabi, co-authoring textbooks, just to name a few, right, there are so many possibilities to think about open pedagogy and open assignments. So renewable assignments have been linked to increases in student proactive engagement and completion of assignments. And we also know it may add value for their future endeavors, things like applications to graduate school or applications for employment. And so thinking about utmost importance though, we have found that open pedagogy is possibly regarded by students and they believe it has meaningful impact on their sense of pride and that they experienced about their work. So when we think about kind of this intersection between the open pedagogy and CSL and how it creates a gap in the literature, right, research has identified the potential for open pedagogy to really benefit student learning. And to facilitate meaningful engagement and participation within the classroom. Yet we still see a gap regarding how students perceive the specific iterations of open pedagogy, particularly comparing assignments delivered with a traditional approach and an open approach. When looking at the influence of open approaches to community service learning, there's limited exploration right now of how students perceive these experiences and how satisfied they are and whether or not that will help them to want to continue to engage in experiences like this or to continue service in the future. And so the present study builds upon existing research and explores student perceptions of project based community service learning, one using a traditional approach and another using an open pedagogy non disposable or renewable assignment approach. And so in one course we use a traditional approach and the second course we use an open pedagogy approach students in the latter course engaged in dialogue about open pedagogy, the role of renewable assignments and how CSL assignments fit into this approach. The decision to include the same assignment with two groups was with the hope of decreasing the possibility that student perceptions of the project being measured was what we were going to get rather than the experience of open pedagogy itself. And so the goal of the current study was to compare student perceptions of community engaged service learning projects when implemented using traditional disposable assignments versus when an open pedagogical approach was used. Right. And so in the open pedagogy rendition students were aware of the project that they were doing would be publicly shared, and they were able to view other examples right we also let them know that they would their work would be in a repository where it would exist with all of these other examples for future students and for people worldwide to look at if they chose to. And so the sample included students from a small Catholic liberal arts institution who were enrolled in and completed courses that employ community service learning projects as part of their traditional pedagogical approach. And so anonymous self administered survey responses are regularly collected right on CSL courses at the university to measure students perceptions of the course and the CSL integration into the classroom. So archival data from the two CSL courses taught by the same instructor one in the fall of 2021 and one in the spring of 2022 were assessed and utilized for the purpose of this project. Overall we had 47 undergraduate students who completed survey responses at 33 from the fall of 2021 and 14 from the spring of 2022. So we also looked at previous exposure to CSL right and how that existed among this population so of the, you know students who are in this 47 right responded to the survey. What we saw was that the majority of them were taking a CSL course for the very first time so 27 students had not taken a community service learning course before. Right, we had five students who had taken two prior CSL courses and 13 students reported they had taken one prior CSL course before this one. Only two students and any of the cohorts reported that they had taken three or more and they were both in the spring of 2022 cohort. Right of students in the spring cohort so this was the open pedagogy rendition, the only one student reported they had ever heard of open pedagogy before taking this course. And the majority of students reported that they were being exposed to OER and open pedagogy for the very first time. So we had to utilize the student surveys that are already collected as archival data so it was not integrated at all into the course experience right and students knew at the very beginning of the semester they were going to be completing the satisfaction survey for the CSL department. So the CSL academic goal survey asked the students to answer questions indicating their satisfaction with the CSL portion of the course. It asked them if the service experience enhance their understanding of the subject matter in the course, if the other subject matter in the course enhance their understanding of the service experience. It asked them if after the course they would consider taking another CSL course, if after the course they were more likely to do more community service in the future, and if they would recommend this CSL course and the project to other students. The survey exists on a five point Likert scale with one being they strongly disagree and five being they strongly agree right and students again were asked to just anonymously answer these questions as openly as possible. Now, in terms of data analysis descriptive statistics were used to identify their previous experiences with CSL and open methods of instruction. Since assumptions of normality were not met for this sample with the man Whitney U test and a non parametric and cova as designed by quade were utilized for data analysis and all of the data was analyzed using SPSS. So the results of the study revealed that there were insignificant differences between the groups of students and so these results are in line with the previous research that showed us that open pedagogy instructions and approaches to instructional delivery were at least as effective as traditional means. And so the current findings showed that the application of this open pedagogy did not have a significant impact on the CSL project or the students perceptions of its place in the classroom. And so it's important to recognize for a minute that pedagogical models are not in and of themselves right avenues to increasing student engagement and or enhancing academic skills and they must be implemented in such a way that really increase this student engagement and facilitates the spaces where they can actually dive deeper into the material and into this course content where they can actually collaborate and feel safe to do so with faculty and with their peers. And so we looked at the results. It's important that we recognize that while the body of literature does identify that open approaches are positively regarded by students. There is a lack of cohesiveness that has been regularly reported by faculty and students to at times get in the way, right both about its implementation and also about the idea of change and the role that that plays in a classroom environment. So with the results showing insignificant differences between the groups of students on their overall perceptions and satisfaction, the ANCOVA, when we really looked at does previous experience to CSL influence their perceptions. It also showed an insignificant statistical right results so we did not see that whether they had previous exposure to CSL right that it actually changed the results that we got in this study. So thinking about this idea that open pedagogy approaches are as effective as traditional methods measures, but we want to think about any, you know, ways in which pedagogy and implementing this pedagogy and practice, right can really influence how students perceive this experience. And so, you know, thinking about this particular study that we do recognize that there's often hesitancy both on the part of a faculty member and a student to make such a significant shift and change in approach. And so previous research had shown some of the challenges and implementation around OER and around open pedagogical practices where it had been hesitancy to have students to have their work viewed and evaluated by others as well as, you know, knowing that we widely available long after the course ends. And so throughout the course of the semester in the spring of 2022 students in this course really did share that they were anxious about this renewable assignment component. They questioned many times if their work was good enough to be shared with the general public right a sentiment that was not expressed by the fall group who only had to turn in their assignment to a course instructor. And so you're thinking about the different levels of perception of needs for performance and what that evaluation process might look like when we're putting something out into the world through a student's lens that will exist beyond them. Well, the data did not find that previous ESL experiences had a significant impact on the current results. We, it is important that future research really thinks about and looks at the role of student accountability with open pedagogy when in attempting to measure its impact on students perceptions. Right and so what we don't see right this difference in the current study between these two approaches students also did not report less satisfaction right. And so that's another important concept because it allows to assume that we have at least equal satisfaction to what we see in traditional approaches. Oftentimes, research has shown that on the second and third iteration of having open pedagogy implemented in the classroom both the faculty member and students started to become more comfortable. And so there is this question of, you know, with repeated exposure since we have repeated exposure to traditional classroom type learning, would students not even have a greater influence and appreciation for this open pedagogy approach. Right. And so at the very least, right, we think about how we can implement open pedagogy in the classroom, we can think about how we can have conversations with the students at the beginning of the semester about the potential discomfort that we might have in knowing that our work is going to exist beyond the classroom and it really opens up this opportunity for important dialogue regarding the role of open pedagogy regarding the role of assignments in general in the classroom. It gives us an opportunity as faculty to discuss with students, right, any benefits and also any risk factors associated with agreeing to keep their work open. Right, thinking about how we can have conversations about public licensure and provide students with the option to opt in to have their work publicly displayed or to do an alternative assignment if that's not something that they're comfortable with. Right, thinking about this idea of really partnering with students and we're asking students to really partner in the creation of this learning environment. And then how do we do so in a way that allows them to be a part of the assessment process design as well. We need to be able to engage in setting and understanding right reasonable goals and benchmarks right for their performance so that they're not preoccupied with the grading element of the course and you know how different it may be from what they're used to in traditional classrooms. This idea is really supported by the evidence that has found that for faculty who have implemented open practices, right that in and of itself it does not improve student outcomes that students must also be informed of the benefits of the rationale and given strategies for successful engagement. Otherwise what we see is confusion right that can impact that community environment and their willingness to engage with open approaches. So, when we look at implementation and how we can support students, we're looking to open up room and space for this very important dialogue about why we're choosing different teaching strategies. Right and what this overall assessment process will look like and what we're hoping right that classroom will gain and that environment will be as a result of an open approach. I've been doing research so far that has really explored the intersection of service learning and open pedagogical practices, but my hope is that in the future, right that this will be a possible avenue for future research to look at student efficacy to look at the student engagement and to look at how it influences ownership of course outcomes for students. You know, especially where CSL has the potential to really prepare students for future career paths, right what is that intersection there between CSL and open pedagogy and how might that contribute to their preparation for practice in the future. So, thank you very much for your attention to this presentation and I'm certainly happy to answer any questions at this time.