 Welcome to Domains 21. This is another session and I am extremely happy to welcome Lee Scower-Bisset from Georgetown University and Marie Savanandin who has been doing domains and I think, Marie, you've been at every Domains conference so far. So you're kind of like a three star attendee. Yeah, you're true. So welcome back. They'll be talking to us about Beyond Portfolios, a topic near and dear to my heart in terms of what's possible and high impact programmatic uses of domains at Georgetown University. So I will not dither on and I will let them get down to work. Excellent. Thank you, Jim. So welcome to our presentation on Beyond Portfolios, High Impact Programmatic Uses of Domains at Georgetown and just a very brief introduction of Lee and myself and what we do at Georgetown. I'm Marie Savanandin. I'm the Senior Associate Director for Digital Learning and Web Development and Lee, do you want to... Sure. I'm Lee Scower-Bisset and I'm a Learning Design Specialist at Candles which is the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University. So what we're going to talk about today is high impact practices and this was identified by the AAUP as pedagogical practices that have a high impact on student learning and how important they are. So one of the most recent high impact practices that was added was in fact, e-portfolios as a high... the AACMU, sorry. So as you can see here, we know what how important portfolios and now e-portfolios are for student learning. It gives an integrated experience. It allows students to see the connections in their work as they've gone through and Georgetown has long been practicing not just e-portfolios but portfolios in general as a good educational practice. And Georgetown Domains is often used as a kind of Trojan horse for or e-portfolios or Trojan horse... Trojan horse I should say for introducing the domain in one's own program that we want something flexible. We want something that students can help share their work more publicly. It gets it out of locked down and proprietary e-portfolio systems that are more templates than they are the opportunity to be creative. But there are more high impact practices that domains can help faculty and programs adapt into the pedagogy. And so what we wanted to focus on today is some programs that have the e-portfolio but how domains... the e-portfolio through domains also allows for other high impact practices that take place in the classrooms such as collaborative assignments and projects, service learning and community-based learning, capstone courses and projects, and the formation of learning communities. And these are just some of the examples that we're going to be looking at for programs across Georgetown University that have adopted Domain in One Zone. One of the first programs that we were going to focus on is a master's degree in learning design and technology. I will, full transparency, I teach in the program. I actually teach the design studio in portfolio and digital identity. But what's so great about that particular class is that I get to see a wide selection of the work the students do across their classes and help them see the integrative nature of all of these various projects, but also encourage them to think more broadly about the work that they do outside of the program and how they can bring that into their portfolios. So here are some examples from students and the work that they've done on their domains and what it is allowed them to be able to do with their domains. So as I said, you know, they have an e-portfolio requirement instead of a capstone or a thesis and the program largely uses project-based learning with their projects hosted on domains. So one of the, one of the great classes that we offer is a class called Emergent Technology and that's taught by Brian Alexander. And this first project that I wanted to share is one by Anne Dumanat. And she designed a game in twine hosted on her domain. This is as well, she did it that it was focused not only on the English language or students in the United States, but students in the Philippines. And so really she was able to design this game, hosted on domains and be able to produce it to an international audience in that, in her design for it. You can see the link at the bottom of the, at the bottom of the page. And I'll make sure to share all of these links as well for what we're checking out. Now it's not just in classes, though, that our students are doing this great work. There is also extracurricular projects that these students are developing. Often they work either full-time or part-time. And so they have the opportunity to, to apply what they've learned in their classes in their day-to-day jobs and come up with really amazing projects that then they can feature and, and promote even on their, on their domains. And it allows for this kind of work to gain visibility, but also to be able to again, integrate it into their learning. So Ijeoma Nijaka, she curated a, she's a recent graduate. She now works at the Red House. And she curated an entire exhibit that then she was able to put highlights up on her site, Invisibility at Georgetown Past, Present, and Future. She's very interested in inclusion and inclusivity, especially for the Georgetown community. And she was able to make visual of that and bring in, bring in the voices of multiple people and have this really fantastic project live on beyond the short exhibit time that existed where it's allowed to exist for a longer period of time on her domain. Another example of this is the student Sandy Lee, where she participated in a summer institute called Equity in the Academic Experience. This was again extracurricular, but nonetheless she was able to put her, narrate her experience and share their final project and report on their, on her domain, allowing for it to have a larger impact than just Georgetown University, but again sharing beyond that and able to then also include it into her portfolio and show the work that, show the applicability of the work that she was doing in the learning design and technology program. So these are all great examples of students using domains in various ways, both curricular and extracurricular, to showcase the project-based, community-based learning that they have done. Our next program that we want to look at is MA in Public Relations and Corporate Communications. This is a program offered through our School of Continuing Studies. It is currently in the process of being moved entirely online, even pre-pandemic, we were developing these courses online. And so one course in particular, we're going to talk about, but of course Public Relations is a outward-facing profession. And so domains allows for, allows for the students to experiment with this kind of public-facing work, but also this opportunity in a all online asynchronous format to be able to still build community and hopefully for real-world impact as well. So the course is Public Affairs and I worked with the instructor Wendy Files. She's a professional in the field and a subject matter expert and who teaches this class and we developed the online version of this class. So the assignment that uses domains is that students from the very beginning choose a pet cause to apply what they have learned that week, which they then write about on the blog. At the beginning of the course as well, the students participate in a value sort. They're required to comment on each other's posts that have different sets of values. So in other words, how would you convince somebody who has a different set of values than you to endorse your pet cause? And what Professor Files notes is that the blogs were amazing for community building, for student engagement, and provided a platform for what the students were passionate about. So we see this kind of project-based learning, student-driven learning where they're choosing what they're passionate about, as well as an opportunity for the students to get to know each other better, comment on each other's posts. What we hope blogs can and should be is this opportunity to engage with people with admittedly different, as they say, values. And how do you learn from that? How do you engage? And so it turned out to be a really, really successful pilot that she tried and is now continuing on. And she's planning on using it every semester moving forward. So with that, I will pass it on to Marie to talk a little bit more about how domains are being used. Thank you, Leigh. So the next set of examples we're going to look at are all undergraduate-focused. So this first one is a course called Flourishing in College and Community. And the instructor for the course is Professor Sarah Stiles. And the course is entirely focused on student well-being. There's a lot of research talking about even before the pandemic, the stress that students go through as they learn how to navigate college and as they're sort of progressing through their academic career. So the course is for freshmen and sophomore. I think it's mostly that freshman that enrolled in the course, but a support system created as well. They have peer mentors, and they're really encouraged to think about well-being, put in place practices and reflect on the journey they've had so far. And then how would they like to progress from that point on? Now, where Domains comes in, Leigh, if you want to move to the next slide, is students are encouraged to actually create a public website to have them reflect about this very, you know, most of the time, very personal stories about challenges that they've had in the past, things that they're working through at Georgetown. So you can sort of get a sense of some of the challenges that students go through. Now, Domains and all sort of outside of the e-portfolio approach here, it really encourages students to think about online presence. How are you talking about these challenges in a reflective way and how are you connecting to your audience? So you're thinking about your content, you're thinking about digital presence and crafting that narrative while also sort of grappling, grasping, and working through well-being as an overall sort of, you know, thing that you're working on for your life, right? So it's been very neat to kind of see Domains being used for this kind of personal space within a university environment. So then our next example is the Digital Rome Project, which is actually a study abroad experience back in the day when study abroad used to be possible and here's hoping we can get back there very soon. But if you want to advance to the next slide, Leigh, sorry. The project itself is asked so students go to Rome and they go and visit several museum sites, archeological sites, and then they document, take pictures so they use Domains and the specific instance is actually an Omega site where, you know, they're easily able to get access to Omega without having to go through the process of setting something up, figuring out is this the right installation process, etc., right? The professors and the students are just focused on the sort of problem that they're looking to solve, which is we want to create a digital library, we want it to be able, we want to be able to co-create this place, we want to be able to reflect on each other's work and then sort of augment, leverage each other's research as well. So this has provided like a collection of all of the assets that different students are sort of taking pictures of, documenting, etc., and then as they sort of deliver their final exhibits and that is the other thing instead of writing a paper, students are encouraged to actually create a digital narrative around what they're seeing, what they're learning and what they're giving back to their peers in this learning community. So I wanted to sort of wrap this up with a quote from the professor, overall students certainly engage more than they do in writing papers with a visual evidence and since this is a major component of this class, we count this as a definite benefit and we, you know, sort of anecdotally from the faculty just heard how much more engaged students were in sort of changing some of the dynamics of, you know, here's a kind of final paper about my summer abroad experience to here's a very tangible resource that me and my classmates or my teammates created that now others can look at and also use, right? Like that's the other thing, you're sort of giving back to this larger community. So with that, we would like to wrap up our session. You know, thank you so much for your time and listening to our presentation and we look forward to engaging with all of you in the discussion. Yes, thank you everyone. Jim, you're still muted. Luckily, I can cut that out. I want to thank you both for joining us and, you know, I'm interested. We've been talking a lot. You talked about the notion of the Trojan horse portfolios opening up just the idea that like you have a tool like Omega to do archiving of a project in Rome or you have a platform where something like twine can be built. And I think in some ways it's as simple as providing your community web tools to build some of the ideas that they discuss, right? Like I don't think domains is as I like that you talk about it as a programmatic, but also a practical approach to putting tools and possibilities in the hands of your community. And so how has that worked? I mean, has it been a hard sell or has it just been natural given that, you know, these are things that a lot of your faculty, whether it's Brian Alexander or whoever, might see the value of like already, it's not something where you have to beat down doors, I imagine, but am I wrong? No, absolutely not. I mean, it's been a very organic growth at Georgetown and, you know, we started with and also we should sort of just stepping back a little bit there. We have a huge blogging system as well. So there's a lot of buy-in into that's opportunity to give students to be themselves, like in a public space, be able to theme things, engage with each other differently. And then when we introduce domains, you know, like you said, it opens up a plethora of options without having to sort of engage with different groups of people bringing in different kinds of expertise, all at the systems level, you know, at that point, you're still not even getting to the problem or the goal that people want to achieve, you just have a lot of sort of barriers. So Domains does a great job of reducing that and thereby more people can just jump in and sort of take their research, scholarship, experimentation, like to a whole new level, you know. And there's been a renewed interest in it as well, given the pandemic situation where faculty are now rethinking their assessment and their evaluation for their students and thinking about the affordances of the internet in a way that they perhaps didn't previously because they could still just have students submit papers or doing high-stakes final exams. And now they're thinking, is this the best way to assess what their students are doing? Are there ways that we can do projects, and in this case, digital projects, and this leads to a discussion with faculty around, you know, yes, you can do that, and we can do that on domains, right? They start to see the limitations of the LMS and say, well, I want my students to be able to see each other's projects, and we want to be able to comment on each other's projects, and we want to be able to share them a little bit more broadly. We can't do that in an LMS. We want to have, because we are remote, we can invite external guests to comment on the student's work. Just, I just worked with theater, and they have a guest, they have an external guest commentator for the student's work, and that person can't access the stuff in Canvas. And so now we are setting up, in this case, it's a Commons blog, but we're setting up a space for digital projects for them in a way that we wouldn't have previously. And so it's been a really wonderful opportunity to talk, not only about domains, but talk to faculty about rethinking how they do assessment and rethinking what they ask their students to do. So we've seen a little bit of an uptick in organic interest that is pushed along by the pandemic and the opportunity to have to relook at all of the pedagogy, but in particular assessment. Opens just another word for teaching on the web, right? Well, thank you both. This was great. I appreciate you taking the time to share your work at Georgetown, and hopefully I'll be seeing you soon and face-to-face at some point after this craziness. Hopefully, it'll be nice. Thank you, Jim. Thank you. Thanks, Jim. Bye-bye, everybody. Bye.