 Hello everybody, you're very welcome to this session entitled Combining Open Pedagogy and Citizen Science to Empower Learners and Educators and we are joined by a full panel of presenters David Tully, Will Cross, Erin McKinney, and Carlos Gullar. Over to you. Thank you for that wonderful introduction and welcome everyone and thank you for being with us today. I'm Will Cross, I work in the libraries in North Carolina State and I'm going to let the let the rest of my panelists introduce themselves briefly as well. Carlos, that's you, yeah. That's me, Carlos Gullar. So I'm Carlos Gullar, I'm a faculty member in the biotechnology program at NC State. I'm Erin McKinney and I'm an assistant professor in applied ecology at NC State University. And I'm David Tully and I work alongside Will at the in the libraries at North Carolina State University doing some OER and open pedagogy stuff. We're really pleased to have the opportunity to talk about the opportunity to build on these sort of natural connections between open pedagogy and public or citizen science. I know the next 15 minutes are going to really fly by so I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to my colleagues in just a minute. But I wanted to quickly introduce a resource that we're going to be sharing throughout our discussion today. This is a padlet. You can see the go link here. It's just at go.ncsu.edu slash oer21. And we'd like to take a minute or two to let people sort of find their way into that. And maybe add a comment having to do with how you currently are engaging with one or both of these areas of practice, public and citizen science or open pedagogy. So let's take a minute or so and then we'll come back into the presentation. But we hope you'll keep commenting on the padlet, adding suggestions and talking with each other, et cetera. So let's stop and take one minute to do that now and then come back and we'll jump into the discussion. I always want some elevator music in the background, right? Yes. In person, you can see people like heads down writing things but you just sort of have to take on faith that everybody isn't just dispersing. Yeah, exactly. Or open the padlet in another tab. Yeah, I'm seeing some good stuff popping up now and seeing a nice mix of specific resources, general questions and I'm totally new and excited to learn. That's awesome. Yeah, I think it's always reassuring and affirming to see that we are indeed all existing along a spectrum. So there's no right or wrong place to be. So let's give it another 20 seconds or so. And then as I say, we'll start talking but please don't stop writing. Please keep adding information as you have it now or if something that is said sort of sparks something, you can add that as well. Yeah, communal scribing as we go, right? Exactly, right. Yes. So do please keep adding comments but now we're going to get into some of the discussion we wanted to make sure to have. And I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Carlos to introduce this concept of public or citizen science. Thank you, Will. So we use the term citizen science because it's widely used and recognized but we want to clarify here that citizen science has nothing to do with citizenship, rather citizen science engages and really empowers the public including people who may not identify as scientists. Yeah, absolutely. Citizen science efforts typically involve a partnership between the public and professional researchers. And that means that reciprocity is key. Participants are often experts in the subject being studied, right? They might be expert hobbyists. That means they not only enable data collection. They also help to inform project development and spark creativity. So from the researcher's perspective, data sharing improves science communication and relevance. So I think next David is going to walk us through kind of what are some of these attributes. What is open pedagogy? Thank you, Erin. Good question. So essentially, pedagogy is a set of practices and values that essentially looks to both engage students as creators of information rather than simply consumers of it. And it's a form of experiential learning in which students will demonstrate understanding through the acts of creation. So it essentially seeks to do a few different things. First and foremost, engage and empower learners who initially might not identify as creators of knowledge. And they're sort of empowered to do this through what we call nondisposable or renewable assignments. So in this sense, the student is both the creator and the contributor of assignments, which are openly licensed. And it allows that content to be shared, revised, and reused by future students in that course. Open pedagogy seeks to create authentic partnerships with professional researchers. So it reexamines that power dynamic that traditionally exists between educator and student. In this type of scenario, the educator adopts more of a guideline approach. And reciprocity is key. So participants enable data collection, they inform project development, and hopefully ideally spark creativity. And this idea of data sharing, it improves science communication and relevance. And it gives back to the wider community. Next slide, please. So one way in which our university libraries has sought to support open pedagogy has been through the open pedagogy incubator. I'll try and give you all the long and the short of this. The incubator is a multi semester program, which is designed at the concept level to incentivize and support faculty to move beyond what we call the first step, which is adopting open course materials, into actually implementing open enabled practices around or within their own courses. So the idea would be that you have a faculty member who is interested in the incubator, they apply, if they're successful, they're accepted in. And they're essentially sort of trained up and given knowledge, skills and support in three main areas. The first one is the potential of open pedagogy, sort of more sort of theory sort of laced things there. But the second is current and emerging models of open pedagogical practices. And the third area is this idea of being prepared to leave with a set of concrete processes for actually implementing open pedagogy within their own courses. So the incubator program is sort of based around this series of readings, discussions within the cohort and workshops. And the structure of the program is based around three cohort meetings. You have your initial meeting where you're introduced to one another, you're introduced to the folks facilitating it, so people like Will and I and some of our colleagues. The second cohort meeting is sort of this midway point where you've had a taster already, you might have attended some workshops, you would have done some readings, there would have been some discussions. And you can at this point sort of discuss with one another what's been attractive, what you're still curious about and sort of shape the program sort of menu style for what's to come. And the third and final cohort meeting is where you sort of present upon what your open intervention is going to be. So once you've been through this program, what you are going to do. We ask our cohort to attend at least four different workshops. We have a menu system which they help guide. So we have sort of random double figures in terms of workshops that are both theory and practice based. And it's our cohort that tells us where their interest lies and we shape and schedule those workshops according to those interests. And finally, as I mentioned just now, there's the open intervention piece. So they leave the program with an idea for what their specific open intervention and their course is going to look like. Next slide please. Yeah, so given the workshops and kind of the structure of the open pedagogy incubator that David just described, a number of us in the inaugural cohort had a lot of experience working with citizen science. So a natural kind of topic for one of our group discussions in workshops was just thinking about what are those parallels. You know, how does citizen science fit with open pedagogy? And so I was thinking, you know, like what better way? Clearly we had an ice cream craving. So we're thinking about, you know, Ben and Jerry's a pint as your analogy here. The column in core for both of these approaches is a collaborative iterative co-creation where citizen science depends on open pedagogy via accessible information and materials, whereas open pedagogy can feature citizen science by engaging students to actually participate in large projects through individual building contributions. So then if we actually look at what this might look like in practice from project development to interpreting the data, participants in my, oh, if you go to the next slide, Will, sorry, participants in my sourdough for science project have provided crucial insights either through conversations in our public Facebook groups or during Q&A sessions in middle school classrooms. I worked with middle school students in Raleigh to grow hundreds of sourdough starters to determine how flower type affects microbial communities. We targeted flower type because it's a major question asked over and over again by thousands of members on our Facebook group. Throughout the students experiments, I wrote a series of blog posts to explain the science behind sourdough and to answer student questions in real time as they were asking them in the classroom. I also worked with the teachers to refine a graphical protocol, which you can see here, and to develop complementary lesson plans, which are actually hyperlinked in these slides that were aligned with learning objectives in science, math, and reading comprehension. So the full teaching packet is freely available. So you can see, you know, that interweaving of open pedagogy and citizen science throughout this project. And I was lucky enough that I had the opportunity to teach fantastic students molecular biology techniques. And as part of several of our lab based courses, we work on a weird microbe that's an alchemist that's able to precipitate liquid gold into gold nanoparticles. And when we moved to remote instruction, several students really wanted to continue their research experience, and we did not have access to labs. But we had this Delftia Hub website that I had started a couple of years ago. And we had fantastic students like Lauren Ramillo really interested in public science and open education. And they heard me complain for a long time that the Wikipedia page for Delftia was really short and somewhat inaccurate. And over the summer, they teamed up and created a cohort of 12 to 16 student volunteers, not for credit. They took the wiki edu course to learn how to edit wiki. And they used hypothesis to openly annotate Delftia papers, articles using some of the tags that you see on the screen. And throughout the process, they blogged about it, and they ended up editing and improving the Wikipedia page. And this for us is a really a great example of how students can, if you give them ownership and let them know where the tools are, they are empowered to do research online, learn and share with others through blog posts and Wikipedia. Thank you, Aaron and Carlos, for sharing those examples. So that's sort of the quick version of what we wanted to share with you, this sort of peanut butter and chocolate combination of these two cool things and some concrete examples of what that looked like. We'd like now to open up a conversation about whether this has sparked anything sort of interesting for you, or if you have questions about how it worked or what that might look like in different places. I saw a couple of comments in the chat calling out the incubator program. And I wanted to mention what David said, which is that there's a link to all the materials on an OSF site and a presentation that goes into more depth in terms of the what, how, and why of that program in particular. So we're happy to answer questions here about the combination or anything else. Maybe I'll start with the really burning question, which is somebody asked, what's the best flower type, Aaron? Can you answer that one? You may be muted, or at least I'm not hearing you. Thank you. There's some background noise. It depends what you want from your sourdough, we found. So in growing these sourdough starters, I found that rye flour, a whole grain flour made milled from rye kernels, it just has some extra goodness because there's a lot of Amelie's activity and more easily digestible starches and sugars. So you get a really rapid rise really quickly. But if you want certain flavor profiles, like we found that a millet starter actually goes for almost a lemony effervescent sourdough. So there are distinct microbial communities that produce distinct aromatic profiles, just depending on what you desire. Thanks very much, Aaron. Maybe just given that there's quite a number of you, how did you, and you've got different specialisms in different areas of discipline, how did you get together? How did this come about for you as a group? How did that synergy come about? Can I jump in? I thought it was amazing having such high interdisciplinarity and also different experience levels with different class sizes. The largest class that I teach is about 45 to 50 students. And then my other classes tend to be 20 to 25 students. But we had a colleague in the incubator whose classes are usually 250. So it was really great to talk about, here are the different ways that we could see that would work or not, and that might scale well or not across these different class sizes and disciplines. So I thought it kept the conversation really lively and active brainstorming all the time. And I'll jump in and say that I learned so much from the other participants. And Aaron and I now work together and connect our classes through open annotation and resources and learning from the libraries and learning from other cohort participants about what the philosophy and reading some articles through different perspectives really helped us as a cohort learn and implement. Yeah. And I think also then brainstorming ways to fine tune our pedagogical approaches to ensure we might have an intention that isn't necessarily carried out or realized by the students. So then thinking through, you know, how do we troubleshoot this together and getting those fresh perspectives has been amazing. Great. Thank you. I don't know if you've taken a chance to look back at the paddlers and see some of the things. I don't know if you've got any comments on some of the posts that participants have put up there. I now want to check out open, et cetera, if that's the way it's pronounced. As we're looking, I'll also call out Carlos, I know something you've explored in the past, and I bet you have too, Aaron, is the opportunity, especially in the online environment where we've been to start building these cohorts across sort of national and global boundaries. To say this is something that could happen in this state, in this state, in the United States or between Canada and Australia or between, you know, wherever and wherever. So I think that's true for some of the open pedagogy stuff. That's true for the citizen science stuff. And that's true for the incubator as well. So if you're looking at this and going, this looks really awesome. And I wish I had a partner who's done this before. Well, you're looking at some enthusiastic partners here on the screen as well. So we'd be happy to talk about what it means to share materials, to have conversations, or even to sort of work collaboratively in different ways as well. That's what makes the open community work so well. And we're excited to sort of live those values. Absolutely. I would say it's been very empowering to learn about these open tools that can then enable and facilitate collaborations. This spring, I'm actually next week is the last week of classes for us. So I'm wrapping up a course that my students at NC State in Raleigh, North Carolina have been collaborating all semester on research projects with students in Northern Michigan University. So, you know, hours and hours and hours by car or, you know, several hours and a couple connections by plane. But we can all be real time, you know, gaining even more from diverse perspectives across geographies, across institutions, across different conservation perspectives. And I think I have felt braver to do that sort of thing. Open pedagogy is really like the gateway for me, dipping my toes in. I totally agree. And it has made me hopefully a more transparent educator by not feeling that now I feel okay sharing what I'm telling with students in open websites or having students blog about their experiences. And I was initially confined to thinking everything we had to do was somehow lab bound. And now we can create the experiments or design the experiments in the lab, but we can share the results and have students really analyze them across state lines, borders and internationally and comment. Yeah. And I think to Ed's point in the question on the padlet, thinking about writing blog posts, the students or the citizen science's role is hugely important for informing the real world relevance. How do our research results actually play out and apply to the real world? So, I think that's been a critical viewpoint to keep in mind at every step. Absolutely. I think that authenticity is demonstrated throughout a lot of the things you've shared with us today. I'm afraid that's our time up. We've got to continue the conversation over on Discord. I know you've got resources to share there. Just want to thank you all so much and thanks for the participants and jumping in on padlet and everything. And we'll wrap it up there. Thank you.