 My name is Florencia Gabrile and I am a lecturer in economics at Emmanuel College in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm Megan Price. I got my bachelor's degree from Emmanuel College in Boston, Massachusetts, and I'm currently pursuing my master's in economics from New York University. And I am Diane Zaleski. I'm the associate librarian for reference instruction and outreach at Emmanuel College. I would like to describe the project that my students are doing. We are creating a reader using different text that was written in the history of economics. So copyrights usually last for the life of the author plus 70 years. So many of the texts that my students are reading are already open source. So Megan is going to describe later how this project works and what's the template that everyone has to follow. But the idea is that we're doing a collaborative work and students are choosing paragraphs or different sections from books and they're analyzing them and they're explaining why it's important that we study them today. The project we're presenting today is a project based in our history of economics art class. Emmanuel College is a small Catholic liberal arts school that was funded in 1919 by the Sisters of Notre Dame. We're part of the business and economics school and we're based in the economics department. We have the largest school in the college. Traditionally we have many first generation students in our college and this is a class that is primarily taken by sophomores and juniors. Everyone who takes this class had to take principles of macroeconomics and principles of microeconomics. There are many reasons why I use OERs when I'm teaching economics. And while I have many options for my principal classes, I have found that I don't have that many for my more advanced classes. Also, OERs allow me to customize the material and just present what we need in the class. I showed before that my students really enjoy watching videos and OERs allow me to incorporate multimedia. In this project we're taking this to the next level as we're going to be using open pedagogy. And open pedagogy is the practice of engaging with students as creators of information rather than just consumers of it. So it's a form of experiential learning and students get to show what they know as an act of creation. And I really enjoy that. I don't want to be the end user of the artifacts that my students create. I see a lot of value. And I would like them to share their artifacts with the world with the students that are going to be taking this class next with their peers. By creating this type of project, I feel that I give my students a lot of agency because they get to choose first of all if they want to participate. This is an extra credit project. So they decide how much they want to put on this. They get to decide the role. Some of them are writers, others are editors. We have someone with a strong background in design, so he did the cover for our project. And as I mentioned before, I really enjoy creating something that it's going to be used in my future classes. So we are, we know that we're not just saving a student money. The impact is more important than that. We are allowing a student to persist, whereas allowing a student to enroll in our classes, we're allowing a student to successfully finish a course. So we also know from the literature that students who have not completed college, 50% of them claim cost as the reason why they couldn't finish the program. This is a survey that I have been doing in my classes. And this is what my students have been telling me. So I know that my students are committed to the studies, but they also have other obligations, especially in the last year during the pandemic. So I wanted to know what is the best way of offering them material to get the information that they need to come to class. There are really interesting statistics. 12% of my students tell me that they prefer to read. 32% of my students tell me that they prefer to watch videos. And 54% of my students tell me that they prefer to use videos and readings. So I have been trying to have a mix of materials. So I can engage them as much as possible. I know that the readings for history of economic thought can be sometimes dry and very difficult. And when I asked my students to assess themselves and tell me how much they read from a scale to zero, from zero to 10. They tell me that they read about three. So I gather that they get to about 30% of the material that I have been presenting them before they come to class. So by creating this project, we're trying to find a way that would create a motivation for my students to go back to these original books that they are many of them are open source books right now, and read them and try to connect them and try to understand why they are so important to know and why is it that 300 years ago after this material was published, we're reading it. And what does it teach us? Here I'm sharing some information that my students have also given me in my surveys. So by creating this open pedagogy project, we try to tackle several issues we try to tackle the issue of cost, the issue of not having OVRs that are suitable for advanced classes. The issue of engagement and the issue of community, especially during the pandemic, it has been very difficult to create community in my classes while that was something that would just happen naturally before we were all sitting together in the same room. And I believe that through this project, students had to meet and we had to work together and many times we work outside the classroom on this project, and we got to have that community. So here you can read the some of the issues that my students had with the readings that I have been assigning. We were inspired by the Rosa's work on open pedagogy. And what we learned from her is that students benefit from being part of a team that design and creates OVR textbooks, or in our case a reader. So the Rosa found that students were more engaged with the material and that the textbooks that they create are easier to read because they have a similar level of understanding. As a librarian and not a lawyer, I just want to be clear that I am not giving legal advice, but just simply going over some of the definitions and general information about copyright and public domain. One of the key terms public domain comes out quite frequently, and here's a definition. A work of authorship is in the public domain. If it is no longer under copyright protection, or if it failed to meet the requirements for copyright protection works in the public domain, maybe use freely without permission of the former copyright owner. Such as US government created works are not protected by copyright. For this project, it is important to note that copyright may have expired for older works. Also, it is important to note that as you're checking on copyright and public domain for resources that the time frames differ based on the country. So it is important to do your homework to check if copyright is expired or if the work was always in the public domain. When in doubt, always double check. If necessary, seek appropriate legal advice. So this is a template that we used for the reader that we began creating this past semester along with five students from Dr. Gabriel's history of economic thought course. So this was an optional project based extra credit assignment for students to contribute to. And in order to receive credit for their work, students had to complete this template for a specific economic school thought of their choosing. We also described notable economists from each school key dates and concepts the historical context of the school thought and how it does or doesn't fit into the current view of economic thought today. So like Dr. Gabriel was saying project based learning has been shown to be engaging improve academic performance and it helps to develop high order thinking skills. And these purposes were kind of tried. We tried to keep them in mind while developing this project. Using this template the project was designed for students to make connections across different schools of thought, apply critical thinking skills respond to frequent deadlines and collaborate with their peers. So this project was also designed to allow students to improve the information literacy skills by finding evaluating and using appropriate resources and to develop their communication and time management skills, because they had to respond to multiple deadlines and work as a team together. This project also gave students an opportunity to take on individual responsibilities as well as responsibilities within a team experience of freedom to explore different schools of thought of their choosing receive feedback from professors and gain recognition for their contributions for this reader which will be shared both inside and outside of the Emmanuel community. So I had kind of a unique role in this project as I worked both with my peers on developing the reader itself and with Dr. Gabriel and Diane on developing the project. So like I said before this was an optional project based assignment for extra credit so the other participants and I were able to choose which school thought to research and we're able to choose what our role on the actual project would be. So for example, I did research on the classical school thought and wrote about it while one of my peers designed the cover for our reader, and this was helpful as a kind of allowed each of us to apply our specific skill sets to this project. And for me this was a really helpful review of the course material and it allowed me to gain a more in depth understanding of different economic schools of thought. As each student was only assigned one or two so we really got to explore each one that we chose. It also allowed me to make deeper connections across material that we had learned throughout the semester. We shared a Google document so I got to read other students work and kind of see their perspectives on these things. Project also allowed for an increased sense of camaraderie and more collaboration with other like minded students which I think is really important especially during remote learning like we've seen the past year or two. And because students have done most of the writing for this reader I do believe that some of the concepts are also easier to understand. As it allows for a different perspective to be seen than what might be seen in a typical textbook and it increases the accessibility to a wider audience who might not understand something that was written 300 years ago. And this is also an opportunity to be something larger than ourselves so as a student I know how costly textbooks can be for courses and it was really rewarding to be part of a project that will hopefully be used at a larger level and make higher education more accessible to a wider audience. So these were the students who worked on the project with us this semester there were five students involved including myself. I took history of economic thought about a year ago while these students were taking it currently in the spring semester of last year. And these were mostly sophomore and juniors like Dr Gabriel said they were either economics majors or minors and each student was very high achieving. And so after the semester had concluded we thought it would be valuable to get feedback from the participants and since this was our first semester actually working on the project. And even though we had a very small sample size of students we still want to get feedback from those who participated through a survey in order to adapt our next steps and see what did or didn't work well for the students so some of the most common responses and the things that students thought this project was most helpful for. So one the survey responses indicated that this project was really helpful in expanding students current knowledge of the course material and that the project was an enjoyable experience for students. They also reported that it was really helpful in understanding how course modules fit together indicating that they had a better understanding of how each topic that's taught in the course relates to one another. And I also think that using a template and having a shared Google document for this reason was helpful as students could see everyone else's work and knew exactly what was expected of them over the course of the semester. And lastly the students reported that this was helpful for exam review and since our work on the project concluded right before the final exam period. This gave students the opportunity to receive extra credit for their work while also reviewing the material that they would later see on the final exam. Using Megan's work we started to look at different publishing platforms to as a way to be able to share the OER. As you can see here this is a cover for Pressbook, which is the one that we are looking to use for this project. And one of the things I will note is I do have a background with website design, and that was helpful for me to negotiate it, although not necessary, but just to be aware of that if you don't have that background you may need to spend a little more time on the setup. I also want to let you know that this is a work in progress and will be continued this coming semester. As you can see in the next slide here's a sample entry, and then there's a more detailed entry on the next slide. We will have some questions about this project and one of the main things that we're wondering is, should we continue doing this as an extra credit activity, or should we involve the entire class in this project. Also we want to be able to compare once we have more data. If this assignment has helped students to improve the learning and do better overall in the course. We are planning to continue adjusting this project according to the feedback that we receive. And so far we have been using Pressbook. I like the way that our textbook looks, but we are open to other suggestions, or to use something different to be able to continue show the material. We want to use something that makes it very easy to edit every semester around. I talked before about the importance of working in a team and something else that I think that it was very beneficial for this project was to be able to have a TA who has taken the class before who had an overall knowledge of what the class was about. We want to be interested in continuing with this project, even though she was not part of the class. What we have learned is that we have to clearly communicate license requirements for images, videos and other materials that can be included in this reader. And we have to do a better job informing students where to find public domain sources, because for us it's simple I know where those repositories are so it makes no sense in miss making them look for that information when we already have it. I think that that would save time. We have learned a lot by making this project. And if there is one thing that I would like to pass on to anyone that is considering using open pedagogy is to work with a team. I really appreciate all the support that I got from Diane from the library and the university technology department. It's not a project to do alone, it makes a lot of sense to tap on everyone's expertise to do something like this. I learned a lot from them as well. We also learn about planning. I learned that I have to be more strict with deadlines that we had to prioritize what content need to be edited first. This is something that we will we talk a lot about is how are we going to guarantee that this book that we create is accessible for everyone. What we're trying to do with our student collaborators is to create more meetings and make sure that we're very clear on what material is copyrighted what material belongs to the public domain. We give them a list of resources so they don't have to find those resources by themselves, telling them which are the pictures that we can include in this resource and also showing them how to use press work. So if we evaluate this project as we go, we are working on it this semester and we have a different set of students who are involved and that are working on different schools of thoughts. And also we will be serving them and learning from what their experience was. What we have learned is that, well, first of all, this is a project that can be done in person or remote. They both work. What it's really important is the commitment from the students. So, as I mentioned before, we're going to be more explicit about the rules of what open source materials are. We're going to give students more structure and more deadlines. And also we are encouraging our students to look for multimedia resources since when my previous research has shown me is that students also like to watch videos. So that would include videos that are already done, or my students can create these videos and incorporate them into the press book. What has really worked for us is to work as a team. And to connect the material with current events. So students understand that these concepts that were first expressed hundreds of years ago, there's still extremely relevant to them to what's going on today. And to what we're learning in class. This is a list of our references following this QR code, you can find the material that we have been using and we would like to share with you. Thank you very much for your attention. We welcome any comments, any questions, any criticism. So please reach out to us and share your feedback. We would appreciate very much. Thank you.