 Okay, thank you very much for coming this afternoon. My name is Dr. Connie Blomgren and I'm here with my colleagues from Athabasca University, Dr. Stella George and Dr. Karen Cook. And we have actually two other guests joining us, but they're still on the transit. One is a high school student. So she's on her way with her name is Mariam and Agnes, who works with Sincunia, which is a non-profit here in Edmonton, is responsible for making sure she gets here and they're going to participate when they arrive. So if we're interrupted partway, that's partly why. Our presentation today is called Celebrating Youth, Intergenerational and Intercultural OER Animation Co-Creators. We have a land acknowledgement and Athabasca University, which is Canada's online and open university, welcomes a diversity of learners from all over Canada. We celebrate and acknowledge Indigenous heritage, including the ancestral lands on which our buildings are located today in Athabasca on Treaty 6 and 8, the traditional territory of the Cree and the Métis. This area is a meeting ground and home for many Indigenous peoples. We respectfully acknowledge that we live and work on the traditional lands of the Indigenous peoples of the country known as Canada, and we honour the ancestry heritage and gifts of Indigenous peoples and give thanks to them. So because Athabasca is online and distributed across Canada, our land acknowledgement is quite wide and inclusive in many ways. The photograph on the right is the beautiful Athabasca River in the April of 2020. Nobody was there except for me. And it was very beautiful and, you know, water is life. So I just give you a little bit of background about how we came to be doing this project and when it began. So back in July 2021, hot off the pandemic, the tri agencies came together, all three came together to invest in promoting vaccine confidence across Canada. And the federal call funded 40 projects all around communication and vaccine confidence. The projects were one year in duration. And as you can tell, timelines sometimes move, given that we're in 2023 now. But the artifact that we created has been available for about a year now. So, you know, it's nice just to finish things off. So our finished product is an animation and it's called Accelerated Confidence in Canadian teens health decision making about vaccination. So we had some clear aims when we started the project. And they were to look at the complexity of addressing complex health decision making, including vaccination. And it was particularly focused on youth, high school students, young adults who are going to be the next decision makers for how their families are vaccinated. And we did not focus on COVID. In fact, we left that out so that it was not a territory that would be difficult for youth with parents and whatnot. If there was a disagreement around that, but we did look at all the other kind of vaccinations. So our aim was to provide youth focused health information and to actually have a very super creative co-creation process to create this OER in that we co-created with the youth for whom this material is directed at. And along with that was the opportunity to develop health information and science literacy along with longevity. So with a little help from the amazing tech panel at the back. If we could click on the hyperlink and it's up at the top in the title where it says it. Yeah, there it is. That's just a screenshot. There we go. Hi, I'm Corey. Thanks for joining me. This is my family. I'm mom and her parents. They're here a lot. My stepdad, really a nice guy. A nice youth nurse. Kai, my stepbrother, a real sports dude. Super child with abs. And our sister Michelle, mentioned her having a baby. My younger brother Clay, who loves beating me at gaming and hates school. And my goldfish guru, Goldie. I want to have a career as a social influencer and Goldie is my number one fan. And then of course, there's my imagination. So vivid, it's almost real. Corey is thinking a lot about viruses these days and their imagination has a lot to offer, but more about that later. Kai walked into Corey's room one day, all excited about a trip to Guatemala. Corey couldn't believe how lucky he was until Corey realizes that vaccinations are needed to help prevent diseases that would send Kai running to the bathroom or worse, the hospital. Hey Kai, that's a lot of shots. It's slightly envious of Kai's Guatemala trip, but not so much about the vaccinations. Keep calm, Corey. Goldie guru has something to tell you. Happy that Kai is only two shots away from protection, Corey realizes that this is news worth sharing. Getting vaccinated for travel might not be so painful. The viruses are big talkers with egos to match. The longer people wait for a shot, the easier it is for viruses to be passed around. What we know and believe today can change tomorrow because science is iterative. Scientists experiment, evaluate results, and make or update discoveries. They do this over and over again to determine the best medicines and practices. Corey is searching for reliable information. Ask science information for yourself. Follow the five and five. One, read like a scientist. Two, look for a consensus. Three, find original sources. Four, use specialized sources. And five, evaluate the author's expertise with cries of, oh wow, you are here. The Kai family excitedly welcomes Michelle, Mitch, and the baby bump to the barbecue. Yeah, Michelle. Get vaccinated. Yes. Yeah, Michelle. Corey's discovered a lot about viruses and vaccines based on their five and five research. Vaccines protect us and others by making the virus more difficult to transmit from person to person. One person, close friends, makes a safer community for most people. Corey is wondering what happens if you aren't most people. Researcher Corey is back again. Corey's already followed the five and five. There's no fake news here. Cognitive biases influence our understanding of information. Clay is looking for evidence needles hurt. And Kai's optimistic. He's just thinking about the present and not about being sick in Guatemala. A jab in the arm is not that bad. And Michelle, she wasn't sure about giving up what she already believed when it conflicted with new information from her dad. Michelle decided to check with her own doctor about what is right for her. She's not getting sucked into authority bias. The other important part about making tough decisions Corey found is how to separate your emotions from facts. He has done a lot of excellent research. Corey is thinking about posting their research. In a brief moment of sibling support, Kai explains to Corey that their posts are really helpful to him and others at school. It takes time to build the following and its effort and reliable information that matters most. I'm Corey. Welcome to my channel. Alright, Agnes has arrived and so has Mariam. Welcome. Come on up and join us on the stage here in the bright lights. Hi, Mariam. So nice to meet you in person. We've only met online. Nice to see you. Hello, Agnes. Again, nice to meet you in person because we only meet online. So we're just part way through our presentation. We just want, you probably didn't get to see it on the big screen. Maybe, you know, we're the last presentation and I'm the problem child of the tech people over there. And I'm just going to ask them to play it one more time before, like, it'll just be us in here. Nobody else has to watch it, but it'd be nice to see it on the big screen and hear it through the lovely speakers and just really take it in, eh? So, okay. Stella, why don't you pass the microphone to them? They give their official names, like their full names, because I can't remember now all of it. And then you can jump back in. Hi, everyone. My name is Mariam Bengura. Nice to meet you. Hello, my name is Agnes Somoan. Thank you for having us. And we'll hear a little bit from Mariam and Agnes later on, but we hope you enjoyed the video. It's twice as long as it's supposed to be because there was so much good stuff created by the youth around the story that it was really difficult to cut down. So we already cut it in half once, but just to let you know. So even though we wanted this to be a co-creation with the youth, we wanted to set it with a structure such that there was the freedom to create, but with a direction and with a purpose the whole time. And so what we did was we had one of our librarians at Athabasca University, Jordan, work with us to generate some good reference material around vaccinations and scientific facts and myths and so on. And then we spent a little bit of time at the beginning getting understanding of each other's experiences of vaccination and health decision making and telling stories in the way that Darian explained this morning as being a good sort of circle of sharing. And once we had done that and we had the shared understanding of what each of us could bring from experiences, we went into a second stage where we did some experimentation around what we wanted the video to be like, what message we really wanted in there, what communication styles we wanted. And what we didn't know at the time and what we allowed was the communication around that story to evolve and to... We didn't know how important the characters would be in terms of setting up the scenes, setting up some of the narrative. And so once we had worked through the characters and we had workshopped for several weeks running, we workshopped how we would do that, we co-create narrative and then we started to fix it all together. Once we'd got a script, then we handed it over to the production crew who professionally created to the specification that the whole team had given them. So down to gender, down to the languaging, the type of vocabulary we used, the type of movement, how much dialogue there was, how much cartoon, the pacing, the music. So these were all decisions that the group made. Okay, so that's how we started. Now some of the youth, because there's quite a few involved and they weren't able to join us today. So we'll be hearing video clips from these four youth who are part of Agnes' group and she can speak a little bit more about each one of them when it's her opportunity. And then we also have Frank McKellum, who is a vice principal at Vista Virtual School and his students also were involved in the co-creation process. So again, if we can just, it's embedded right in. Thank you. Hi there, my name is Frank McKellum, I'm the associate principal for Vista Virtual School. I'm sorry I couldn't be there in person, but unfortunately the way the school year has begun has kind of kept me a little busy. In terms of our involvement with this project, we are an online school and so clearly we have an interest in getting access to online resources, being able to actually construct those resources in a way that fits our particular curricular needs is very helpful. So in that sense, we were already motivated to participate in this activity. But the other part of this was the ability to have students collaborate with each other in between different schools and that was a very big draw for us. We are always looking at ways to improve relationships with students and how to build those bridges between students and between students and staff. And so that was one of our interests in pursuing this project and it was certainly an eye-opener in a lot of ways and we have applied a lot of those learnings in what we have continued doing as a school. Since this project took place, we have since established a couple of clubs and we took some of the things that we learned in terms of process from this project and applied it to those clubs. Some of this stuff is not surprising, but to see it in action is always valuable. First and foremost, whenever you get teenagers in the room, there's always going to be a certain amount of reticence to really be forthcoming with opinions and views. That's understandable in any circumstance. But in a virtual circumstance where they may have never met the students face-to-face before and they don't have the advantage of the subtle cues, physical cues that we get when we're in a room meeting with other people, that becomes doubly difficult. And so we noticed at least in this particular case, it took time for students to be more willing to share their honest views. Again, probably not surprising, but very valuable to see that in action. And so with that in mind, we took that forward in terms of how we would build activities to get students talking and collaborating within our various club groups. So in a lot of ways, this activity is not just a matter of building a resource, which is obviously important. It's a struggle in perseverance to get the students to be interacting more openly with each other. And so I think that was one of the biggest takeaways from us as a school and I think that's what I appreciate having out of this particular project. The resource itself has been very valuable. We're able to use it across a couple of different courses because of its applicability both to social settings like in current life management, as well as science settings like biology. But the development of the resource, absolutely valuable. The actual process of having students collaborate with each other, that has been more informative as to how we build relationships with our students. So I want to just thank all the team that was involved in this project. And I hope you get a lot out of this session. Okay, you can have to escape, Rhys, sorry. Okay, so here we are on some of the youth and they, they're shorter clips, but they're very interesting to hear too. Oh, hello, you're here too. Okay, well, we're waiting for the sound to come back. Do you want to just introduce yourself? Hi, my name is Obias and I was one of the vaccine confidence projects participants. How to develop a new video about vaccine confidence, as find my knowledge or change my decisions about vaccines. Creating this project increased my knowledge of the various types of vaccines available for diseases such as hepatitis A and B through and many others. Before the study, I didn't believe we needed to get all the injections we needed to protect ourselves against infectious spreads by other people. The only vaccine I was familiar with was the COVID vaccine because we had several news channels and social media platforms teaching us about the risks and benefits of getting the shots. The reason that this research improved my understanding of vaccine since I previously did not believe vaccines were necessary. But now I have a better understanding of vaccines and which vaccine to take to protect myself and my family from diseases. From my experience on this project, what do I recommend for our load who want to include high school students in learning projects? I think incorporated high school students or even junior high school students into learning a project about vaccines or any other project can be very informative and valuable experience for the students themselves as we will learn a lot from this information and any other information to be better equipped with knowledge. Thank you. So the most memorable thing to me about the approach of making interesting education material is that you have to know your target because if you know your target and the age that they are in, you will be able to know how to introduce the information to them in a way that is entertaining. While developing the video, it helped me be more confident about taking the vaccine because I learned about the amount of research behind it and it debunked the rumors that it was a government attempt to turn us into robots. While making the video, I think it was really important that we had a lot of diversity in age and also in culture because it helped us input different ideas into the video and I think that's what makes the video really amazing. I would recommend to adults when they're trying to engage high school students to create resources like the video that we did is to allow them as much freedom as possible but always with a limit of course but to give them the freedom to bring their ideas and not shut it down right away but find a way for those ideas to work together. Just like the question before, I would recommend that they allow freedom of different ideas no matter how odd it sounds and freedom of diverse ideas. I would also recommend that they allow the teens to think outside of the box. I think what would help students get the most out of the video is to be open-minded to learn as well as to pay attention obviously because the video has lots of information and having attention will allow them to get the most out of the video. At the beginning of the project, I kind of felt I was uncertain and I was unsure about how I would look in the end because we didn't have the animators at first but in the end it all turned out well. Okay. Okay, thank you. Oh, here is Miriam. That was asked was what would you recommend to adults about engaging high school youth in creating learning resources like the video? So I would recommend adults to learn our language by that I mean our vocab, the words we use on a daily. So for example, if I were to text, I don't know, I wouldn't text, I don't know, like fully type, I wouldn't be able to type, I wouldn't be able to type, I wouldn't be able to type, I wouldn't be able to type, I don't know, like fully type it out, I would like text IDK because it's like, it's just the way we communicate, you know? And for like most videos that I've seen, like examples, like there's Netflix movies that are supposed to represent us teenagers and how we communicate and it just, it's just like a bunch of, it just sounds and looks like a bunch of like adults just wrote it from their own perspective of how they think we talk and how they think we think. But if they were to get like teenagers give their input on that, it would be a different type of content. So I think getting like high school students engaged in animations like this would be very effective if your audience was like youth. And also the other question that I was asked was how do you think animations can be used effectively in schools? I think they can be like used effectively if it's like, because animations are, you know, they have a lot of visuals and a lot of us are visual learners and we learn by viewing things and looking at things. For example, like I, like the way I learn, like I need to see it to be able to learn. So animations can be used effectively in schools to help visual learners and they can learn from that. And our last one. It's going round and round. It's going to kick in. Hey, my name Ray. I'm a member behind the production and the creation of the vaccine Confidence Youth. And today I'm here to talk about my experiences with the vaccine Confidence Youth through the use of two questions. But before I get straight into it, I'd like to thank the vaccine committee for giving me the opportunity to talk about my experiences and to contribute heavily. Thank you very much. All right. So my first question is about how they've developed a video about vaccine confidence expand or change your decisions about vaccines. Honestly, I believe that I grew up in an environment where everyone believed that that prevention is better than cure. So after having gone through this experience, I believe that it only strengthened my belief in what I already kind of was brought up with. It made my belief stronger that vaccines are the way to go especially if you're trying to avoid a certain type of disease or virus. Yeah, vaccines are the way to go. My second question is what did you learn about working together to create a unique learning resource like our video. So working together as a team brings more ideas, support and collaboration leading to better problem solving skills. Also I believe that when you work together as a team you can always leverage each other's strengths and skills. And it fosters creativity and it boosts morale and it also enhances communication plus working as a team is generally just more fun. Thank you very much. Take care. There we are. Okay. Agnes, it's your turn here. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Agnes and I work with a non-profit organization here in Edmonton called Tynconia. So when the creation of this project came from my professor, Connie was my professor when I was doing my masters with Atabaska, I consulted with the parent of some of the youth who were not over 18 and I want to talk about trust here from the parent. Most of the families that we work with are new immigrants very new. And so sometimes they need to have somebody in their life that they can trust and Tynconia is in that place where they can come they can share their stories, they can request for services and support from us and through that we are able to work with them especially with the children and youth to integrate into the Canadian culture. So when this project came there were some consent that we needed to leverage and I had to be there the guarantor for the parent for them to understand okay this project is not going to because sometimes they are afraid of what are some of the questions they are going to ask my kid and I am not there so they entrusted their children into our hands and we are able to get four of our youth to participate in this project and the youth themselves call me Miss Agnes I am the one who screams but they still trust me that when I say let's go, let's join Zoom, let's do this they are able to even right now I am still chasing them because some of them are still coming yeah and so when we discuss how are we going to get them to participate I think there were a lot of things and I threw out to them the youth what they would like to do to be able to participate well and they themselves suggested ways of breaking the ice I remember for the few three first three sessions that we did I asked each of them to be the moderator for Kahoot they would set their own questions research questions around COVID around vaccine around other diseases and use it to set Kahoot questions where they can participate in and they were able to do it well I am really passionate about where this video is going to be and the the participants as you see us here we are all new immigrants and like two of them, Mariam came in 2019 July Raymond came in 2021 so they have been very new in Canada and our focus as an organization is to integrate them into the Canadian way of doing things even knowing my personal space most of this case didn't understand when they came here and so to get them to collaborate in the project like this is very big for us as an organization and we don't take it for granted thank you as you can hear the youth from Sincunia and the youth from Vista Virtual School had embraced this project after a while and it did take a while to build that level of trust and confidence in the process and as well as in the product but although both groups came from different backgrounds the shared process and the shared purpose was actually really helpful and as well as co-creating the product the youth co-created the process of what we did so we very much followed the lead and tried out different ways of engaging working as a big group working as small groups working individually working asynchronously we tried all sorts of things to build that's trust that Agnes talked about so the other thing I think that was different about this project is we had an intention of open access right from the very start so with us with the youth who came also with the production company so there was no sense that what we were creating belonged to any one person or would be the possession of any one organization it was a truly collaborative project and so starting with that intent was really helpful in that we were all in this together type approach in doing this and so the other final point that I want to make about this is although we focused on creating a video as the product for this project what the video does in terms of curriculum is that allows it allows a story that has been developed by the youth through our would be social media creator Kai who was voiced by Miriam and that's her first voice acting job I believe which is I think she may be available for the opportunity and what it does is a video like that allows it to be based within curriculum in several different places and so you can use an open educational resource like this in a number of different places and then use it as a springboard to attach other curriculum in depth around it and so when we create something like this it's an anchor for where you can weave it into other situations and other breeding okay Karen I think you might have a few more I'm just going to spend a couple minutes putting a bit more wrapping paper on the importance of the youth contribution to this and particularly around the health information because you can imagine the youth met three us three women that look like this and they eventually met some animators and we were inviting them in to do something that they weren't familiar with and some of us had more familiar with it other but what I from my heart I just want to say these youth brought to us so many things that we could never have done by ourselves you've heard them all speak about their roles in it but the way it's I think provided more credibility to the health information that you see and that animation and the chatter between the viruses and all the language and the way that they coached us about that and they coached us about okay Kai's a tall guy with great abs and he's going to wear high top shoes this and Corey's going to be this and the music and so the authenticity to me really comes through and I think the youth have said that they feel like it's authentic because their voices there which is which is the most important part of it and you saw as we went through the video there was two key learning pieces and it was the five on five information where you think like a researcher and gather different evidence and corroborate the evidence and things like that but it was all done just a more lighthearted way than you might find it otherwise and again a decision matrix which I thought was an important part there where the Dr. Kathy Fitch who's a ER physician in Edmonton helped people think about how you separate emotions from facts and pros and cons and what those outcomes are on it so in every piece of this animation it was the health information was accelerated and made more credible by the youth okay we can bring up one more chair because I see we have one more arrived come on you want to come alright so we've got I just want to just again thank the youth for all their great contributions and it's lovely to see them come and be part of the panel here they were a little nervous I think to come but they're here and that's why we had the videos we weren't too sure how many would be able to come the animation has been translated into French we really do believe that the animation and that whole process translates or interprets and bridges intergenerational understanding of these topics but it also builds on the ideas of open pedagogy and the values of openness and it's in that effort of building trust and those deliberately committed to trust building that you can co-create together anyways of course we could say lots more but we're going to hear from Miriam and Obaya and pass the microphone down so since like this is like my first voice acting I'm like the person that I used to not the way I sounded I don't know because every time I would talk and record it it sounded different so I was like I don't sound like that so I was never really confident in my voice and this really gave me that confidence boost and like it made me feel comfortable in my own self I felt comfortable like speaking because like at first we were just doing it we were just like practicing and then they told me they wanted me to like be the voice of Corey and I was like oh okay I was like scared but then I did it and they were like oh this sounds good and I was like okay it was really it was a fun experience and I would do it again and that's good I'm Amma and I definitely wasn't late it was a fun experience I was not the voice actor I wish I was but I really enjoyed just watching it come all together because when we first started we didn't know what the animation was going to look like so it was just like we were all imagining different ideas of what the character would look like and then when it all came together it was just beautiful hi my name is Obaya and I enjoyed working with everyone the youth and the animation and coach and everyone okay well as you can see we're quite the crowd up here but we're going to turn the microphone over to you if there's any questions and we'd really love to hear your thoughts on the animation it's always hard when you make something like this to kind of hear what viewers, you know, an audience not us who are very close to it what do they think and anything that you noticed and we'd just be curious to hear anything so I can run around with the microphone if anyone's got a question or comment okay Shana thank you I congratulate you guys on this work it's really excellent and actually I'm a microbiologist so I've actually worked on vaccines so it's really cool to see this and I think it's really powerful the way that your voices were you know and your input because communication and science and how you communicated is so important and when you all spoke in your video you said that very clearly and so did Raymond about how key communication is when it comes to that kind of information so congratulations and great job but I have a question I'm wondering how this is being distributed right now or where it's located and are other students able to see it thank you well we're working on that and we're going to do some research on the project as well and I think in our overall of where we can take it it's currently housed on YouTube but it's not distributed widely enough although Frank the principal has access to it through Vista Virtual School so we're still thinking about how to share out OER and have greater uptake and that's to me from my other projects that's always the challenge is trying to get people using what it is that you've created so we're going to brainstorm and do some more thinking about some of those things so if you have some good ideas or connections we're welcome to anything any kind of suggestions so so we're still working on it I guess it's the best answer to that question any other questions hi your animation was so lovely I'm a middle school librarian so I work with middle school students and I could even see them really enjoying the work that the high school students made because I think they would really understand it and as a librarian I love the part where you talk about the research components because I think not only are you providing information about vaccines but also how you think about information which I think is really helpful and I could see it being used in a bunch of different different contexts but I guess my question is like what was the writing process like for everyone like kind of the creation of the script and the characters was that an easy process or was it a hard process or what was it like so it was kind of like all over the place you know and it was like a lot of child and errors you know so but at the end of the day it came out really good and we all liked it and they all worked so hard so thank you for everyone and thank you to these lovely women for giving us that opportunity it was interesting because we were trying to make Cory sound more of a teenager so try to incorporate a little bit of slang where it doesn't sound forced like yo like that so yeah that was part only the hard part it was mostly easy yeah for me I think I struggled with the creation of the scripts because I grew up in the era where we learned with textbooks so I was expecting them to give us textbook and then we look into it and then we fake it but we didn't get anything like that so when we were grouped that we were supposed to create this script for this person even for the fish I got confused but eventually it came out good and I'm proud of it so the process was totally chaotic but what we attempted to do and I think we did to some extent was we built our characters and sorted out the message and then talked about what sort of things could happen and we introduced a little animation tool and had people write little you each went off and wrote little scripts and little animations for just different points anything that sort of had come to their mind for after the discussion and then some of those pieces we pulled into creating a story and so we set the sort of general scene so this scene has to do this this has to achieve this this has to achieve this and then wove those some of those animations and then those discussions together and then we each of those sections we then had a Saturday mixed writing session where we broke into smaller groups and we started to build script for each of the scenes and then we looked at continuity and tried to weave things through and there was a fantastic scene with Cori not being very happy and going hiding in the pantry and it was excellent but it was just like what I said before it was just way too long so we had to cut some things out so yeah so we were working on two levels when we were scripting we were doing the story arc for Cori as an individual and then we were trying to hit the points of the scientific communication or the sort of the struggle but it had to be Cori's story throughout in order to carry it through so yeah and one thing too you might be going it's an animation and yet it's sort of like a graphic novel and that was because of budget it costs so much money to make a true full-on animation and so we hired animators, two animators it was called Pulp Studios they're based here in Edmonton and we kind of said we don't have we've got a good amount of money but this isn't Pixar so we really had to think creatively around that and hats off to both Cori and Kelly at Pulp Studios because Cori especially the graphic artist who pulled in a lot of the character of developing Cori and we would say how about this and how about that and we'd have there was a lot of collaborative digital tools that we used to gather up Agnes was very helpful in making sure that students from Virginia and same with Frank with students from the Vista virtual and they've gone on to University his students so they were much harder to get a video from so that's why their voice isn't really as much as part of this but so we did a lot of collaborative digital tools, a variety of those and just constantly trying to tweak and build the characters within the there's a lot of limitations and limitations make you become creative so it was always kind of how are we going to solve this next part of the project and so that mixed kind of animation graphic novel style I guess there it is it's kind of what we had to do mostly because of budget but I think for the purposes of the animation it's effective so that's why in case that occurred to you it's like that's not quite what that usually is but that's why okay well we're available for any questions and of course if you'd like to come up and meet you know Agnes and the different youth that are on the stage with us please do we're welcome to hear more questions from you anytime for the rest of the conference and we just appreciate you three beautiful young women coming here today and being part of this and I know that Mariam said she was coming and so you two are bonuses so I think that's great yeah so thank you so much and yeah have a lovely rest of your day I think that we're at the very end so I know everyone's kind of tired and ready to just relax have a cup of tea or whatever you want to do there so we'll see you tomorrow okay