 Well, good afternoon, everybody, and I hope you're having a great afternoon session here at OER 21 and Domains. I'm delighted to be introducing Melissa in this session who's going to talk about if you build it, will they come? The challenges of building a communal OER. So over to you, Melissa. Hello, thank you, and good morning. I'm coming to, and I think I have, I'll go quickly here. So good morning. It's actually morning here in British Columbia. Very early morning. But thanks for coming to this session, and someone else will be monitoring the chat. Anyway, good morning, Melissa and Quest. I just want to take a moment to acknowledge that I'm coming to you from the traditional lands of the Tacomps to Shaquepmuc in our Cano-Libs campus, and the Tacalc, our Williams Lake campus, within Shaquepmuc-Ulu, the traditional and unceded territory of the Shaquepmuc. I'm grateful for the Shaquepmuc nation's generosity and hospitality while I live, learn, and work in their territory. And I was born and lived most of my life in Shaquepmuc-Ulu. So I really do think this term and description really captures the land that I feel I'm from. I'm here to talk to you today about a project that I started when I was on sabbatical a few years ago. I wanted to build an open educational resource repository of learning activities, and I started by looking at what current resources were available at the time. And, you know, there are a variety of different resources around University of Waterloo here in Canada has a resource. It basically has a lot of documents, resources, and explanations. UBC is teaching and learning resources. Portal also has a wiki, an extensive list, bibliographies, but not really examples. The University of Central Florida's blended learning toolkit, again, some examples, but not many, and a focus on explanation and course-level templates. At the time, I was the Provost Fellow for blended learning at TRU in Calibs, and I was trying to promote blended learning across campus. So a lot of it was just explanations and not a lot of actual practical examples that people could then use and adapt. And I noticed that these three resources were all sort of static resources, but they weren't really communities of practice that anyone else could contribute to. So I started doing a bit of research and I studied by just looking at one of the issues around reuse and the difference between something being open and being used. And I found a lot of the so-called open resources. Once you dug, everything was in a PDF or a website. And it wasn't really that easy to adapt and reuse. And as Wills and Pegler noted in their study, the widespread use of digital online resources in technically efficient ways has often been described as a holy grail within e-learning. So I started to look for that holy grail. And they noticed in their study a bunch of factors that influenced whether or not an OER was actually reused. And I picked out four of these as being particularly important, and then considered those when I was developing the design for my resource. And these factors really that I thought were key were a common e-learning platform, making sure that the license to use was really clear, and a description so that students were scaffolded through all the steps of the learning activity. And then collaborative design, including some sort of role for educational developers. So sharing and knowing that someone had actually really thoughtfully looked into the design of those activities. So as I said, Wills studied despite being based on the single design of role play, it actually points the way to learning designs representing the most effective reuse strategy. So I was looking at trying to create a learning design activity bank that could be adapted and reused. I drew on my past as an ESL teacher. I spent 15 years and ended about 16 years ago, but a good portion of my foundational career in education was based in ESL. And in ESL, we use educational resources really widely. And any of you from the UK may be real aware, because many of these come from the UK. So these are some of the books that I drew on very, very heavily in my teaching to help with lesson planning. And what are the characteristics I found that they identified the additional resources you needed, any materials you need were probably included. They told you what level of English acquisition the activity was aimed at. It told you what the purpose was, was it to practice the present perfect. They were searchable by index and chapter. And they didn't require a lot of extensive research or expertise to be able to use them. So I took all of that into the design decisions to make the resource. And I decided that making my resource would be an open web based resource that I would have clear categories that I would provide examples to serve as learning designs for activities that could be adapted. And that I would enable contributions and comments from people who were using the resource. And then it was really important to me to make the Creative Commons licensing clear. So I started by looking at what kind of interaction was within each activity. And this led me back to this diagram based on Garrison's community of inquiry model, showing how learners might interact with either the content, the context, or other supporting individuals in their learning activities. So that led me to design in the resource, the ability when you're entering a resource to choose the type of content the learner is interacting with within the activity. And you can choose the one that's most relevant to the activity, but you can choose multiple. So the learner and the content, they might be doing a reading and watching a video. If they're interacting with their context, it might be field work that they're doing, but they might also have another interaction with different resources as well. So that was one aspect. Another one was just the activity structure. So was it an individual activity? Was it a paired activity group team or a plenary activity? And making sure that people and the activities were clearly described with regards to what kind of people were needed for it. I also incorporated the new version of blimps taxonomy so that your activity could say if it was actually analyzing or was it understanding? And you might be able to have more than one of these in an activity, especially if it's a stage scaffolded activity where the students might first be recalling information, and then they're actually analyzing or creating something afterwards. And then I thought it was important for people to be able to search by academic discipline as well. So I started out with just the basic arts and humanities. And since then, I've used tags to allow people to add additional information like is the activity related to indigenization, or a specific field within arts and humanities like history or psychology to make things easy to research. And then of course, it's really important to make sure that the Creative Commons licensing is clear. And for all the activities that I've contributed, I wanted to make sure that it allowed that remixing so people could use whatever, change it, alter it, share it back to the resource, and carry on. And part of what I looked at then when actually building the platform for the website was a conference that we'd held here at TRU. Sorry, where they developed a website. Now my voice is crying. Sorry about that. The support of the conference and the community, people could contribute resources there. And there were larger categories and allowed discussion, but it wasn't searchable. And you would have to go through a lot of scrolling through posts, which could become very time consuming and unproductive. So what we did in the end was adapt. I had a very talented technical colleague of mine, Troy Welch, who works here as an innovations developer. And he is toolset within WordPress to create the actual website, which you can see the welcoming landing page for here. Now, despite all of this, and I've tried I've, I've gone to several conferences promoting this resource CNIE and Banff and UBC, the teaching practice of colloquium that we hold locally here at TRU BC campus. It's been in OER repositories, one of our course redesigned sites that's being developed cricket is going to be incorporating it. And we had some research assistants who helped add activities. But still, I really have no idea if the resource is being used. And to be honest, I don't think anyone other than myself have contributed activities to it. So that's sort of where I've gotten to with the project. And I'm really curious if anyone has suggestions for how to make that more to get more people actually contributing. So I think I'm still after the holy grail. I hope it's being reused. But and I know we share it with our subject matter experts when we're developing courses here at TRU Open Learning. But I don't know that anyone's contributing, not so far anyway. So I will stop sharing my slides. And then if anyone has any suggestions, and I will try to switch to the actual resource just to give you a sense of how it can be. Yes, I did have a reference on that last slide, I'll copy it and put it in the chat in a moment. Okay, so you should be able to see the website now. Yes. So just to give you a sense. Here you can search very easily. So maybe you want to look for a case study. And you're hoping they're evaluating, or maybe might be easier to go for a case study in business. And then submit. And it'll give you all of the results for that. So managing events. This is an online discussion. And you'll notice here, I was very deliberate about this. So the full text upload is here. And it's in a doc file. So you can edit it. And then people can add activities very easily. Put in your activity, any tags you want. Choose files. And for all the activities, if there was a related video, if it wasn't Creative Commons, I provided the URL, if it was something that we had in TRU that we owned, I've uploaded the resource here, you can pick your, your license and attribution and submit. Okay, so I know that time is short. So I'll just take a minute. If anyone has any questions, and just post the reference for that. I should stop sharing Yeah, and also, I think we might need to put it in the YouTube and chat as well after the session, Melissa, as well. I think though, a lot of the other references are probably in the abstract that's in the conference guide as well. So it actually is in the abstract. You're correct. If you want to, but we'll, and we'll put them in Discord. So everyone will be able to see that. I think they've been quite a few comments. And I think there's been quite a lot of nodding of heads for many people in the session about getting people to share activities, Alan, and that has said that I'm with you there, Alan, I have struggled for much of my career trying to get people to share things. And Laura's asking about how you're expanding the community, and how maybe there need to be champions to share the value and communicate it and actually have sessions that kind of meet, I don't want to say meet, but actually encourage people to share their designs in a warm and friendly environment, although that is slightly more challenging now that we're online, but there's still ways we can do it. But I think a lot of it does come down to really a lot of community building, doesn't it? So I don't know if you've tried, if you've probably tried that, but you could Well, yeah, I mean, I did a hands-on workshop at CNIE in Vancouver a couple of years ago. And Rajiv Janjiana, you know, he's aware and he's a great champion. And his wife was in the session. And even then it was like, I don't think anybody actually went home and added. So in a way, virtually, if you had people, you know, at home, and they had the other resources at their fingertips to be able to add while you were doing a session, that might actually be easier. But and to be honest, I think we all have to be very cognizant of the fact people are just tired after a year of pandemic. And before that, they were busy. So I think that's part of it is just it takes time to go in and add something, right? So this isn't what people think of immediately. So I hope people are at least using it. But at least now, hopefully more people in the home out it, please do add if you have an activity like to add, it would be wonderful to see that. And please do use the activity if you find the resource, if you find it useful. It's essentially built from a bank of, you know, successful learning activities from open learning courses. Yeah, I think there's also just so we get some other questions there. I think there's sometimes a reticence from people to share their activities. And I think it's more about Oh, well, it's kind of it's good enough for me in my class, but I'm not really sure if it's good enough to share with the world. And I always say to people if it's good enough for your class, and it's good enough for any class. So I think there's a confidence thing there as well. But there's a really interesting question coming through here as well. And asking how you got students to add and trying to get students to add anything to the repository or activities that maybe worked for them or that they're generating or creating. I haven't but you've you've got a good idea there. And perhaps you've given me an idea to contact our we have an online teaching and learning certificate and perhaps students could through those courses contribute. Yeah. Yeah, good idea. Yeah. And I think particularly now when students have had so much more experience of doing online activities as well, that there's a wealth of experience that knowledge that we could we could be tap we should be tapping into just now in terms of what we'd like to do. Yeah. And Laura's just saying I think again, more of a comment, but maybe it's a train the trainer effort. So instead of us let our community reading it, we need to maybe go into, you know, the disciplines and get people in the domains to actually do that as well to start doing that. But I think there were some there were some comments earlier on when you were presenting the list about, you know, kind of that the language barrier. So a lot of teachers are sharing activities and content, but they're just not doing it as openly as perhaps we in this community would like and they're not using the same language. So I think that again, that's just, you know, again, one of those issues that we have to keep working at and, you know, kind of reaching out to as many people as we can to make people aware of open education and what what they're doing is actually open educational practice. Yeah. There's another question coming in here from Hope. She's saying unware of more subject specific databases and tools for OAR material. And are there maybe opportunities to interface with with those which might be Yeah, and hope if you have any of those, if you could email to me, that would be great. I I'm perhaps not as aware of those specifically. So I put my email in the chat. Yeah, I think it just takes it takes takes time, doesn't it? Like all these all these things. And again, I think as you said, Melissa, you know, everyone's very tired just now. But also, people are always looking for new activities. And if we are going to be doing maybe not as much online, but we're still going to be doing an awful lot of online learning and teaching over the next year, then people will be looking for things. So I think it's how we promote and share and, you know, kind of sell these things to people. It's like, like, this is a great way for you to get some ideas and to help you and ultimately, ultimately, maybe even save you some time. But also, you can share, hopefully share something back the wider community as well. Yeah. And that's just the point to save time, right? If you've got something you can adapt. So maybe you've never done a discussion forum before. So take one of these and adapt it. It gives you some sense of what the stages would be and what the language could be to describe it and how that could be scaffolded. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Just one thing as we're talking here. And I said, could you get people to upload that then just describing an activity, you know, a little video instead of I know why you're putting in the form. But I just wonder if that would be, you know, here's what I did. And I'm just going to record it quickly and then share it that way. I wonder, I don't know what people think about that as well. You might want to show that in the chat. That obviously someone might have to go back and tag that. That's the only thing. But sometimes I think quite there is an option here to upload an audio file. So I think it's it's it's possible. Yeah. And I thought about simplifying giving anyway. Yeah, there's lots of different, but I think it's just awareness and people having time. And I think you're right about the the complex as well. And I've had a university student in my house this past year over the pandemic and some of her teachers have done some really amazing things. And, you know, and I have reached out when I've seen somebody do a presentation on a really cool activity. I said, you know, could you please add this here? But then it doesn't, you know, happen. Yeah, it's a real challenge. And, you know, there's some great comments coming through there from everybody else. But we are just about at time now. So thank you all so much for your discussion. And the chat has just taken off here. And Melissa, thank you so much for such a thought provoking discussion. And it's really important work. So keep going. And I'm sure more people are going to start sharing because now more people know about your resource as well. So we can all maybe give Melissa a little virtual range of applause. And thank you so much and enjoy the rest of the conference. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Sheila.