 So this is webinar 15, inclusive and equitable OER, day three of the Open Education Global International Conference. And thank you so much to the organizers. I know it is a great deal of organization, whether it's face-to-face blended or fully online. And hopefully someday in the future we'll be able to be seeing each other face-to-face again. Lovely to always meet up with our community in a joyful way. You may be noticing that behind me, I have a bright orange, says every child matters. Tomorrow is September 30th in Canada, where I'm coming from. And it is our first national recognition of the truth and reconciliation report and the reconciliation work that Canadians are participating in as we understand and work together with Indigenous peoples throughout our country. So it's a sad day in many ways. And it's part of understanding the colonization and the history of residential schools in our country. So it's a tension how education can sometimes be used for important, useful applications and then also in the example of Canada as part of colonization and injustice. So with that, we have an opportunity today to think about open education and in this idea of inclusive and equitable OER. Our first presentation will be about 20 minutes. And then after that, we'll have a few minutes for questions. Then we'll move on to the next set of presentations. So the first one we'll be presenting will be open for anti-racism, using open education to support anti-racist teaching. So this is James Glapla-Grossgog, Luna Daly, Joy Schumate, and Kim Green. So welcome and let's start the learning. Thank you so much, Connie. And welcome everyone to the Open for Anti-Racism session. We're really so pleased that you could join us and to hear about this program that we worked on last year with 17 faculty from the California Community College System. Once again, I'm the director of the Community College Consortium for OER at Open Education Global. And I'm here with my team who led this work last year. And I want to turn it over to them for a quick introduction. Hey, everybody. James Glapla-Grossgog. I'm a dean at College of the Canyons in California. I'm also a fellow with the Mickelson 20 Million Minds Foundation and glad to be here. Liz, did you want to say something? Sorry, I didn't realize it was friends. Hi, everybody. I am the manager of Communities of Practice for Open Education Global. And I worked on the OFAR project. And I'm still working on the OFAR project. My name is Kim Gruy. I'm an instructional designer primarily, but I do a lot of professional development work. And I have been working on this OFAR project since it started. I'm very happy to be part of it. And I'm happy to be here today. Hi, everyone. My name is Joy Schumate. I'm the director of online education at College of the Canyons, along with James, in California. And I'm just thrilled to be here with you and thrilled that we have the opportunity to share with you a bit about our project. Great. Thank you all. And you'll hear from them in just a moment. But I do also want to thank our advisory coaches. These are the folks who worked directly with our participants last year in implementing their anti-racist plans in the classroom. And what we're hoping you'll learn today is a little bit about the program design and support, including the research findings from last year, how OER and open pedagogy was used in the classroom for anti-racist pedagogy. And we have some wonderful examples from our participant projects and some resources that you can leverage for anti-racist pedagogy at your own institution or organization. And then talking just very briefly about how we're moving to a program this year from our pilot last year. And a huge thanks to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, who have supported this work in the California Community College System. So for those of you who might not be familiar with community colleges, CCCOER has had the pleasure of working with community colleges for the last 10 years on promoting open education to enhance teaching and learning. And just to let you know how big a system it is, 44% of our US undergraduates enroll at community colleges. And they go there for a number of reasons. It could be the first two years of university or they could be getting a workforce certificate or they could be preparing for college work. These are open access institutions that are very teaching focused. Many of our students work full time and they may have families. They tend to be on the older end of the age spectrum for college. So what motivated this program? Last spring and summer in the United States was a time of a lot of pain and recognition of the racism in our society and how deeply embedded it was, not only of course in our society but are in our educational institutions. And there was many inspiring words put out, particularly at higher ed institutions around standing in solidarity for equality and racial justice, eliminating all forms of racism. But there weren't programs put in place for the classroom and how faculty could move forward with this. And so we are so thankful to the William and Florid Hewlett Foundation which really worked with us, recognized this lack and worked with us to put this together. And here's a quick quote from one of our participants saying the program gave me the starting point and the confidence I needed to be frank and vulnerable with my students in order to discuss race and privilege and how they themselves engage and perhaps perpetuate and benefit from racism. So there was this recognition that we need to see the racism first before we can move towards eliminating it. So along with the anti-racist focus, there was the realization that OER and open pedagogy could really be leveraged as tools. I think most of you probably know what open educational resources are in open pedagogy but it's that ability to be able to change resources that don't represent voices of marginalized students, learners and educators. And it's that ability or I should say it's that facility of an instructor working with their students to co-curate materials and co-create materials that can be then shared publicly. And in fact, there was some studies done a couple of years ago, this one in particular by a colleague of ours, Dr. Shauna Brandel out of the CUNY system that found that publisher textbooks and OER textbooks both had limited representation of historically marginalized groups. She specifically looked at American government textbooks but the only upside to this is that since that realization those of us who are working in the OER space are looking to make those changes to those openly licensed materials to incorporate those voices. And perhaps in an even more serious matter, I'm hitting my time limit here is the medical textbooks which focus on only folks with white skin. And so doctors and physicians aren't being prepared to diagnose correctly conditions with people of dark skin. So are open for anti-racism program, it's a year long program for faculty to explore the use of OER and open pedagogy to make their classrooms anti-racist. There's an online course you're just gonna hear about in a moment that they go through and then they develop an anti-racist action plan. And there's different supports through peer group coaching, OER workshops, anti-racist webinars, and then there's research done through surveys and interviews. And our first cohort was last year with 17 faculty members representing a wide array of disciplines from career technical ed through your standard academic spaces. And I'd like to now turn this over to our course developers. Great, thank you, Una. So I am going to kick us off and then I will pass it along to Kim. Kim and I had the pleasure of co-developing the course and co-facilitating it. So I will tell you a little bit about the course and then we'll move on over to Kim who will share a little bit about the projects that our participants or faculty members created. So first, as you see here, we developed a four-week course utilizing Canvas as our LMS. And what we were exploring were these four topics. First, what is anti-racism? So we had to define that. What are open educational resources and how can they support anti-racism? Exploring what is open pedagogy and creating an anti-racism action plan. It's important for me to note that our participants came to this course with a variety of skills and knowledge concerning OER, open pedagogy and anti-racism. So it was important that we made sure we were defining all of those clearly and really setting the stage for the last component of the course, which is for them to actually create an action plan where they implement tangible changes within their course. Next slide, please. Thank you. So to start, we had to define anti-racist pedagogy and really what that involves is being explicitly race-conscious, thinking about the systems and structures that are in place that enable racism to function in our society. And then also taking a look at our own disciplines to examine the history of those disciplines, examine how a lot of what we are teaching and learning and even the foundations of our fields of study have been influenced by or have benefited from racism in the past. So really it was just about elevating voices of minoritized groups and considering the ways in which race can be brought into the conversation, even if race isn't the focus of the course or of that particular subject matter, but really exploring again how disciplines, academic disciplines were informed by and often built off of and through and by racism. Next slide, please. So next, after defining anti-racist pedagogy, we had to spend some time kind of bridging the gap. As Una mentioned, it was really about how do we leverage open educational resources and open pedagogy to make our courses more anti-racist? So it was really, again, I won't read all of those to you, but considering the voices of our authors, what perspective is being shared, whose voices are we acknowledging and honoring as subject matter experts and whose voices are being left out of that? Really engaging and further exploring how racism is connected to our fields of study and exploring ways in which we can elevate student voices and bring students into their own learning, one so they not only see themselves in their learning, but also honoring and acknowledging the incredible talents and skills and experiences that they bring to the classroom that really their peers and us as instructors can benefit from learning from. Next slide, please. So this is another quote from one of our participants. I was interested in using open resources, but this program was a great opportunity to learn more about OER and connected anti-racist pedagogy to something that they were trying to do as well. So again, really trying to make that connection between leveraging open educational resources to make courses more anti-racist. Great, and now I am going to pass it on over to my co-facilitator, co-developer, Kim Brewey. Thank you so much, Joy. I think you can tell Joy and I very much have enjoyed working together on this. And so the action plan template, that was something that we kept purposely nebulous and sort of unstructured so that faculty could do that, could walk that talk, right, of trying to figure out when something, the problem, define the problem. So we asked them to think just, we provided some structure in a template, but asked them to think about what can they do right now in their own classrooms? And then also to think even into the future, like, and then once you do that, how can you scale that up and bring other people along? And next slide, please, Zuna. What they came up with, it's so hard to choose among the 17 to share with you today, but we're gonna share a few of those. One of these is from one of our science professors, Anna Garcia Garcia, and she wanted to make her science courses anti-racist using some open pedagogical approaches. And what she did, next slide, please, Zuna. She created, yes, there you go, an assignment in her course where students would look, do some research and find a scientist, in essence, that looked like them. And as Zuna has mentioned, we know about our textbooks tend to sort of just regurgitate the information that we've been given before, but this way students are looking to scientists that maybe have not been listed in the textbooks and highlighted and focused upon, but have contributed valuable, made valuable contributions nonetheless. So here's one example, students would create basically a page that would explain a little bit about the scientists and the contributions and the connections. So again, connections. So that was for a science class. Next slide, please, Zuna. And this is a business class. This is Deborah from Crumpton, excuse me, from the Sacramento City College. And Deborah's a business professor who injected anti-racism into her courses. And next slide, please. What she did is she took topics that maybe weren't necessarily with a social justice or a racist or an anti-racism lens, and she created assignments that actually in fact did focus on race. And one of those was to look at racial bias in marketing. And another one of those was to look at a significant racially minoritized entrepreneur. And with Deborah, if you, yes, thank you, Runa. You know, Deborah had made some comments here, reflections that it requires you to move through racism in order to get to the anti-racism. And that it is a requirement to do that. And it takes a lot of time and energy and work. But, you know, just so you know, we're all committed to it and the outcomes as a result of this work are so valuable that it's totally worth some of that tension that we lean into. We've talked about that a lot. The next slide, please. So this is a history professor. This is Oliver Rosales at Bakersfield Community College. And he did what he calls a radical archiving. He works with his students and has them interview, bring in pictures and talk to people in their community and then in their families and creates that and makes them understand that they can be historians that way and that the history of a place is a history of the people. And it's a really exciting project where he brings his student voices in for the history project. And then the last one, please, Zuna, that I'll share with you today. This is Nikia Cheney's English module as she teaches a composition course. And she created a module which she shared out in the Canvas Commons exploring the Black Lives Matter movement. And, you know, for Nikia, she also, you know, for her like what really was special about this project was that she realized how important sort of her journey was in connecting with students and she was able to kind of put her story to the forefront there and use that to guide the work that she was doing and to inspire her own students. And those links will be shared out and that you can check those out. And then the last slide I think that I'm doing here, very excited to let you all know for a lot of times when we presented, we didn't have this ready to share yet, but as of August, it's been ready to share. So there's both a facilitated and a non-facilitated version if you're interested that you can access and use as is or modify. And so I'm excited to be able to share that with you. I think that's the end of my piece into James. Great, thank you so much, Kim and Joy for describing the course. Yeah, I'm gonna move into, whoops, I got just my view there, sorry about that. I wanna share one more quote from our participants. One of them said, learning from my peers in OFAR was great. They were other faculty that teach such an array of different disciplines to see how they are using anti-racism really inspired me to see how I can use it myself. And I think many of us here are deeply involved in professional development and training for our colleagues. So we understand the value of getting out of your own environment and learning from what others are doing in other environments. That was certainly an advantage to this program. But one other piece of support that our participants enjoyed was to have access to dedicated OER support. So some of our participants were unfamiliar with open educational resources or open education generally. So the OER team that works with me and Joy here at College of the Canyons provided monthly workshops and open office hours on searching for OER, open licensing and so on topics. I think most of us are very familiar with in addition throughout the spring term we invited guest speakers who were mostly well steeped in anti-racism, some who work at the intersection of anti-racism and OER to deliver webinars for our participants. So that was an added exposure to expert information and experts in their network. And then we devoted a lot of energy and time to research to documenting the impact. You'll see on the screen here the research questions. I'm not gonna read them all but really the crux was question one, can anti-racist teaching, can anti-racist instructional materials improve student outcomes, success and retention of the outcomes that we look at here in California? But can we improve student outcomes? How do students perceive what's going on in the classroom? Can open pedagogy contribute to anti-racism? And then do the faculty, of course, recommend using an open pedagogy as an anti-racist until next slide, please. We looked at, we tried to document impact and we did document impact in a number of ways. You'll see a lot of activity here. First of all, we engaged an external evaluator at external research research company or research organization to help us. Participants, the faculty completed pre-surveys, post-surveys, they sat for interviews. They gave a presentation on their own campus doing outreach on their own campus. We documented the number of students they impacted, students themselves in the classes where the change was taking place. They participated in a survey and so on. So on the next couple of slides, I'll share some of those results. But first, yeah, go ahead. First one more quote from a participant, student participant who said that the racial assignment because it brought, the racial assignment was helpful because it brought a real life problem into our learning and made it more interesting. So that's terrific to hear. And we had a lot of feedback like that from students. So here are some data on the student perceptions. Those, the number of the percentage of students who felt more engaged or more active, 88%. Those who said they almost always had opportunities to provide their own perspectives, 87%. They almost always in their classes examined the history of the discipline, 92%. Going back to what Joy shared about anti-racist pedagogy and they almost always used classroom content to identify and challenge challenges and biases. So 80%. So positive, very positive, satisfied by outcomes for us there. The faculty participants, they said that they throughout the term, you'll see on the left-hand side, the teaching practices that they implemented. And the first two are terrific. We're happy to read those. They engage students to co-create anti-racism modules. Interestingly, the last bullet on the left-hand side was a bit lower. Engage in explicit conversations around race. That's something we hope to explore more in this coming year to understand what, where and why participants might have some a little bit of hesitancy around that. Our participants said they had an increased understanding around anti-racist teaching practices, OER, pedagogy. So all terrific, terrific numerical results there. Next slide, please, Uda. And finally, faculty recommendations. They plan to continue doing what works. And that's the amazing news for us. They plan to engage, continue engaging students to co-create materials on anti-racism. They plan to continue incorporating student voices, implementing inclusive images. And then the last bullet, again, engage in explicit conversations around race. It's still not bad, but certainly a lower response to that particular problem than others. So that's again, something we'd like to explore this coming year. Most of our overwhelming proportion of our participants said they would recommend participation to others. And 100% said the most effective strategy for enhancing the learning experience was open pedagogy. And to those of you who are familiar with that, I'll say the idea, I think Jim Joy and Kim can confirm this. The idea of the non-disposable assignment was really enthusiastically embraced. You know, you can see the light bulbs going off when he introduced that. So that was good fun. Next slide, please. This year, this academic year, 2021-22, we are able, again, thanks to the Hewlett Foundation to continue and indeed expand the program so that we are going to support 40 faculty from around California, community colleges, but we're going to expand the focus to have deeper institutional impacts, meaning that rather than supporting individual faculty, say 40 faculty from 40 different institutions, we're soliciting applications from teams of faculty at institutions. So we expect to be able to serve, say, six, seven, eight teams from six, seven, eight institutions and the teams that have four, five, or six faculty on a team so that there's more of a support network developed at that institution so we can have a greater likelihood of changing something or embedding something in the institution. We're also going to measure the student outcomes, compare past, a couple of past semesters of student outcomes in the classes that are taught by the participating faculty with the outcomes from the semester in which they're implementing their change and one semester past the time when they've implemented their change. Hopefully something will stick, right? We wanna see that there's a long-term change there. So that's very exciting. In fact, we just closed applications on Monday and boy, once again, an overwhelming interest. Just many, many, many, many, many, many more applications than we can possibly accommodate. So it's exciting to see the demand is there. Next slide, please. And if we have a few minutes left for discussion, Connie, we'd love to hear from everyone here. What does inclusive teaching and learning for social justice look like at your institution in your context? Are you explicitly talking about anti-racism? Are you talking about equity? What does this look like in your context? How does open support your work to advance social justice? And what are you hoping in doing this work or in tackling this work at your institution? And maybe do you have ideas for us? So we'll turn it over to the audience, I think. Well, thank you so much. That was very exciting to see that work, James. I can see so many people working in the same direction, helping everyone work. It's hard work. Anti-racism is hard, difficult work and so needed. So I love your questions there. We'll see if some people would take the microphone or turn on their video if they're inclined as well. There are some discussions in the chat, but maybe there's somebody who wants to provide a comment right away or a question to this presentation. I see our friend Eva, my friend Eva made an interesting comment in the chat. Maybe a culture different approach, but how is this different from so-called ordinary education using open education to support anti-racist teaching? So Eva, what we've found, I think there's a developing or an evolving understanding in open education or OER generally, that many times open textbooks or OERs are created by people who are deeply embedded in the existing system. And certainly in the United States, a lot of open textbooks or OERs are created by people who look like me, who bring with them the biases that I might have. So you might create free learning materials for students, but you're not necessarily creating materials for students that help students see their lived reality. You might be recreating patriarchy. You might be recreating white centeredness or the centeredness of the dominant culture and not giving voice to other cultures simply because you as the author you come from that culture. Does that help, Eva? Does that make sense? No, actually not, but I understand your point very much. But for me, I think it is, I'm not sure about those issues which you have been raised in your presentation. That is, I mean, what we have to consider all the time with so-called ordinary campus education without using OER to always to consider those issues which you have raised. I was wondering how, what is the added values and benefits which is not, which you don't cover. I mean, in my country in Sweden, this is that you always have to take those issues for granted whatever you are doing, whatever kind of topic you're raising in your education, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm wondering what is the added value with OER? If you understand my question. Well, perhaps, and I'll make one brief remark and then turn it over to others. I would say, I envy Sweden if this is taken for granted. It's certainly not taken for granted in the United States perhaps among some of us it is, but amongst many people it is not taken for granted that educators will tackle these issues. In fact, in the United States, we have examples of state or provincial governments and local governments passing laws to prohibit the discussion of race or the discussion of discrimination. So that if we were not in California, for example, but if we lived in different states, we would be violating the law by running this program. So it's incredibly impactful, I think in the context of the United States, please. Okay, I would say in my country, for example, if you don't take those issues very seriously, there will be a lot of complaints. So I mean, it is by default in the education system. That's wonderful. Maybe it's cultural differences. Thank you. Thank you, James. Good, Jim. Thanks, James. I really liked your answer. As a matter of fact, I wanna get that captured because the timing is perfect for something else that I wanna write, but I think, and partly to get to Abba's point, in my experience, and I teach at a community college and have for a long time, one of the challenges, and this speak is the variety, the differentiation, the variety, the heterogeneity of students at community colleges in the United States relative to the sources of the books. And this even goes for, as James was talking about, at least the first wave of big OER books, like in, and don't get me wrong, I am not being critical of open stacks, but they are in effect, and they were the first wave and they're an OER copy of the other publishers. And in the US, you run, those materials don't speak to very many students and that pain point is particular in community colleges, not only along the traditional lines of like, cause we have different races, we have different ethnicities and so on like that, but even subtle things like as an economist, I can tell you the problems I've had trying to teach from textbooks that were written by someone who thought they were going to write for the entire nation of the United States college students and going, you know what? My, you know, they're using examples of, you know, the trade-off between buying an iPod in, or your iPad and doing this or that. And I'm going, guess what? That doesn't speak to my students at all. But when I or my faculty now can create this stuff or modify this stuff and in particular get into the race issues or other, you know, other issues, it's just really, really powerful. So I don't know if that answers part of it or not, but yeah. Thank you, Jim. I want to turn to Connie and check on our time. Well, you can just respond maybe to Jim and then I think it'd be fair to pass over to the next presenters. Yeah, because we could probably be here for the whole two and a half hours, right? So if you want to just respond to Jim and then people can have the opportunity to continue the conversation in the chat and then also in Connect. There's opportunities there as well. So if you just want to respond, then James, thanks for asking and then the next presenters will queue up. Thank you. Una, did you want to respond to Jim or Kim or Joy? No, you go right ahead. I think we just all want to say thanks for the other comments in the... Yeah, no, and I'm with you, Jim, absolutely. So thank you very much. And I think we'll all dive into the chat here. So thank you very much, everybody. We really appreciate it and we're excited to continue this work. And as I said, we're able to, thanks to the Hewlett Foundation, we'll be able to triple the number of faculty we're supporting this year. So good news here. Yeah, and I'll just post the link to the resources again. Okay, thanks so much, Una. Just put that in the chat. And Verena, I know is moderating the chat and providing some provocative questions for us to continue on the conversations there. So thank you so much for your presentation. It did make me think of the emotional labor that is involved with this work for all people involved in it. And perhaps that's something related to that 60% because it is very emotionally charged and that's hard work. It's difficult work. And it's a different kind of work than most educators are familiar with, in my opinion, just adding that. So now we'll just move over then to presentation number two. Pluriversal decolonization in open education, thinking with Islamic epistemic traditions. Rerouge, Nazami, and Elliot Montpellier. So welcome to at least one Canadian presenter I know. And we'll continue with this presentation. Thank you, Connie. I just wanna confirm that everyone can see our screen but not our notes because why would you want that? Okay, awesome. I'm Rerouge, a trained librarian and open education strategist at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia, Canada. And I'm Elliot, I'm a PhD candidate in South Asia Studies and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and an instructor in Asian Studies at Kwantlen Polytechnic. So we work, study and live in a region south of the Fraser River which overlaps with the unceded traditional and ancestral lands of the Kwantlen, Musqueam, Katsi, Semiyahu, Tuasin, Kokwitlam peoples. This presentation was born out of a shared interest in how secularism, religious understandings about the world and practical concerns regarding building an inclusive open movement intersect in concrete and philosophical ways. We'll begin our talk today by introducing what we see as the problem. The absence of religion as a worldview that is welcomed within Eurocentric educational systems and the creation of barriers that occur as a result of this absence in collective efforts to decolonize the educational system. This includes a case for why we're focusing on Islam. Our framework borrows from literature and open education that calls for a plural versalist approach to open it and is centered on decolonization. So then going forward in the third section we're gonna describe results from an OER scan that we conducted to both present cases of active exclusion or derision of Islamic worldviews from educational spaces. And we're also gonna present a non-exhaustive survey of OER that emerged from some majority countries or take up subject matter relevant to the region and or Islam and point to trends in these domains. And then to wrap up, we'll discuss how we see opportunities within the open education movement to learn from and grow alongside Islamic knowledge traditions. So in preparing our talk, like many of you we turn to UNESCO's recommendations on open educational resources hoping to find UNESCO's framework for engaging religious identities, communities and worldviews. So in the OER recommendations, the language we found mentions among other things this desire for inclusive and equitable quality OER for all stakeholders. And then there's this long list of sort of categories that they include. So we see age, gender, physical ability, socioeconomic status, those invulnerable situations, indigenous peoples, those living in remote rural areas people residing in areas affected by conflict, natural disasters and then ethnic minorities, migrants, refugees and displaced persons. So you'll notice three glaring absences. Religion, which is the subject of our presentation but also race and sex and sexual orientation. In our research, we didn't find a clear answer to why this may be, whether it was explicit or perhaps due to a vocal opposition or just mere oversight. At best this represents an underlying skepticism or deprivileging of the validity of these as useful categories for thinking about people's experiences of life and at worst it represents a blatant opposition to valuing religious life, religious worldviews and racialized experiences within a national or international context. And sadly either of these could be accurate. So why are we focusing on Islam? So while engaging the effects of colonialism is not new to our field and we endeavor to take decolonization seriously in our praxis, colonialism and its persistence effects on Muslims are largely understudied in open education. Our contribution attempts to enrich the definition of decolonization by shining a light on secular biases that persist and discount religious life today. So from Palestine to France, from China to India, from Guantanamo Bay to the Bay of Bengal, Muslims constitute a large percentage of the world's migrants, refugees and displaced persons who are escaping social realities that include everything from outright genocide to poverty and climate changes, growing effects. Moreover, many migrants then come to Europe and North America only to face institutionalized Islamophobia and racism in our secular democratic nations. So what we're trying to get at here is that many Muslims constitute those who have taken shelter in the camps and bureaucracies of institutions like the UN and other humanitarian groups. And so we implicate in our presentation UNESCO, the UN and its member states in the global North whose framing of recommendations like this one that we just talked about on OER, a wide ways of knowing and worldviews of the very people they seek to assist and bring together into communities of what they call inclusive knowledge societies. Now we're presenting these problematics not to dwell on the rather depressing state of affairs but rather to discuss ways of moving forward towards these goals. The framework for our intervention is that decolonization of open must include pluriversal engagement with Islamic intellectual traditions, customary practices and epistemologies. In a 2015 lecture, Achille Mbembe offers us a working definition of pluriversalism. So he writes, and you can see this on the slide here by pluriversity, we understand a process of knowledge production that is open to epistemic diversity. Is it a process that does not necessarily abandon the notion of universal knowledge for humanity but which instead embraces it via a horizontal strategy of openness to dialogue among different traditions? Epistemic traditions are ways of knowing, ways of understanding, ways of perceiving the world. In the introduction to open at the margins, Mahabali and her colleagues referencing Mbembe make a forceful case for bringing pluriversalism into open education. And we very much wanna take up their call to bring forward non-dominant epistemic stances in open education by attending directly to tradition, which we have pointed out is largely absent. So we take decolonization as an imperative to rid society from colonialism. This is like our working definition. It's action-oriented, it's aware of current and historical violence and oppression and it seeks to regain and control thought processes. Open education scholars have argued that open can actively engage in decolonization by providing opportunities for liberation from dominant ideologies. For example, if we think about the opportunities licensing provides for adaptation or generally how publishing challenges hegemonic norms. But this can really only happen when accompanied by understandings of relationships of power, who gets to frame our movement and whose norms are valued. Otherwise, as Florence Piron and others have argued open can itself become what they call a source of epistemic alienation and neocolonialism. Translation won't save us, it's good for access but translating a Euro-American canon in OER for the global South preserves the uneven flow of knowledge production and making only Northern experiences available through curricula denies embodied realities of learners in the South. Decolonization cannot be done without bringing to the fore the epistemic traditions that have been marginalized by colonization. The turn to indigeneity in open ed has been hugely important. This work has helped shift conversations in a positive direction, yet there's a lot of work to be done on this front. At the same time, we need to think about the effects of colonization on marginalized identities that aren't always contained within the framework of indigeneity. Next, we're gonna discuss our scan of existing OER and present a brief summary of the literature review on specific education-related cases where religious identities intersect with policy, law and the state in counterproductive ways. Together, these provide insight on successes, shortcomings and opportunities for advancement. We started by searching meta-search engines for OER. Our search terms were Muslim and Islam as well as discipline-specific searches for religious studies, theology, anthropology and sociology of religion. We also did searches using filters and tags for different key languages that we deemed both relevant and that we were capable of conducting a survey of resources in and these included English, French or Lu Persian and Arabic. We conducted searches using OASIS, OER Commons, OER and other languages, and the OER by Discipline Directory from BC Campus. A simple Google search and OER in religion also returned a useful library guide from Mount St. Vincent University for religious studies. So as you see on the slide here, some of these methods and then some of the results that we found. So what we did is we sort of generally could classify the types of materials we found into six categories. So we have resources on art and architecture from the Islamic world. We have resources on security studies or international studies kinds of textbooks for which there was a large focus on Islam as a sort of political ideology, how it fits into geopolitics. Then there were a handful of more humanities-focused learning resources, things like anthropology, religion, textbooks, that sort of thing. Lots of language, learning materials and philological resources, some things that focus more on area studies, particularly primary source materials, and then a large body of things like manuals, teacher's guides and other translations. And so this survey that we did of Arabic or Lu Persian OER was really sort of as a proxy for hoping to access relevant materials, but really within the scope of the scan, these materials were mostly in that sixth category with a real focus on secular subject matter. So there were really few comprehensive OER relating to Islam and Muslim societies. Now a positive finding is that there were no really blatant Islamophobic materials to report on. And so the kind of the critical takeaway here is that it's really this critical lack, this lack of materials that we found in this like the main omission, the main issue here. What does exist betrays a largely outsider view into Islamic societies. So these sort of traditional Orientalist domains such as art, language and philology, and then this more recent focus on geopolitics driven by an ongoing war on terror. And of course in this later case, viewing Islam through a largely political lens has led to a number of off-putting and disproportionate kind of focus on Muslim beliefs and worldviews as like being tied to violence. And this is of course deeply troubling. At the same time, we also know that our educational systems or places where Muslim students are regularly marginalized and in our broader survey of policy literature on religion and higher education, we encountered substantial evidence of this fact. There are a litany of well-published cases in France, Austria and several other European countries were religious students, but especially Muslim women and Sikh men. They've been prevented from embodying their religious identity, let alone having access to educational experiences that affirm those identities. In Germany, the US and Canada and elsewhere, there have been bans or attacks on interfaith prayer spaces at institutions of higher education which have specifically targeted Muslims. And there are many cases of blatantly Islamophobic content appearing in courses across the West. Another relevant example of this is the banning of access to MOOCs in Somalia and Iran due to US sanctions, as again mentioned by Mahabali and her colleagues. So in this sense, too, we regard the publication, the publications being printed at university princes, like institutions like Al-Quds Open University in Palestine and the Alama Iqbal Open University in Pakistan as closely connected to our OER discussions and really already doing the work of plural reversal education, but on terms that might not formally be recognized as open. That is to say, Alama Iqbal Open University, for example, makes publicly available online on their institutional website, what appears to be the vast majority of resources required for the programs they offer, though these resources are not openly licensed. Here on the screen, you just have an image of a sort of an upper level applied research course, and then I've highlighted the copyright statement that sort of assigns copyright to the publisher. So here again, we're returning to Florence Piron and her colleagues' arguments on a Northern focus on the technicalities around open access and we underscore how the availability of these works align well with our decolonizing ethos, but are not currently legible in or as open. Finally, there were many openly licensed public domain resources that we encountered either in broader non-repository searches or the ones that we knew of because of our subject expertise or perhaps personal encounters with materials. The extent to which these resources, which in many cases more directly engaged to the Islamic scholarly traditions fall outside of the scope of the OER meta-search engines points for an avenue for immediate engagement and improvement in a plural reversal direction for open education. Now in our final section, we're going to turn to some intersections between Islamic knowledge traditions and open education. One of open education's strengths is that it resists rigid definitions of what it means to be open. So we see this in how open education has adopted ideals that predate open ed like privacy, agency, critical pedagogy, and social justice. This is great. To us, this means that open education presents an opportunity, but all the ideals I just mentioned above can be traced to Western Enlightenment ideas. And this is not the only way forward. Increasingly, in North America, as we've noted, there's been an interest and a need to focus on indigenous knowledge practices, as well as anti-racist strategies. Though here again, there's a lot of continued work that needs to take place. In the same way, we should be asking what can open education learn from histories of Islamic knowledge traditions? If we want to decolonize our practice, we have to think outside of our epistemic bubbles. As Membe writes, we must both critique the Eurocentric academic model to imagine what alternatives might look like. Those alternatives must horizontally engage with other knowledge traditions. So, of course, Islamic intellectual traditions go back way over more than 1400 years, and we can't cover all the details here, of course, but a couple of noteworthy points, I think, for a presentation. One is that medieval Islamic thinkers developed upon European and West Asian intellectual canons. They're largely responsible for preserving European traditions from antiquity into the Renaissance period. And then second, colonial era, European thinkers created a hegemonic narrative that really elided this history and made claims about intellectual stagnancy within modern Islamic societies. So, opposing this, we sort of really maintain a different picture of a vibrant intellectual tradition, historically and in the contemporary Islamic world. One that has a lot to offer the movement of open, and it currently provides authentic educational models and knowledge traditions for students. This is not to say that these traditions haven't been steered into irreconcilable directions in certain contexts, but it is to add that if open education wants to take seriously the manner in which it approaches education as a universal right, it must be open and engaged with difference. As a start, we suggest considering features of the Islamic tradition, which resonate directly with existing open concepts, namely ideas around attribution and several of the five Rs. In many key elements of religious curriculum, these exist, there exist traditions of what I'm about to share. Isna is a chain of transmission. It links the current version and or practitioner to a lineage of transmitters or teachers, usually all the way back to the Prophet. And this is a vital system of attribution. The Fsir is exegesis, often on the Quran, but also in other prominent texts. And it's subject to the rigors of both Isna and also in the event of teaching Ijaza. And here we see revision as a center of this intellectual tradition. Ijaza is an authorization to be able to teach, which several prominent scholars argue was a precursor to the doctrine emerging out of medieval Islamic learning institutions. These institutions retain copies of exegetical and other scholarly works reusing, adapting and adapting them to their curricular context. So this is a tradition that is maintained today in centers of Islamic learning. If we think with these concepts and really in viewing them as generative models of attribution and the five Rs, we witness an alternative to the commodified notion of intellectual property that dominates Euro-American educational systems. And this is something that, of course, the open movement too has really taken on as one of its primary considerations. At the same time, this is not just about using Islamic terms or making analogies with Islamic concepts, but instead about finding intersections, learning from, incorporating and integrating practices are emerging from other traditions into a plural reversal model of open. These models have distinct orientations to notions of a public good. We can see this in traditions of knowledge production at some of the oldest learning institutions in the world, including the University of Al-Karawin in Morocco, Al-Azhar University in Egypt, Al-Nizamiya in Baghdad and the Najaf Hausa also in Iraq. Indeed, religious education has in some ways been more resistant to the commodification of knowledge. When we revisit these histories, we also call attention and critique a historical and generally inaccurate understandings of curricula and religious educational contexts. As scholars of many different religious traditions have noted, the division between secular and religious training is not always neat. It is important to think of how to adapt what we think of as secular disciplines to religiously attuned life worlds. In work on Buddhism in Laos, for example, Justin McDaniel notes that in English grammar lessons, aspiring monks use examples like Buddha taught the Dhamma instead of C spot run. A kind of funny, but a very sort of interesting example to engage and think through. Finally, we also see aspirational notions of the public good emerging from open university models that have found traction and educated millions of students in post-colonial Muslim countries, like Al-Quds, open university in Palestine and the Alamik Ball Open University in Pakistan. And so while being careful not to romanticize or dehistoricize traditions of Islamic teaching and learning, we argue in favor of seeking out the convergences between existing and customary practices in the Muslim world and current trends in open education. One of these points may be found in challenging the commodification of knowledge. We must, however, also be open to dialogue with parts of the tradition that may not immediately be reconcilable with hegemonic Euro-American ones. There's a rich Islamic tradition, a learning tradition and if we take it seriously within higher education, it will resonate with our Muslim communities, but it'll also help undo persistent colonial ideologies of the West. So really to conclude, what we wanna argue for is that while open education has argued in thinking with bell hooks, that we need to engage the whole person in our pedagogy, this is something that when it comes to religion, we're not quite there yet. We do have a robust engagement with this idea and this is evident in how we address costs and barriers to access with practical solutions to mitigate these, but we really need to sort of continue to do that work of putting forward decolonizing models for students to make sense of themselves or what George Sefa Dai calls to take control of their own thought processes. This must include the possibility to rediscover holistic worlds, including religious selves, even to the extent that if they choose to bring together secular lives with their religious lives. And with that, we basically conclude, we have some slides here at the end that have the full results of our OER scan that you can consult at a later time. Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you, Elliot Tenirush. Wow, just wow. I think it's such an excellent contribution to this webinar that we're having and I can see there's this whole obviously and it's implications for open educators, openness in general. I see James, do you have a question, James? Yeah, sure, go ahead. Thank you, Connie. Well, I just want to say thank you. The concept of plural versality is completely new to me, but it's sort of mind-blowing to me. It's something that I've looked for. I've sought this dichotomy in my head and haven't understood what to do with it about how to reconcile different epistemologies with what is supposed to be my academic, enlightenment-based worldview. So thank you very much for that. It's a great gift, I really appreciate it. And I would really encourage you to write this up because I would just love to use it with a lot of different training and professional development, so please write something. For sure, and I also recommend checking out the open at the margins volume that really gets into plural versality and also references the scholars in education which really brought it to the fore. Yeah, I think we're really indebted to that piece in particular. It's an added volume and in a lot of the pieces within it that sort of got us thinking about this and also were really sort of helpful in breaking past that kind of like thought barrier too that I think we've experienced as well in our own kind of talking about this. And so yeah, I think that's a really useful volume to consult. Great, we'll see if we can get that in the chat box for everyone to take a look at. And I was wondering too, like I only know some things about Islam, but I do believe that there's quite a oral tradition within it as well. And often with higher ed, well, education generally, there's this privileging of the written word. And so did you find anything relating to, you know, orality and the importance of oral tradition as part of knowledge sharing and extending it out? For sure. And I think it's very relevant when we think about indigenous perspectives as well, but it's not when I mentioned that. So this idea of tracking what was said and who said it and how they may have adapted it or added some context to it, that was all an oral tradition, which was later written down. So it's very much, it very much also can disturb the privileging of a textual tradition as like the only way forward. Do you have anything to add? No, I mean, I think that that's... Yeah, I would think so. And I can see that whole, like the privileging of the written text over other ways and also oral, but also the use of the image as well as a mechanism for conveying ideas. Again, the image has also been suppressed and not as privileged as the written word for lots of different reasons. So I don't know if that also was something that you had thought about. Yeah, and I would add also sort of a kind of, you know, there's a, I think in certain parts of the tradition as well, there's a much more sort of embodied learning. And I think you see this kind of across religious traditions. This is kind of getting to the, one of the questions in the chat about like our approach to other religious perspectives as well. But, you know, if you look at Christian traditions, if you look at Buddhist traditions, if you look at Hindu traditions of learning, there's oftentimes a very sort of like corporal component which involves sort of like moving the body or sort of a real focus on things like the way that the mouth works in articulating the oral tradition, that kind of thing. And so really kind of, you know, religion, focus on religion here really could also open us up to just different ways of experiencing education as I kind of embody practice. Yeah, I would agree, Elliot. I think that's a very useful line of inquiry and lots of, well, this whole idea of what is literacy, multi-literacies, different kinds of literacies that comes into that. I see in the chat, Vareena had the question, could your lit review approach be used for other religious perspectives? What are things to consider as we move forward from our own perspectives? So this, I included, we included this example about Buddhism because I was actually just, I was teaching this week and I was like preparing this new reading to instruct and I saw these quotes from Justin McDaniel and I just thought it resonated so well with what we were trying to get at and it had this nice sort of example. But I absolutely think that our approach here began with, it was kind of a two-fold. One was sort of like using languages that are sort of our research languages, the languages that we know to conduct this research. And so for example, if you were working with Tai and Lao, for example, or sort of Chinese and Tai, let's say, and you wanted to sort of pursue this kind of approach with an interest in Buddhism, I think this model with the sort of review approach that we provide could be pursued. And then of course, very similar to what we did. In fact, the research we did in a sense would already reveal many examples and shortcomings when we were looking at other religious traditions. So I do think it could definitely be replicated in a sense. Right, yeah. There's quite a few people just posting how much they appreciated your presentation and thanking you for it and helping us to just broaden our perspective. One from Jim Luke, he says, thank you so much for this project and effort. He lives in Dearborn, Michigan, I believe. I think that's what MI means. I'm not Canadian, so I'm not always accurate on my American states. And it's the US city with the largest concentration of Arabic and Muslim overlapping but not identical identities, residents. I call them neighbors. This is so needed and so welcome. If there's ever anything that I can do to connect you to people in Dearborn, let me know. So just growing out the network there. And there's a link to the open up margins edited version or edited book. So thanks for just referring to that. I would just jump in there to say thank you everyone, but thanks, Jim, for this comment. And we had the opportunity to go to the, I think it's the Arab American Museum. I believe it's in Dearborn or just outside of Dearborn. Yep, that's in town. Yes, and it was really, it was a really wonderful thing. Just down the street. Yeah. Yes, yeah, great. Well, any other, oh, I see another, just something just came into the chat just now. Just that it was a terrific session. Thank you. That's coming from Elaine and Beth just said, I love how they just looked at each other like, yes. Yeah, lovely collaboration between the two of you. You can see that and probably modeling for us to see how you can present face to face it looks like and in a space that you're working together. So I think we're getting close to the time then. And sorry, Erucia, we'll just go on to the next presenter. So nice to see you both. Great presentation. Lots of excellent ideas coming there. Thanks so much, everyone. So coming up next would be the third presentation today. Strategies for assessing and adapting OER for inclusion. A case study. So Suzanne, welcome. Rachel Artega and Mandeet Garabal. Welcome. Hi. Hi. OK, hopefully everyone can see my screen. Yes, I can. OK, so we are going to talk about a project that kind of came out here, came out of view here and share strategies for assessing and adapting OER. Suzanne Joaquim is not here, even though she's listed as a presenter, but she did contribute quite a bit to this. So, Mandeet, do you want to go ahead and introduce yourself? Yes, my name is Mandeet Garabal, and I teach a big college. I teach biology over there. And I'm Rachel Artega. I'm a librarian. I also do work for the Academic Senate for the California Community Colleges, the Open Educational Resources Initiative. And this project kind of came out of the grant funding provided from the Open Educational Resources Initiative, the OERI. And Mandeet got funding to basically edit a text. And then I kind of helped with that process, but I'm going to let her talk about that. So just let me know when you want me to change that. OK, so I'm going to talk about this human biology OER textbook that Suzanne Joaquim and I curated. So this is a very long project. So about maybe five years ago, we started this project. So right now we are at the third version of the book. So the first version was there was a need for human biology OER textbook because the commercial books were very expensive. So there was equity issue. And if students got financial aid to get textbook, they always got their textbook four weeks into the semester. So that's when they had their first exam. So we thought there was a need. So in OER, when we looked, there was no human biology textbook. So either we could use human physiology anatomy. So those were too advanced. And just general biology would be too not too specific for this course. So we curated this book. And then we uploaded this book on Libre Texts. I hope you guys are familiar with that. So this is a platform where we house their book. And it's very easy to navigate. And students can download the textbook as a PDF and save it on their devices. And this book is available for them on the first day of the class. So we thought, you know what? Oh, this is a perfect book. We were so happy. And we thought it can be better than that. But in 2019, Suzanne and I, we attended professional development workshops. So there's one safe zone training. And there was another one that was about the data that they collected about the climate at the college. So in those workshops, we learned that this book is not perfect. So this book was affordable. But this book was not inclusive enough. Because students told, and even faculty, some faculty and staff, they said that they don't see themselves in the faculty. They don't see themselves in the textbooks that they use or they learn from. So there was a need to make this book more inclusive, to make it more representative of the student body that we have. So I took on that project. And I applied for another grant from ASCCC. So thankfully, they gave me this financial help. But then now the question was, how do I make it inclusive? Because I did not know enough. So I needed to take some classes. So I took classes and I became part of the diversity committee and also gender sexuality equity team at our college. So I and also Rachel, our librarian. So I asked if all of them, they could help me figure out what is lacking in this textbook. So we came up with this survey. Rachel, can you go to the next slide, please? So we put together the survey to audit to just see what is lacking in the textbook. And if you guys are interested in using that survey, that is on our website. And I will post the link to that. And Rachel, if you have access, you can do that. But I'll post it in a minute. So there are nine questions altogether. But this is just an example. You can see three questions over here. And so I gave the survey to about 10 people. So five of them, they returned the survey. They took the survey and Rachel is one of them. And I was amazed to see that if you look at the first question, how inclusive this book is as compared to general books that we use for human biology. So there was a range, like one to four. So I was disheartened to see that some people thought it was not inclusive at all. And some thought maybe somewhat. And then the second question was regarding like how do you see diversity in general in this book? So there was like most of them, most of the people, said that there's only white people. They only see white people. Even the illustrations were of white people. And the women's scientists were not represented. And most of the videos were American and with white people in them. So most information, I don't know much about LGBTQ community. So that's why I joined the committee, the sexuality and gender and sexuality committee. So I got a lot of information. And you guys can see, there's a list. And some of them were eye-opening because I was, I curated this book the way I was taught, OK? So there's a man and there's a woman. And I was like amazed to learn that breastfeeding is not appreciated by transgender community. Opposite sex, what does that mean? Assisted reproductive technology is not only for heterosexual family, homosexual family can also expand their family using this technique. So there was a lot of information that I gathered. And next slide. And then after looking at all this information, I went back and looked at my book and I was like, oh, my god. Is this my book? Did I write that? Or did I curate that? So this is my book, What It Looked Like Before. This is one example. This is a skeletal system chapter. And this is the first chapter, like first section of the chapter of each chapter is a case study. And then it's kind of discussed throughout the chapter. And there's a conclusion at the end. So in each case study, there's a character. And if you look at that, that character is American Melissa. And she just uses she and her pronouns. And she's pretty tall and white woman. And that's what I saw throughout my book. I was like, OK, we need to change it. We need to make it more inclusive. We need to show that, OK, I see all of you students. So if you want to change the next slide. OK, so this is what we did to that particular. So this is one example. So in here, you can see that I changed the name, first of all, because this is a case study. Students sit and talk about it. And I hope that I hoped that there would be a student who would be familiar with this name, Amari. And then I also introduced gender, neutral gender, neutral pronouns, they them. And then also, if you can look at the picture, that is very inclusive. You can see different skin shade. And maybe some of them are transgender women. They don't have to be cisgendered females. Actually, when I had people or my colleagues read these case studies, they had a little hard time reading because they could not connect the plural pronouns with the singular person. So I had a little. So but I just kept it. I was like, you know what, I'm just I'm going to just keep it. And there are a few chapters which have this case, which have characters with the gender, neutral pronouns. And also, I have in some case studies, I have male names with the female pronouns as well. And go to the next slide. And also, I wanted to add something about my culture in there, too. So when recently we had to rent a house and our landlord said, could you cook your Indian food outside? It would be nice if you just cooked it outside because that smell kind of enters into the foundation and then it doesn't come out. And I was like, oh, my God. I was like, I needed to tell it to somebody. So I added this nice picture of Indian spices. But this chapter is not about Indian culture, Indian cooking. This is about phytochemicals. So this culture that people bring from other countries sometimes is appreciated. Sometimes they become cause of discrimination. So I wanted to add that so that people think, oh, yeah, I'm included. So there's something about me in this book as well. Next slide. Okay, so then another example. So this particular chapter is about macromolecules. So here I'm talking about carbohydrates. So you can see a picture of a person on a wheelchair, but I'm not talking about disability. I'm not talking about wheelchair. So this is actually about cotton candy that she's holding or they're holding in their hand. And so there are some aspects of a disability race that I've added. And if you can go to the next slide, Rachel. Hey, so the most trouble that I had was with the reproductive system because this is an OER. So I relied on information that I gathered from outside, from other OER resources. I could not find enough information on different genders, different identities. So I had this little note. And if you go to the next slide, Rachel. So in this note, I kind of told my readers that, okay, I'm sorry that most of the information in here is gonna be about cisgendered individuals, but I tried and then I gave some information about what this LGBTQ means. So there is not just male and female. There are people who don't identify with their natural gender. So we have a range of, we have rainbow of genders and identities in America. So this is not what it is. So I hope it will trigger more research and more literature in this field so that people like us can use that. So I gained a lot of information. So we wanted to put everything together so that if somebody wanted to change their book or audit their book or maybe start a new OER, so they can include all these aspects rather than changing it later. So we put together this framework that Rachel mostly worked on and I kind of helped a little bit. And now Rachel is gonna talk about that framework. Thank you. So as a librarian, I help a lot of faculty find OER and work on OER and kind of worked with Monty through this process. And I thought, because we were getting a lot of questions from students about like this book, like why can't all instructors do this? Like, wouldn't it be great? And instructors were interested. So I wanted to create something that would help streamline their process. And then eventually what we did was use by the state that I'll talk about a bit more. I'm just going to, I don't know if I can, oops, I can't pop it in the chat really. I'll pop it in the chat at the end. I can do that. Okay, I don't wanna switch screens. So basically I wanted to streamline the process, modifying the book, like the examples that you saw can make the content and the design better. It will allow more diverse authors and even students to contribute to the content leading to culturally responsive teaching and textbook examples like we just saw. So we can make really relevant resources for our student population. So our population here in Duke County, California might be totally different than somewhere else, but we can change the examples and the references that we use to be more inclusive of our student populations and just in general. So the OERI, the California Community Colleges, they wanted to develop a process that was similar to this and since they fund a lot of projects for OER, new and also people that are improving OER, they thought it would be a good idea to have something like this for people to use and work with as I went through that process. So we both wanted to make a case for people who were questioning if they should do this, but also for people who were really committed and wanted to do this, but just needed to see what practically they needed to do with their text. So we do recognize that every discipline is going to be different. There's going to be different challenges, a math textbook, what you can look at and do is going to be completely different than say, like the biology textbook. And we also know that we're asking people to kind of do some difficult work and reconsider what they know about their discipline, what they're including. Like Mandip says, like she was writing a book based on what she was taught in school about biology, human biology. So the framework is divided into different areas or components, restorative requirements. Those are kind of the main overall requirements of things that you can look at. And then the elements for consideration are the areas that are broken down into more specific things that you can look at and change. And this will make sense when I actually show you the framework. But we wanted to restore and include voices that have been excluded or marginalized. We also wanted to give areas to assess, tips and examples that would help meet the requirements that are included in the framework. So I don't know if I'll have time to go over all of the components of the framework, but I'll just give some examples. So a major thing that you saw examples of because it's easy to show are illustrations and photos. How can you change those? I know when I was reviewing the biology book, every single, I don't know what you call body model of anatomy, it was basically white and male as if that's the only thing that exists in medicine that you would study, so things like that. Example names, we saw an example of that. More gender inclusive language and pronouns and then who are you referencing? Who are the people in your discipline or the field that are historical or pioneering? What are current researchers doing? How can you look at those in your discipline? There are a few more things. Who are you referencing? Who are you giving credit to? Application and examples like problem scenarios. So that is something like say for math that if you write a problem, I haven't taken math in a long time but sometimes you have long word problems like how can you be more inclusive and be more relatable to a diverse audience? What terminology are you using? Is it the appropriate or the most up to date terminology? What keywords and glossary terms are you highlighting? What metadata are you representing? Very librarian type of thing, but it's good to look at what perspectives are you using when you look at events and issues? Are you representing concepts that are relevant to underrepresented groups? And then we have a section on additional resources where to find images, style guides and things like that. So this is kind of what it looks like and I'll post the link at the end. So for examples and photos, like what is the requirement that you want to have to have an inclusive text? You want to be reflective of diverse populations so students are able to see themselves like the example of Indian food. We have a pretty large population of Indian students here in Duke County. At the same time, visuals should not perpetuate stereotypes like you have to be really cognizant of how you're using the images and what they're next to, what the context is. And then these are like ways that you can meet this requirement. You know, analyze the connotation, the picture, the pictures in the photos, expressions of authority, like really think about how are you using the photo and look at the work as a whole and section by section to make sure that you are representing things throughout in a diverse and inclusive way. So here's an example of another thing that you want to look at is include images of people doing actions where the context doesn't necessarily relate to their identity unlike we saw with the cotton candy example. It's just a really easy way to be more inclusive. And hopefully I'm okay with time. I'm not gonna go through everything. I just wanted to show some examples. Basically, if you were writing a text and you went through all of these, you would be able to create something that is very inclusive. Okay, I'll pop the links and I just saw in the chat that the link isn't working. I'll pop the links in the chat as soon as we're done. And when I can stop sharing. So the ASCCC OERI just, we worked on a project over the summer that kind of expanded the framework that I used to mute and we just published it like a couple of days ago. So it was really good timing. I'm gonna provide the link to the whole framework and then there's also a place where if you have ideas or if you wanna use it, you can give comments and feedback or even get involved somehow, like if your discipline wants to use this or work with this, you can. Okay, I think we have the links. Sorry, I can't do more than one thing at once, but I'll make sure that they're the correct ones. I think it's okay. I think we got the links. Okay, thank you whoever did that. If I switch away from this green shirt, I'll get messed up. So other questions? Yeah, that was Verena. She's helping us out and I think there's a Google doc that she's been collecting, collating all the information that's being shared in this webinar. If I understand how that's been working. So thank you. That's a fantastic framework and lots of detail there about how to dive into making sure that you're thoughtful in your equity and not just trying to reach it. Like there's many things as you can see, I don't know how many categories you had, but there's a good degree of thoughtfulness there. And the example from biology, that was quite interesting. Lots of people were commenting on that process. Ben Deep, I'm curious about when you've been using the textbook, have you shared with the students about this process of revision? And if you have, can you tell us a little bit about what that has looked like or felt like? The thing is like since I have modified this book, I have not taught this class. So the other instructors have. So I did not get chance to talk to them yet. So I don't have that information yet. So hopefully, you know, maybe I'll get some information this semester and I can share it with you guys. So I'm kind of disappointed that I haven't used this book in my class yet. I understand that it's a lot of work and also it's that process of revision and improvement. And also I would think it models for the students how there can be change over time that we can grow as educators in our understanding about how we educate and our resources and how we need to constantly be rethinking them because they need updating. And I think that that's an interesting also sort of a, obviously not tied directly to biology, but certainly tied into this concept of openness and equity and how our actions, our models for our students. So I'd be curious to hear what they say. I mean, like even that before and after of the picture of the shoes, that was, you know, it's very clear cut example. And I can see students going, oh, wow, this is interesting. I've never seen a professor revise a book in that kind of way. So it could be a great model for them I guess is what I'm suggesting. Yeah, so I'm teaching microbiology this semester. So I'm not teaching that. We are using OER OpenStacks, OER textbook for that. So sometimes like today, this time was my office hours. So I've changed my office hours and I told them like I'm presenting and they were like, okay, what are you presenting? So I shared the link to the book with them. And some of the students like they emailed me this like we're so proud of you. And they see me as like Indian person coming from India like not speaking even much English when I came here and I'm sitting here and presenting and they were so proud and I was like, okay, I'm a good, I wanna be role model for you guys and you can do much more than me, you know? So it is, it's a good encouragement for students. Doesn't matter, you know, which class I'm teaching. Lovely, that's really, it's lovely. I think our students cheer for us more than we anticipate sometimes, yeah. There's a question from Verena. She said, did you survey the students after you've made the changes? And if you did, what was the feedback then? And so I think that you said you haven't used it yet since the changes. I have not even like, I didn't even realize that I should do that. Like I should have done that already before the presentation. So this is a good idea. Like this is a good suggestion. So I'll do that next. Oh yeah, actually, so maybe timely that you didn't actually get to teach it this semester. Yeah, or just like survey the students who are in bio to this semester, even if I haven't taught them. So maybe I'll just put together something and Rachel's gonna help me put together a survey. Right, right. I think that's, yeah, that's a good way to sort of just calibrate, you know, the changes. And also like, if you have to go for funding or whatever, it can help because often it's about creation of new material is often what we see and hear in OER. And that process of revising doesn't always get as much attention. And if you had some evidence through surveys and that kind of data, you would be able to create a case for, you know, a different type of funding, maybe other types of revisions to OERs that you might be inspired to do. Thank you. Judith says, I'm inspired by you and your work, and I'm glad to hear your students are as well. And Verena says, we are so proud of you or words to be proud of when they come, especially from your students. And Una says, thank you, Rachel, as well for your good work as a curator and open licensed expert and so much more. Yes, there's lots of heavy lifting in this work, right? There's many pieces. So very exciting work that you've been involved in. And we have time for maybe one or two more questions if there's anything from anybody else. I was wondering, Mandeep, that shows a lot of vulnerability as an instructor. So personally, how did you feel about that if you wouldn't, if you want to share? I just, I admire the braveness to say, ooh, that was not, I thought that was good then, but now I know more and I'm going to change that because it's not as good as it could be and this is how I'm changing it. So do you want to talk a little bit about that or? You know, like I just got into this with the encouragement of Rachel and Suzanne. I was a part-time instructor for a long time, right? So I wanted to, so first my goal was just to get a full-time job. So I got into OER and then I was like, okay, I'm gonna do, let's just do this, like let's make an OER textbook. So first I was kind of like just doing what other people were doing, right? So now I've realized that, oh no, like I have big voice, like many people don't have voice. So I should include these aspects because it's necessary and also I just recently experienced that, you know, when we just rented that place and I was like, okay, so if I can experience that, people who don't have voice, they can experience a lot. So people need to be educated. Maybe it has to start from the school, like from college. So even educated people don't know how to approach these things, right? It's okay to ask, okay, don't cook, but there's a way of asking. So I've realized that, okay, I have a big voice, like I have, you know, opportunity. I have a support from my colleagues. So I should do that. And I'm looking at this in with a different lens now, right? Rather than just, okay, I need this job. Like I'm just doing it just to get experience to modify my resume, maybe just make my resume better. But yeah, so this is, maybe I'm older now too, I think differently. Yeah, it's always changing. That's the experience of being an educator. And also it speaks to this idea too about the privilege of a secure job and how it allows you to maybe take risks that if you were a session, maybe less likely, right? I mean, that's a whole area of how higher ed operates is, you know, session instructors, part-time instructors and risk taking is a different exercise when you're part-time in contract versus having a permanent position. So I think that's obviously part of it too, yeah. Yeah, I think Rachel, do you wanna add something too if I missed anything? Like you saw my, you know, like my metamorphosis, right? You saw me becoming a different person. I just think that it's a really good way to model for students. Like one saying like, you know what? I'm supposed to be the authority, but I don't necessarily know anything and I'm constantly learning more things. And like this was a huge thing that I needed to learn. And now I'm, you know, giving it to you and showing you. I think that that's, I know that as a student, I always didn't trust someone that's like, said that they knew everything. So I think that like, I think your students can really admire that about you and see that it's something that we're constantly working on. Yes, I would agree. There's a, we don't often see people in, like a teacher has that authority and that voice and, you know, making admission that, ooh, I made a mistake or I know more, I've changed. We don't often talk about that with our students. And yet it can be probably a really important piece of modeling, like you say, Rachel. So a great presentation. Thank you to both of you and all the important work you're doing there. And hopefully we'll hear more as there's further revisions or research, et cetera. So we'll be going on to the next presentation here. And let me just check. Oops. So we are on presentation number four, informed open pedagogy in the classroom, bringing students into working open by Cynthia, Mari or Ozoko. So Cynthia, are you here? Yes, I am here. Lovely. Okay, just setting my timer. I wanna make sure we have enough time for Josie also. Okay. So hello everybody. My name is Cynthia, Mari or Ozoko. And I wanna talk a little bit about open pedagogy today. I know several of you in this room have heard different iterations of this talk. So apologies for having to listen to me again. Yeah. And I'm also one of the California Community College folks in this room here from East LA College. Oops. God, I always do that. Okay. So in this session today, I wanna talk a little bit about my background, just how it informs my work. Talk about the idea of informed open pedagogy. Some examples of it in practice, thinking a little bit about my future work and then my concerns with open pedagogy with open pedagogy practices. So just to tell you a little bit about me, I am a librarian at East Los Angeles College. I am not an official OER librarian, but I am an OER librarian for the most part. People ask me OER stuff, but I mostly do instruction reference and outreach. And I do teach a one-unit library science class that teaches student college level skills. And I do a lot of EDI work in libraries and community colleges. And for several years, I was most known for doing a blog called LIS microaggressions for microaggressions in library and information sciences that kind of tapered off and I'll get into that a little bit. And it was mostly because I was attacked by alt-right internet trolls in 2016 and never fully bounced back from that. I also think a lot about the affordance as a working in closed spaces and what it means to have your work out there openly because I've had a lot of terrible internet work out there. I had a really bad Zanga that I was really happy was killed off when Zanga lost a bunch of its data. And so that's great for me. And yeah, I'm glad that schoolwork has been disposable in some instances. You know, like I'm a graduate student right now and having graduate seminars where you're talking about tough issues that aren't made public is really great sometimes. So that's where I'm coming from. And when I'm teaching library science 101, I use this concept of an informed open pedagogy which I wrote about in a book chapter that I'm sure someone will link for me if I ask. I forgot what it's called, but something about informed open pedagogy and information literacy. So what I think it means right now is that it teaches students, actively teaches students about open and it brings them into the greater open education movement. It's not just doing student-created works that are openly licensed but really contextualizing open education OER and open for them. Students, you know, when they're creating their works are able to individually or collectively decide their preferred individual or collective authorship and licensing. And students can opt out. You know, I don't think that all work should have to be open. That's scary. And if they want to opt out during the class, there should be an alternative assignment. And, you know, later on if they decide, hey, you know, maybe I don't want my work on, my name associated with this, they can take their name off. Thank you, Brianna. Oh, and it's inherently aligned with information literacy which I won't get into too much today but the book chapter is linked there in the chat. So in my first example, contextualizing the open textbook, one of the things that really worries me about my college in particular is that right now our OER conversations is really focusing on the free aspect. And I don't want to negate this because some people, oh, there are conversations about open that are like open is more than free but the free part is actually very, very important for places like mine. About 50% of our students are considered low income. And, you know, that is absolutely something that I want students to take away. Like this is something that will, you know, liberate us from traditional textbooks. But I also want them to understand what the affordances of open are and not just an open education but open access. So we talk a lot about, you know, global context of open access. We talked a lot about the early, you know, imperatives in Latin America in making things like the league and Seattle available and also open access as an imperative in Latin America but also for non-English language materials because a lot of our students are native or heritage Spanish speakers. And so they really like to learn about non-English language forms of knowledge. Conditions of knowledge production. So, you know, these things aren't neutral and we talk about who makes textbooks, you know, who vets textbooks, et cetera, et cetera and how open education really kind of opens this up to different types of authoring and different types of knowledge production. And if you're in California, we're really kind of big on the guided pathways right now. If you're not thinking about, you know, different college majors or professions and what open affords them, you know, it's a very different conversation when you're talking to artists and photographers, et cetera. You know, you're not going to tell them all your work is going to be open. You know, they have a profession and they have to make money and it's silly but, you know, we can encourage those students to say, hey, you know, what if we had or what if we encourage photography professors to have students do assignments where we can build repositories for the work that, you know, they're doing at Butte or ASCCCC, ASCCC, you know, to build, you know, diverse like collections of photographs represented in textbooks. You know, teaching students about unsplash or Flickr or however you want. So I think a lot about like, like what open looks like for different student paths that students are taking. And I emphasize the academic labor and the scholarly communications crisis, you know, what the conditions that libraries are under to make textbooks or books, et cetera available and how much publishers are really kind of squeezing all the money they can out of us. And so my first example of an assignment I do with my students but I also do as a librarian for other professors, I go to their classrooms and we have this conversation is one in which we problematize the relationship of textbooks to faculty and colleges. So I just call it if I was a professor or if I were a professor. And so in syllabus review day in my class or at the beginning of a semester, you know, we talk about, hey, we have an open textbook. What does that mean? And then students are, you know, of course, overwhelmingly a big fan of free textbooks. But we kind of start building in different situations, a series of choices. And so first it's like, okay, if you're a professor you have to choose between two things. So first your students have to pay $0 for a textbook or $200. And of course, you know, if you give those two options students are gonna say, well, I want my students to pay $0. And then the next situation gets, it just gets progressively harder. So students pay either $0 for an okay textbook or $5 for a way better textbook. So even at this point, students are like, well, you know, I really want them to learn and $5 isn't that much. So maybe, and this is where we kind of start splitting splitting off in different sides. And then just having these different scenarios. So students pay $0 for a textbook, but you need to spend 100 hours developing your course or your students pay $200. And then the publisher gives you everything you need to kind of facilitate this course. And then we can, and then oftentimes even go into like this scenario, but also, you know, I have, you know, a children under the age of five, I have these like conflicting life things, et cetera, et cetera. And so students really get to understand the labor that faculty are under. And we also talk a lot about contingent labor as well. So they understand the realities of what professorships look like at the community colleges or at the university level. And yeah, so they think about the bigger picture. So example two, we talk a lot about student authority. So students are centered as creators. We talk about authors' rights, intellectual property. And this is done again in my class as library science 101 or in a library orientation for another course. I always refer to students as authors or creators when they talk about the work they submit. And I ask them to think about how they want their works out in the world. So if they are to publish the stuff, how do you want to be represented? What is your, you know, I don't really like the word brand, but essentially what is your brand? And so two examples I have in links here. So we have a keyworded description assignment in Flickr and then a final course scene assignment. This is early on in the semester, students take pictures of things that are useful in the library that they wanna share, that they want on the internet. So students can, you know, if someone was Googling ELAC library study room, they could find this on the internet. So they take a picture, they develop a title, they develop a description. This is the description. It has to have a link. And then the students here decided to put their full names. They also have tags down here below. Honestly, these aren't tags I would use as a librarian, but you know what? This picture got like over a thousand views, which is actually way better than other pictures in the series. So, you know, kind of to Rachel's point, like I don't know everything. Like they're probably better at social media and stuff like that than I am. So maybe those are the right keywords. Anyways, so they're thinking about their authorship. And then at the end of the course, they do a zine assignment. And this is the title. It's just a zine about information literacy. And then there's 22 students in the class and there's two, four, six, eight, 10, 12, 14, 16. Out of the 22 students have opted to put their name on here, but they knew that they could put a variation of their names. Their first lit name and last initial, they could put a pseudonym. They really thought about how they wanted to be represented in this book. No students took me up on not completing the assignment at all. So that was kind of fun. And I think it looks pretty nice. So that's example number two. I also think a lot about self-preservation in an online environment. So how do you keep your students safe? Again, you know, I'm coming from a place where I've been attacked online. And so I like to teach students about privacy. You know, when you use your real names and what it is associated with, identifiable information. You know, if you're taking a picture, is your address on, you know, if it's outside your house, can you see the numbers on your house or your apartment? You know, is your name bad showing in a picture, et cetera, et cetera? Like all these little things, you know, like let's be really, really careful. And metadata, the metadata that's inscribed in say a photograph or in a Word document. Just telling students to be a little bit more careful with these technologies. And students ought to be able to assess what level of open works for them. You know, CC buy for people is fine, but you know, students might not want to do that right now. And that's a decision that should be made up for them. So anyways, I wanna talk a little bit about future work looking forward. So my concerns in open pedagogy, the appropriation of content. So, you know, it's not unknown that BIPOC folks have had their works kind of co-opted or appropriated, or we've been talking about the politics of citation, you know, who is cited and who isn't. So I would, you know, when I talk to students about putting your works out openly, you know, people may see your work and they may not cite you. And that happens, you know, I, even with this whole concept of informed open pedagogy, I've tried to talk with other people who do open pedagogy and they don't want to like associate our ideas with each other. And I'm like, I think they align, I would cite you, but people don't wanna say me and that's fine. So we talk about that. I talk to this with students very, very openly. Bullying trolls and doxing. So, you know, if you're talking especially about like anti-racism or decolonization, those are words that internet trolls literally look for. When I was attacked, the word microaggression was on their radar. They were doing this kind of like, they were attacking the American Library Association. They were attacking anybody that had the word like librarian and microaggression associated with their names. And then I had my information, public information looked up. So a reporter went through my emails, my public emails. So I teach students about like public email versus personal email, you know, what you put on the written record is very, very important. And honestly, I never thought it would be important enough to have my emails, you know, looked up by a reporter, but here I am. I don't think all or nothing open is a helpful framework and it re-inscribes the oppression that seeks to dismantle. And I think they're, like I've said, there are a lot of affordances to working closed. The rules of participation in open work vary. Again, it's really, really important to recognize privilege. So, you know, again, I'm talking about my students who are, you know, about half of them are low income. You know, when you tell them, if you're able to make a textbook and you could make X amount of dollars versus zero amount of dollars, because at ELEC right now, we don't currently have, you know, stipends for doing open work, for authoring open textbooks, that is something that I wouldn't fault them for. I would not fault them for wanting to take on a publisher textbook to make some money. It is a real kind of affordance to be able to say I can work open. All right, I think that's all I have. Yeah, I cut out some slides because I was worried on time and I'm a worrier. So I'm happy to take questions or look through what's come through in the chat so far. Thank you, Cynthia. That was fantastic. And you were great on your time and some really important messages there for us. In the chat, just running through that, we'll sort of go up to the very beginning. Luna is always interested to hear about your work and if this comes from you and Elliot, that's a very helpful point to think about, Cynthia, to thank you. That is the benefits of the disposable assignment in certain contexts. So do you want to talk about that just a little bit more because that had me curious as well and maybe some other people in the room. So yeah, so right now I'm a PhD student also at UCLA and I'll tell you in spring or during this entire pandemic, I've written papers and as a PhD student, a paper isn't a disposable assignment necessarily. I could turn it into a publication, but I have turned an utter crap and I'm just literally putting ideas out there. The ideas aren't bad, but this work deserves to never see the light of day, but it was a good assignment for me to get ideas out there, even though I don't have any intentions of making a publication. I think students do the same things as undergraduates too. I'm using this paper to get some ideas out there. I don't want anyone to see it, but I want you to see it. I want my instructor to see it and I want you to give me some feedback or sometimes they don't even want feedback, they just want the grade. I'll be honest. Yeah, well, I would agree. I think I like that idea that as the creator, you're choosing, right? Just like you would choose your format as a creator, you know, how you're going to be presenting your ideas as well, but also choosing when and where and why you would want to share it and also like even degrees of sharing, like sharing it within your class, obviously is going to be different than sharing it, you know, more broadly. So that those nuances, I agree. I think sometimes there's a lot of binaries, black and white, you know, either you're open or you're closed. And to me, I think you're right. It's very much this continuum and being thoughtful around that. Liz was just adding that last year, Cynthia participated in OEG Voices, that's OE Global's podcast in an episode hosted by Una Daily. And there's the link to the podcast there. And also the link to your text is in the chat box. And some of that will also be going into OEG Connect. And Kim loved your scenarios. And James felt that number two, especially shows so much respect for students and a real. So I totally agree. And deep due to social media and the environment, students do not realize the danger of sharing personal life and disinformation. It's good that you teach them. Yeah. And from some really important examples, I think it's not. It's the type of when they know that you've experienced that, they probably listen and pay attention differently than just a generic, you know, be careful with social media kind of messaging or that kind of conversation. Did you want to have any comment about the student reception about when you talk about disinformation, social media privacy? Yeah, I think students understand that that happens. You know, you see people get taken down on social media all the time. Usually it's like in, I mean, in ways that maybe as perceived as good, you know, somebody who is saying that they have a fake covid vaccine card, for example, getting called out and then getting fired by their employer that's like, oh, yeah, they should get fired. But it's like, you know, that kind of attack. I mean, I don't actually mind that kind of attack, I'll be honest. You know, it goes both ways. You know, people can perceive you as being, you know, I don't know, antithetical to their world views and therefore try to do a similar thing. And so that is a real danger with with the environment that we operate in. And and students go, OK, yeah, I've seen it, but I didn't think it could happen to me now that I know someone personally that this affects this is affected. It makes me think twice about it. And it is it's not like I'm not being stodgy and saying don't use social media. So I think they appreciate that. I'm like, social media is actually really, really powerful, but it is also incredibly dangerous in the wrong like in the wrong, you know, interactions with folks. Mm hmm, most definitely. Yeah, and a good message to be, you know, just talking with them about it and having them understand that there's consequences and that you've experienced those. James also points out that when we're talking with our students about assignments, it should the point shouldn't always be about open, but maybe more the concept of agency. And also Cronin, Marina, adding that Cronin in 2017 suggests we need to consider open, open readiness when considering open pedagogy as well. So I would agree. I love that title of the informed open pedagogy, pedagogy, right? So being thoughtful in that. Do you have a closing remark? Because we have a little bit of time, maybe two or three minutes. Sure. James, that's a question about elaborating on why CCBuy may be undesirable or not recommended. I have nothing against CCBuy. It seems like some of the open or nothing folks will say everything CCBuy or nothing. And mostly my criticism is just saying that everything has to be CCBuy and thinking that the other creative commons or non-creative commons licenses are any lesser than CCBuy. I think, you know, people have their reasons for using any of the licenses that are available, and that's why they exist. So mostly I just want students to know what's available and make those decisions for themselves, you know, there's instances when I don't want to work CCBuy and I tell them that as well. So it's just like these are my reasonings for doing what I do in different contexts and then you make your decision. Great. OK. Oh, and by the way, I was going to tell you I love your T-shirt. I recognize that logo. Yes, back in the day when we could meet face to face in California. And Jim Luke says, amen, all the licenses of value. And indeed, some of the other licenses actually promote the commons better. Yeah. So the concept of the commons and it's nuanced. It's not all or nothing. So thank you so much, Cynthia. And I think we're ready to move on to our final presenter here. So Mapping Desire Lines into the OER classroom by Josie Millican. You're muted, Josie. Thank you, everyone, for sticking around for this final session in a series of incredible sessions by others. And so interested in talking more about each presentation, but I'll forge ahead with my own a little bit about me. I'm the Acting Dean of Distance Education at Pima Community College. I'm also a yoga and wellness instructor. Focus areas include open pedagogy, OER, instructional design, agile, social justice, equity, inclusion, wellness, embodiments and collective liberation. So our path today or our desire line, if you will, is to discuss first, what are our desire lines? Second, how do desire lines relate to open education? What are some practical applications of desire line thinking? So regarding what our desire lines, they're also called desire paths. They're also called herd paths, lots of different names. They've long been used in urban planning, architecture, landscape design and other fields to plan and develop designs and structures that align with human behavior. So here are a couple of images that I've taken of desire lines in Tucson, Arizona, where I live, the traditional home of the Oro-Orum and Pascaiaki tribes. And so you can see here how they actually play out in terms of the land. You have this structure, these sidewalks that are meant to serve as pathways for people to take. But then you see how natural human behavior chooses an alternative path or at least a substantial amount. Here are some other ones that I've taken closer to my home. This was the actual University of Arizona back there in the background. And then we have here a couple of I intentionally left the litter of the litter in. I thought that's not very pretty, all that litter, but it also speaks to this whole concept of behavior. And then again, that student housing in the background. So it's a very interesting dynamic to see that those lines of natural human behavior, contrasting with all of these structures that are meant to enforce the this understanding of how people think and behave and navigate in the world. So that brings up the discussion of how do desire lines relate to open education? And what I love about desire lines is this is a concept that I learned about as an undergraduate in. Years ago in a sociology class, and there are a couple of concepts that really stuck with me. And one is desire lines and how they serve as paths that indicate desire of human behavior. Here's a quote from Jane Jacobs, environmental activist. And this is an article from the 1950s arguing in favor of desire paths and how they should be considered with urban planning and building design and infrastructure. The quote is there is no logic that can be superimposed on the city. People make it and it is to them, not buildings that we must fit our plans. So it's a quote that emphasizes Jane Jacobs' view and the view of many others that the people the people must be considered first prior to the construction of these spaces that predicate how people interact and behave. It's not everyone, of course, agrees with this and we don't see a lot. There is one university that has that was constructed, at least the pathways and the sidewalks. The administration argued that successfully argued that the sidewalks and walkways and all of that that they wait to actually construct those until they saw the paths of students and natural human behavior on the campus. And then they subsequently then determined where those pathways would best facilitate people's needs. So in terms of why thinking, in terms of desire lines, the emphasis is placed on students. The instruction is based on students' learning preferences, which we know that can span several different countless different dynamics. The premise is based on what students show us they need rather than what we think they need. And to me, this one is the huge item that I would highlight and underscore as the most significant here is so often curriculum instruction planning is based on what is thought that the students need rather than what we actually have evidence for rather than what behavior shows us. And it's not always what they tell us because they have because those what they tell us and express to us comes within the confines of environments that are not always conducive to honest and open conversations. Also, the language brings us out of the technology and into our minds and bodies. And Oruj and Elliot brought up embodiment earlier. And that is a huge part of this because when we are navigating in technology so much, there's a tendency to become disembodied and to separate from bodies and to disconnect from our awareness of others and others' humanity. Also, DesireLines illustrates the offering of multiple methods of assessment, communication, representation, presentation, and expression to honor diversity in student populations and multiple paths to success. Many of you, not all of you, I'm sure are familiar with UDL. So DesireLine thinking, this is my argument of what I would classify as a term that I've called DesireLine thinking, would consist of listening and observing, giving students voice and agency, involving students in learning, engaging students as co-creators in the learning, which we know is a very concept very embedded within open pedagogy, and working to eliminate bias and preconceived ideas from course design and teaching. And this last one is so significant because these confines that we're working with and often, if not always, represent the archaic and hierarchical structures from decades and decades, if not centuries prior, but have not been deconstructed to a point that they can be reconfigured in ways that don't continue to have traces of those archaic systems. So DesireLine's an open education, Boster's equity and inclusion, where students are offered options and or create their options based on their learning needs. Flexible instructional design, observing and adapting to student behavior and needs, and then again that de-centered learning and student agency, where students are co-creators in the learning experience. Here's a little bit on DesireLine thinking and instructional design, where it comes from observing student learning and behavior, identifying frameworks that support that learning behavior in connection with outcomes, and then implementing student focused design thinking into instructional design. So here's an example of that. And this is an actual example that it happens all the time. And it happened, I actually discussed this same exact thing a week ago with a specific student about a course that the student had complaints about. And the student expressed that the video, the video lecture in that course was archaic and it was recorded in a very low resolution. It wasn't engaging. And he said that the reality is that all of the students in this class are going out to this YouTube site and this YouTube site. And so that indicates that, well look, this is understandable that students are searching online to get the information they need. We all do that. And so why not consider that when we are putting together our courses, not giving them links, but giving them the openness to go explore and find the answers and then bring them back. And then so this item here just represents that approach. Here's another example. This is a biology class we offer at Pima Community College designed by a department head by the name of Robert Wakefield. And it's constructed in a way where it's very recursive and all students centered. So students go out, they're posed with all of these different concepts and they're asked to go out and find their own information about, they choose their topics and they teach each other. And that's what they build from to create their final projects. Another way that this manifests is with student success and course planning where we observe students as modality choices, design course schedules to align with students as modality choices and continue observing and learning from student behavior. So an example of this at Pima Community College and perhaps this reflects another example that you all are familiar with is that within this pandemic, we've come much closer to a lot of different equity issues that impact online learning. We've always known of them and how, and looking at success rates and at Pima Community College, we see clear evidence that success rates for marginalized communities or underrepresented or underserved members of our college community, those are lower than those from other demographics. And so in terms of looking at that student success, there has often what comes from that is a sense of view that, well, these students need to take face-to-face classes because those success rates are higher. And the concern with that, well, that's not their need. That's not their desire. These students, if they can't take these online classes, which they need to fit in to be able to make space for in their lives with all of the complexities that they are often faced with in their lives, then they would quite easily gravitate towards another educational institution. And so that's been a little bit of a dynamic where how do we, well, then what do we do? And so then at this point, one of the answers is, one of the responses is to offer success coaching, offer tutoring, offering all these different things. And my view on that is those measures do evidence and increase in student success. But what's not often talked about is the increased amount of labor required on those students to successfully complete a course. And so there's a need to, well, what's the structure and what are the desire lines of these students and how can we reconfigure this structure in a way that's much more amenable or that recognizes the unique differences, the unique warning in some kind of flexible way. And I'll get to that a little bit later in more detail to help these students divide these students towards success without requiring all these different external measures. So this is an example of that and of how to address all of these issues in a different way. We have documented concerns with our online math courses, which have a much lower success rate overall than many of our other courses. And so what we're doing is forming a study group to analyze Math 101 master and LMS data to get a view of demographics and student pinpoints. And then from there, redeveloping Math 101 master based on study group findings and recommendations and also developing additional student support mechanisms. So here we get to the challenge of the LMS. And this is a puzzle that I'm constantly struggling with. I have also been an instructional designer and in that work, I've actually been designing courses for about 20 years. And when I first started, there wasn't even LMSs. There was just Dreamweaver and websites and discussion boards. And in a way that was great because there's a lot of flexibility and freedom in that. And with the construction of LMSs, there are more constraints, these learning management systems like Bright Space D2L and Canvas and Blackboard and all of the others. And a Moodles one too. And often what we see is that they are constructed in a way that simply reflects and represents these hierarchical and archaic methods that have emerged, that have lingered in that instructional design atmosphere for over time. And even the term learning management system. I mean, faculty are not considered learning managers and so neither are instructional designers. I think that term itself is even kind of cold and very rigid and illustrates the problematics of what we're expecting in terms of how these spaces can foster equity, inclusion, a diversity of learning styles and all of those different pieces. And so I love this quote from Laura Nichols, which is from a scholarly essay that's in the theory of society and that quote is urban planners and landscape architects respond in different ways when such paths appear on planned landscapes. Some believe that desire paths are useful in guiding the redesign of such spaces. Others think such paths are problematic and should be discouraged with the use of barriers and other means to impede their development and further use. And I would side with the idea that desire paths are useful in guiding the redesign of such spaces. I would love to see more conversations and dialogue on how, what are the problematics in terms of equity in these learning management systems? How are students actually using them? What data can we see that shows their paths, that shows the pain points of where certain, of some of our demographics in terms of where they drop off and what can we learn? And if you think of LMSs for the most part, they're very point-based systems that emphasize that focus on points. And they're also very rigid and linear in ways that facilitate the individualistic learner, but not the collective learner, which the United States is a very individualistic culture. That sense of an individual can pursue and find their success on their own. But the reality is that many of at Pima Community College are underserved and minority and underrepresented students are from these more collective cultures, which many of these learning management systems do not easily facilitate. And so finally, my final thought is that engaging desire line thinking with open pedagogy has theoretic potential for shifting perceptions of learning structures, instructional design, curriculum and teaching practices towards learner behavior and needs. And so that's everything that I, and I would love though to hear your ideas about what are some ways you can involve this kind of thinking in institutional planning, curriculum, development and course redesign. And I'll end finally with this last quote from Ellie Violet Bromlem, which is that, when cities lack the paths pedestrians need, people vote with their feet. And so it's essential that we look at how people are voting with their behaviors to determine how we can construct these, our methods of learning to best fulfill students' needs. Thank you, Josie. It's a very provocative presentation to end our webinar today, that idea of the desire lines. And as you were presenting, I started thinking of different university campuses that I have walked on and just how you inevitably would find shortcuts, there were always shortcuts, right? And so, you know, those desire lines of wanting to get somewhere faster and more expediently or in a way that obviously wasn't sort of like the train track of Moodle or some of the LMS, right? Guiding you in a certain kind of way and therefore shaping your behavior, shaping your choices and not necessarily reflecting some of the things that students want. So in the chat, we have a few minutes yet to talk and just take up your idea here. And Mandeep shares that desire lines originate because many think the same way. One person cannot create those lines. Yeah. If everyone thought differently, we would see a random network of pathways. So it's true. Usually you have one person taking a shortcut and then pretty soon it gets pounded down. So that's that concept of it's not just one, it's many people sort of taking that route. Kim adds, I love this analogy, desire line thinking, really cool connection between human behavior and philosophy behind open education. And Beth adds also encourages risk taking. What will happen if you take this path and so to step away from autopilot perhaps. Do you want to have any comment there, Josie? Yeah, I think risk taking is a good thing. And it's, it's one of the agile, which is a, you're not familiar with agile. It's a project management. It's a project management style. And it's the ideas that take a risk fail, fail fast, fail often. And, and we don't encourage that enough. We really put a high, and a lot of this is cultural. We put a high price on failure. And so that idea of, and we, and it's emphasized in our very points based system, rather than labor-based is that if you, that the consequences of failure are extreme. So, so yes, I also love the way that it, that it does in that idea that it does encourage risk taking and that acknowledgement that there isn't just one way. And along with that, it's that connection with the land. Knowledge has the potential to disembodied us. To, it's wonderful because of the opportunities that it offers, but it's, it, we see, we've seen an increase in polarization and all of these different pieces, which in a way come from being disconnected from, from embodied experience and interactions and recognizing what it means to, to be a human. Be connected. That's right. Yeah, lots of, lots of possible connections there to that whole understanding of human behavior, human choices, rather than narrow, narrow constricting choices. And so, as Josie says, Josie, I enjoyed your argument for desire lines in open. First time hearing about these. I feel like there needs to be a balance of students and we do not know what we do not know. Part of the function of education is to expand our meaning horizons to not follow in the past. We are predisposed or used to, but to take the untreaded path with, which a guide teachers can show. So that balance perhaps between sometimes having a path is actually what you need, right? Like, you know, it's not always necessarily a bad path, but I think it's about maybe having that agency and choosing that. Again, she really enjoyed your presentation and thank you. Luna says, thank you, Josie. I hope you'll share your slides. The quotes you shared were really amazing and love to reuse and dig into the resources. So if you could make sure that you share them on all your social media, I'm on OEG connect. Other people would be interested to see them. I took a few notes as well. So yeah, I'd love to see the resources. And from Beth, oh, how some of us are. Rule followers and afraid to step off the path. Right. And Josie, there's your link to your slides. And thank you. I love the idea of stepping away from the technology and getting into the minds of student students. What are they going through thinking and what do they need? I really love the student centered thinking behind your idea. You've given me so much to think about. And that's from Nick and Kim ads. This reminds me about the issue of student cheating. If students are cheating, how can we involve them in altering the past to learning? Do you want to comment on that? Juicy one. I'd love to. And that's a really good question. And it really boils down to what kind of cheating are we, are we discussing if it's, if it's plagiarism, then there's the question of what would, what would. Explain that desire line that ended up with that plagiarism route. And there, it could be many different things. It could be a lack of an, which is the one as a. Also, I'm, I've. Thought writing for most of my career and. Off the majority of the time, what we consider cheating right off the bat is actually lack of understanding of how to paraphrase. And so a lot of this comes from trusting students more. There is a lot of studies that show that students are not. Inclined to cheat anymore now with the additional resources they have. That were 40, 50 years ago. And then that gets into the discussion of proctored exams. And, and this just real like. Years concern about. Preventing students from cheating so much that we put them, we require them to be. Filmed. And so the every movement is, I mean, imagine how that impacts the anxiety. I get so anxious when just, I, I'm also a learner. I'm always learning and taking courses. And I get extremely anxious when there is no proctoring. And, and so I think what it, what it really comes down to is trusting students more, but the students are, are there for the, let them show you that they're not. And often we interpret cheating as showing that they're not, but there's a lot. Of the more. Hidden beneath in, in the roots of that pathway, if you will, that we need to investigate and look at. Yeah, I would agree. It's a sticky one, there's lots there. Vina said you mentioned the labor needed for students to follow their desire lines. Did I understand that correctly? And if so, could you expand on the, that idea a bit. Often we see that it kind of relates to remediation like if the student isn't finding success within the structures that are going to be provided and have been provided, then what are the remediation services we can provide, tutoring or success coaching or independent skill building, all of these different things and that we don't talk about how much additional labor that requires for the student and so it's worth revisiting that question of what are the competencies that the student needs to gain to be able to exit this course and have the understanding and skills that they need and then what are requiring of them to get there and we're holding them back and how can we better facilitate those paths to learning without requiring this need to find to expend labor outside of the course and this gets to Uruja's note below about points-based versus labor-based measures which we've seen a greater push towards is like contract grading and other alternative methods of grading that look at the labor involved and recognize that in a different way in the context of points. Right, yes. Thanks for getting to that comment from Uruja. Yes, there's lots of changes that we have to consider and be open to and the point of the desire lines is observing the behavior and what does the behavior tell us and sometimes behavior of course doesn't always align with words. Students will sometimes say things, especially to authority that they think is perhaps what authority wants us to say. So they're in that conflict but yet the behavior is very indicative of what is really going on. So conceptually I just love that idea of the desire lines and looking for the behaviors guiding us and helping us to think again about some of our choices and how we are proceeding. So a great session. Thank you, Josie. A lovely way to exit out. I think we're just over like one or two minutes over time according to my watch. So not too bad. I wish everyone a lovely evening wherever you happen to be or maybe even late into the night or not quite into the next morning. I don't think but nice to have everyone here. And yes, it was enjoyable to be here. I've actually really enjoyed just talking and helping people move through the presentation. So I encourage conversations to continue in OEG Connect. That's a great, not just during the time of our conference but throughout the year. And it's really important that we keep working on that community, building out and learning from each other. So lovely to see you all and hopefully one day we'll meet up maybe face to face. So bye for now.