 Hey everyone, welcome to the next Domain's 21 presentation. My name is Lauren Hanks, and I'm joined here today by Ed Beck, who is an instructional designer at SUNY Onianta's Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center. And I'm also joined with Chilton Reynolds, coordinator of Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center at SUNY Onianta. Today, they will be talking about the Global Commons Project and the Pandemic Diaries Projects, both open pedagogy projects during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is obviously a fun topic. So without further ado, take it away, guys. Yeah, thanks, Lauren. We're going to talk about these two projects together because they have a lot that they have in common and then a little bit that they're different. The SUNY Global Commons was built as an open pedagogy project from the very beginning. The students were invited to put an open license on everything they created. It was project-based learning. It was us trying to give an international experience during a time period when we just couldn't send students overseas. The Pandemic Diaries Project is a little bit different. It isn't technically open pedagogy because it's not with an open license, but it is public. It was built as an open access project right from its very beginning, a digital humanities project where we invited students to write their diary entries as they built a community project where we said, let's keep track of what's going on during this pandemic. Let's take these diary entries. It's really following a tradition that we call mass observation. And it was built from the very beginning as a co-curricular project. It came from that history department, but at the same time, it wasn't tied to any one class. Several classes did participate in it. And then what ties these all together is we put that public display together in our domain of one zone. So the first one we're going to talk about is the Pandemic Diaries Project. It's the one that happened first. It's the one that I was more involved in. I love this project. It really started from our history department. The history department had some people in there who were aware of the mass observations that happened in the UK during World War II, during the Depression. And they got excited about it. And they said they went to our library and said, hey, what if we created this archive that we could build during this time and then open up? And the library and the history department collaborated. They had this idea, hey, let's build this archive. Let's collect physical diaries, physical journals. And then we can open it up in 10 years and say, here is our collection, the special collection that we made during the pandemic. At that time, the interim director of the library was also the interim director of the TLTC and brought us into the equation and said, hey, if we want to do a little of this digital, do you think could help with that? Do you think you'd have an ideas of how to do that? And so we got involved. We got really excited and we ended up building the project kind of as it's seen today. We started it and made it more of a digital first project where we collected our diary entries through WordPress and we displayed them right away. So it was kind of a diary of the moment always showing who's posted recently, what are people thinking? What are people talking about? And then what was really exciting is once I started bragging about it, we started presenting about it in SUNY, SUNY Press came to us and said, hey, what if we built this as an open access book? In addition to everything you're doing with the website right now, what if we built it from our academic presses perspective and we reprinted all of those diary entries and then also let's add some chapters in there and framing what is mass observation? What is this digital humanities project? How would you do it differently if you did it again? What does it mean to have a digital first project like this during this time? And so that's gonna be a book that's gonna be coming out hopefully in 2022 about this project and reprinting everything that we created it. Those are fun emails to send saying, hey, we wanna make you a published author. So Lauren, you were one of the people who I was excited to talk to about this because I felt like we were getting somewhere in this and we were making something really cool and I was starting to get the idea that it was gonna be reusable. And I remember I went back to the post that you made on your blog and I saw Jim's comment. Oh man, he made up splot and at first that hurt so bad because it was like, man, you're right. I spent 10 hours to recreate something that already existed. He remade a splot, but then I started to think about it. Like, yeah, you know what? I did remake a splot. I did add a series of plugins to this WordPress site that made it super simple for people to jump in and make and create and I lowered the barriers everywhere I could so that anybody could just come in and contribute to this project. You didn't have to sign up for a username, didn't have to sign up for a password, didn't have to know how WordPress really worked, didn't know how to navigate to the add a new post page. So I wanna share that, I wanna share what I did and what the user workflow looked like in this pandemic diaries project because I think making it easy to do is why it was so successful. We have over 250 diary entries that were shared by our SUNY Oniana community as they went through the time and not just text, it became a fully multimedia project. So here's my homepage on the pandemic diaries and the thing I hope jumps out to people are the two buttons there. Contribute and write a post. If you're from SUNY Oniana, if you're part of our domain and you click on that contribute button, it brings them right to the SUNY Oniana single sign-on. We wanted to make it so easy to flow right into this. If they do use the single sign-on, it automatically creates an account for them on our site the very first time. And when you sign in, it doesn't dump you back at the front page. It goes right to the add a post page. So you're right there in the text editor. We're using the new Gutenberg editor for this. So just clicking that contribute button, they sign in and here they are ready to post and share what they're feeling right now. We wanted it to be as easily as easy as putting up a post on Facebook or a post on Twitter to share into this community repository. As soon as they're done with that, they get tagged with an email from me right when they press submit. It lets them know, yes, we got your submission. It's in the queue. It needs to be reviewed before we put it out to the public but you're pretty there. We let people pick their own personas so you can see like I left directions right in that email like, hey, while you're waiting to go public, if you wanna pick up a pseudo name, a fake name, however you wanna present on this blog cause we were aware that people might wanna share some feelings they might not wanna put their name to. We gave them that option there and that was one of those emails. And then when the administrators, the editors of this site got that same email and once we released it to the public, then we gave them, hey, here's the new URL. Come post again. Come back, like and share on Facebook. Spread it to your social circles. And that was the workflow that they got to have going through here. And I just wanna go through like how we built that because what we realized is this was a reusable framework. We could keep doing this and do more of it. So once I did it a second time, I switched to using the one login SAML SSO. This was an SSO plugin that I could understand. There's a user interface where it can create the metadata that you need to switch with your IT security team to connect to the SSO. It wasn't some of the more complicated ones. You really had to understand what you were doing to be able to make it work. Believe me, I don't understand what I'm doing. I was able to make one login SAML SSO work. So that was really nice. One of the things that we were doing is we were using the default roles of WordPress to help us out. And so when your username got created through the one login, we gave everybody the contributor role. And in the contributor role, you can make a post but it does have to be approved by an editor or an admin and they have very, very low permissions. Like you can't even upload a file if you have that contributor role. And so what I did is I used this plugin called PublishPress to add features or add capabilities back into that contributor role that aren't in there by default. I want my contributors to be able to upload an image. I want my contributors to be able to upload files. A normal contributor couldn't do it. So using this PublishPress, I gave them extra abilities and God, I'm so glad I did because if I hadn't done that, this would never have become a multimedia project the way it did. I'll be sharing examples that I love in the chat, but a lot of my favorite examples of the photo essays are the artwork, are the videos that students made for it because the students got so creative with it. And then the customized WordPress emails lets us keep going at this and gives us those touch points with the users. I put a couple of extra plugins there that we also did that were pretty important to us just from a logistic standpoint. These first three are the ones that made this idea work. These next two are just things that were convenient. The emails came from a real SUNY-ONI email address instead of from the WordPress default address. Having the user switching plugin, just like we have on our own domains dashboard lets us troubleshoot issues and login as any user. That was really important to us, but not quite as important as those first three. So I'll pop these links in the chat. You can see we had poems, we had texts, we had photo essays showing our empty campus. One of my favorite posts for this thing, this student went around and took photographs of all their friends from the outside of their house. They called it from the outside looking in and they both took the photographs and interviewed them and really chronicled this time. So creative. I just feel so wonderful that I was able to help them in such a small way of setting up the platform so they could unleash the creativity that our students and faculty really have. So at the same time that Ed was working on this, I was working with a group at the SUNY level. So SUNY is a group of 64 campuses across New York and I was working with what's called the SUNY Coil Center where we had realized that students were not gonna be able to do their study abroad over the past summer. And so we were thinking about a way to do a virtual study abroad for them instead. And so they came up with this idea of the global commons. The global commons came out of the SUNY Coil Center and went to give them the credit on that. They are really the people that did this all the way through and they were very committed to making this a very open education process. So all of the content that was created out of this, all of the projects that were created are licensed openly. And we actually did present on this at the Open Education Conference last year and we'll share the link to that if you're interested in more of the information about what the thinking with the open education portion of it. But today I wanna really focus on the end results, the showcase space and how we created that. So that course really became a six weeks course that happened last summer. There were two different courses the students went through at the same time. One was on storytelling for global sustainability. And the second one was really learning about one of the specific United Nations sustainable development goals. We chose six because we had expertise in our campuses to be able to create that content and really focused on those as that process. So out of that, the students actually spent six weeks. They started focusing on the storytelling. They expanded out into international perspectives. They actually met with a partner institution and then they created a project for those partners, international partners that they could use if they're NGO. And what we realized was as they went through this process they were interacting with these international partners. They were creating some really great content and we realized that the content they were creating which we asked them to openly license, we wanted a place to be able to showcase that information. So at that point, I went to Ed and said, hey, I know about this project you're doing with the digital, excuse me, the pandemic diaries. And it sounds like that's a very similar process to what we wanna be able to do for this as well. Do you think we could take that same concept, the same platform to be able to do this? So we did, we created a new site inside of that specifically to showcase the projects that the students were doing with these international partners that they had been working with. Out of that came the global common showcase. And if you notice, this will look very similar in certain ways, we had a big share button. This is where students could go when they were done with their projects, both up in the top right hand corner but down in the middle where it said, share your project. The students could then go to that and click on it and be able to go to the space where they could share their projects they had created with their partners. The big difference here was when Ed worked on it, it was specifically on our campus so it was only connecting to our single sign-on. For this one, we had to make it connect to all 64 SUNY campuses. So we had to work at a different level to get that in but it allowed anybody from any of the SUNY campuses to go on, log in. And then once they did, it did the same process. It immediately took them into the place where they could start creating their posts. We had the students be able to do that on their own based off of the content that they had done. But then we had that be sent to us as the moderators to be able to make sure that it was formatted correctly and everything else that we wanted to. At the same time, just like as Ed explained earlier, the emails went out to the students to be able to say, hey, here is where this information is. Here's where information and how you can get back into edit, information on the act that's been posted on that. What we found was that students often were posting just their PowerPoint presentation into here. So the next time we do this, we're gonna work on a little bit better documentation to say, hey, we'd like this to be formatted in HTML so students can see it better. So that was one reason we appreciate it to be able to kind of vet these before they went live. But also we wanted to be able to put everything that was in one sustainable development goal into one place. So we made sure that it was tagged correctly so that everything that was in the sustainable development goal three, which is on good health, could all come up together so they could be seen and then be able to go into each one of those to look at them individually. So we really were happy that the end result of this was that we have one place where all the students and faculty and everybody else that's interested in this can now go to see all of these great projects. So just like Ed, I'll be sharing some of the links in the background later on, such as this one which is a really neat presentation of the Breckenhurst Forest and just the story behind it. So that's where we were happy with it that we had this space to have the students be able to get in and do what they wanted to with it, be able to work on their posts on their own and be able to curate that how we wanted to. The one other thing that we realized in ours that we need that's a little bit different than is the students in our project were coming into it again to re-edit things or to continue working on it. So we might wanna work on finding another link lower down for them to get back into their posts without having to click on the button that would take them back into starting a new post instead. Well, thank you guys so much for sharing. It's been awesome to just listen, I've been taking notes just cause I think that there's so much great content here and one of the themes that keeps coming to mind for me is just this idea of showcasing community work and how important that is, you know? And it not only becomes a moment in time, you know, that you can river back to but then it's an archive of work that has been done that other people can see and reference and I find that in my conversations with other domain of one's own schools, that idea of highlighting community work, you know, not only as an example for others, but, you know, just to share the good work that others are doing, you know, that's so important. And so I love that both of these projects are doing that, you know? And not only that, but they're doing it in a way that makes it easy for users to contribute. You know, you don't have to jump through all these hoops and that's I think what changes the game for these sorts of things. Like you were saying, Ed, you know, just setting it up with single sign on and then it reverts to a post page and it's dead simple to use. Like that I think is what makes this so successful. So thank you both so much. Sorry, I didn't wanna cut you off there, Ed. Were you gonna say something? Well, to us, it's also a value statement. You know, it's so awesome when you can work on a project that you really believe in and we really believe in authentic assessment. And we really believe in asking students to create something that's not just valuable for their own learning, but might be valuable to somebody else later on. And if that's what we believe as a center, how can we support that? And this is an example of that. And, you know, one of those projects is openly licensed and we believe in that as a center. On my campus, the Teaching Learning Technology Center is the home of our OER initiative. And that's important to us. Teaching students how to build, even if it's just building one page or one post, but build using WordPress, that's important to us because we're teaching technical companies they can use later. So as much as this presentation is about, look at what we were able to unleash by getting out of the way of the students, it is also part of where we see our center on our campus and what we believe in. Certainly, that's awesome. Well, we're about out of time here, but I just wanted to thank you all so much for the awesome conversation and for honestly, for sharing the work and engaging with your community the way that you are. It's awesome to see. And I'm hoping that a lot of our other domain of ones in schools will use it as they're trying to do the same thing. So without further ado, I think the next domain's presentation is gonna start shortly. So thanks, guys, and we'll see you next time. Thanks. Nom, nom, nom.