 The Liberated Learner Project. What is that? It's a VLS project that's the campus Ontario's Virtual Learning Strategy funding. The proposal was to make a descendant to the Ontario Extend Empowered Educator program because that is for getting educators ready for kind of anything in a digital age. So we thought, hey, maybe the learners could use something like this too. Do you want to tell us a bit about what the modules look like? So if you are familiar with Extend for Educators, there's six modules and they kind of are meant to create a well-rounded, empowered digital age educator. So those modules are being a teacher, obviously, but also a technologist, a curator, a collaborator, an experimenter, and a scholar. And we went a little bit more of a simple approach this time with just four modules, but still I think you could look at yourself, think of yourself as a learner, and look at these four and think, okay, I could use some help here and there. And if I do those things, you know, I'll be much more kind of confident and independent as an online learner. So those four areas are being a learner. So that'll be kind of the fundamental starting point for most people. But then there's also being a collaborator, being a technologist, and being a navigator of all these different institutional pathways to success that students have to navigate. Do you want to talk a little bit about the wicked problems? Yeah, yeah. So a key push in the proposal was, obviously, we should invite learners themselves to be the ones co-designing everywhere. We want to bring learners in, and we're all learners, but learners kind of more in the thick of post-secondary than we are to help co-design everything. So we did hire co-designers at most of the institutions who work with us, and I think the Windsor students were like, you know what, we should really kind of identify what the problems are, what are the wicked, tricky, sticky problems that learners have, and those should be the stories that inform us of what the content should be. So we ran a design sprint where we offered an honorarium to anyone interested in coming and talking to each other about their, you know, talk to each other a bit to just pull these stories out of themselves and then put them into a written form and share them with us. And now those stories are collected in a website and are informing all the content we're putting together and activities we're drawing up to help people with similar problems, similar issues, similar barriers, figure out ways to get around over and under through them. I love the wicked problem because to go back to the beginning when the students told us, yeah, if we could finish these modules step by step, we probably wouldn't need the modules. Yeah. And so to revisit it from their perspective, I think that's a really important component of the co-design to get that input. So that was built into the criteria for the VLS grant, but you've really gone with it all along. So there's been students involved all the way through this project. I started my educational journey after having three children. At some point, I would want to raise and just smash my laptop. The amount of workload given after I overcame this problem years later, I can confidently say that I'm really, truly learning. So the beats to study to is just such a fun part of the project. A few months in where we've been working away on student co-design with students from all the institutions and all the storytellers and the graphic designer. And it was just so awesome. And we kind of thought, let's push it a little farther because these lo-fi hip-hop beats to study to were kind of, you know, out there in the world. And we thought, well, maybe we can have our own. And on a whim, you know, we reached out to John Switzer, who is a coordinator of a couple of independent music programs at Seneca College, who was one of our partner institutions. And to see, you know, maybe would any of the students there be interested in trying to make something like this? And we shared the lo-fi girl radio YouTube channel and asked and there was interest. And they came up with this playlist of beats that are just awesome. I actually ended up using the beats to listen to myself as I put finishing touches on the Liberated Learner project itself. They blew me away with what they came back with. So, you know, right from the very beginning, the intention was to have Ontario Post-Secondary Learners develop this thing for themselves and to have Ontario Post-Secondary Learners also be the ones themselves to create the beats to study to was just like the icing on the icing on the cake is just fantastic and just so excited for the work they brought to the table to was just awesome. So, I mentioned we're digging more deeply into the Liberated Learner project. We're focusing specifically on the learner module. Can you tell us a bit about the module? I can. So, we are talking about the trials and tribulations that face students when they're at university. So, we looked at this through the lens of challenge, right? So, the idea is a student is having some kind of problem, whether it is about getting sort of integrated in their surroundings, whether it's about sort of their overall mental health, the academic, specifically academic trials or the big one, which I think is the absolute most important one, which is motivation. The module is meant to sort of give students some ideas, some thoughts, some things that they can do to be able to pull that together and also integrate with the other modules, whether it's the technology module, the collaborator module or whatever. So, it's also meant to integrate with those as well. It is the one that addresses the student as a human first. It's a sort of piece and I think one of those things that a project like this can really do is show to students the fact that they're not weird or strange or different for that they're, you know, not totally 100% invested in their work as a total normal process. The technologist module has three main components and one sort of mini component and the three main components are all about teaching students how to create digital artifacts. So, we go into video editing, graphic design and audio editing and sort of the point is not to get bogged down in the details, not to create something that, you know, is career oriented, but really just something quick and just delivering the basics so that a student can come in, kind of finish the module and then they can create a really nice flyer or something or, you know, the basics of audio editing. It's born out of this trend we see in pedagogy that's been around about authentic assessments. One of the challenges that arise is that instructors are like, students don't know how to do this. I don't know how to help students do this. Do they have the skills to create a video? Do they have the skills to create a podcast? Is it fair that I expect them to? So, I think create something to kind of fill that space. So, our navigator module is really to help students navigate their educational journey from pre-application to whatever college or university is their choice to post-graduation. So, that entire journey that they experience throughout their post-secondary education. And the theme of the navigator module is feeling lost at sea. So, we're trying to help students navigate their way through finances, technology, access, resources, social interactions, many more different types of experiences that they'll have so that they don't feel lost at sea. It's ultimately our goal is to create a module which you are the captain of your own ship and emphasize that minimum grades are the floors not the ceilings. Yeah, the module basically looks at everything to do with working with other people or searching for other people to work with in your times of need regardless of what those needs are. So, focus on things like working on your positionality because it's really important to know yourself and to know what your stances are on in order to know how to work with other people. And we I also worked on pieces like how to be more open-minded towards others. Like there's an exercise on thinking about the ways you've been stereotyped to try to get you to reflect on the ways you may in turn stereotype other people whether you've deemed them the lazy one in the group and whatnot and to just try to understand that there's usually a lot more context we're not privy to. Also pieces such as mentorship we thought that was a really important one and it came through in some of the stories that some of the students shared with us through that design sprint we did a while back and just the importance of having a mentor in your life and how much that could help alleviate stress and just help with the guidance and and just also the perks of being a mentor and how to be a mentor and so yeah it's nerve-wracking stuff but I think it's really good to have that information out there. A lot of it is common sense but at the same time I think it's really nice to know you're not alone and these are things other people have gone through and are going through and that these concerns you have aren't like a you problem it's just part of the context and the situation you're in I think that really helps with moving things forward and tackling things on. I am Pat Mayer I'm the Dean of Teaching from Nipissing University. Coming out of the project I feel like we've just blown my expectations out of the water like we've done so many great things on so many different levels that I'm just like in awe of what I was a part of. Hi everyone I'm Jenny Heyman I'm Dean of Academic Excellence and Innovation at Cambrian College. I had no idea what I was doing in my first year of post-secondary no idea at all and it's really common and to feel lost and uncertain and really anxious and I feel like this resource is just custom built for students who are feeling like that. Hi everyone Sarah Wendorf Senior Instructional Designer with Cambrian College. How do I feel coming out of it? Definitely that this was one of the coolest projects I've ever worked on. I've never done anything like this with so much student co-creation so for me there was a big learning that happened with that and I'm going to take that now and hopefully use that in the future. My name is Alex Fennis I'm an instructional designer from Seneca College. I think what we created was way more than we had expected in terms of student co-creation the overall aesthetic kind of making sure that all the modules work together and the stuff that we created was I think a lot more than I could have ever thought that maybe we were going to achieve. I think that what really makes this whole project so great is it really is student voices. It really has been the core of the project and I think that's amazing and I just think it's so great for students to learn from other students and just I think so often we think that we're alone or we're the problem and it starts to feel like a you problem and I think in this project really let people know they're not alone these are experiences that so many of us have and these are some ways that other people have navigated it so here are some suggestions for you to navigate it and I'm really hoping that's what people who are looking at other modules within this project feel like okay I'm not alone I'm not the problem other people have these experiences this is how they dealt with it I can try that I can try something new it's just I think good to to relate