 enjoy and we'll fire on and we'll see how it's different. That's a question, so why don't you find it ready to do it? Thanks, everyone, for having me. Really nice to be here and see all of you. Welcome to my TED Talk. I guess it's more of a TED Talk kind of format because we're going so quick. I won't give you my life story, but my name's Shelby Hannah. I am originally from Oklahoma, Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the States, but I moved to Northern Ireland about 13 years ago, so that's why I talk like this. So I apologize in advance to everyone in the room. I work as a digital learning officer in faculty of engineering and physical sciences at the Queen's University in Belfast. I have worked there for about the last five years. So what I want to tell you about today on the menu today is, first of all, what the metaverse is and isn't, because there's always a bit of confusion anytime I talk about it, some conflation. And I'm going to find exactly what I mean when I'm talking about the metaverse here. Some early explorations we've done in Queen's University Belfast. So this is all very nascent, it's all very new, but I'm going to tell you what we've done and what we've learned from what we've done so far. The context of good, so what is good in terms of online learning and how does the metaverse feed into that? Practical advice, so if anyone's wanting to go away and try this on your own, I have some very solid evidence pieces of advice for you. The question of openness, so of course we are at the OER conference, so I want to talk to you about how is the metaverse an open resource, what open resources are available there and how that can, in all probability, continue to grow as we go forward through this, down this technology path. And we're going to end with some nice pictures, just to leave you with a nice good image of you in your mind about what this looks like. So I'm going to start with a surprise that's not going to come as a surprise to many of you and that surprise I'm going to go away right here at the beginning is that metaverse doesn't exist yet. So if it doesn't exist yet, why are we talking about it? And this is one of those things that's really, really overhyped. Why should we as educators care about NFTs and cryptocurrency and all this nonsense? Why does it matter to us? And the answer I think that's something to do with this guy. And whether you dislike Mark Zuckerberg or you hate him. Yeah. He is one of the biggest metaverse cheerleaders out there and he's using his considerable resources to make it a reality. But how do you define it? It's not a reality yet. So how do we actually say what it is? So Matthew Ball, who's another metaverse expert stirvature leader defines it as a massively scaled interoperable network of real-time 3D patrol roles. Tony Parisi, another expert in this area, calls it spatially organized real-time 3D content. So a lot of times you'll hear this referred to as web three, web one being the internet as we know it, you know, that old dial up, that kind of internet, web two being social media and the mobile revolution, web three being a metaverse, the three dimensional web. So instead of web sites, we're looking to have in web spaces and not necessarily walking around and at NBR, although that may be a piece of it, which I'll get into in the next slide, but that you'll be interacting with the internet in a more immersive three dimensional way. So one thing to mention is that VR is often conflated with metaverse. VR exists, it already exists. We already know it has great applications already being used for education, things that are too far, too small, too dangerous, that kind of stuff, brilliant. I think there's a lot to be said for VR. It's not the metaverse. It's not exactly the same thing. And there's a lot of conflation there. So I just wanted to draw that line that there is a difference between the two. I think of VR as being like an early computer and computers are great. It's not till we hook them all up to the internet that we actually got the power and the openness that we have not. So the metaverse seems like science fiction and what we're talking about here, it is often portrayed in science fiction. And the idea did come from science fiction. So what I think what we're talking about here is that a lot of companies are, and not just for example, but lots of other companies like Google and Microsoft are pouring in tons of money to make web-free a reality. So I think this is why we should care as educators because if this is going to change the way we interact with the internet, this is definitely going to change the way students interact with their education. In the context of this, I want to share with you as well to these seven rules of the metaverse. So this is how he's defining it. And essentially you can see here, the crux of this is that the most important rule is that the metaverse is the internet. It's the next evolution of the internet. So a lot of companies now will try to sell you the same, this is the metaverse, come by the metaverse. This is your metaverse space, do this. It's like, not exactly, the metaverse doesn't exist. So they can't sell it to you yet because it doesn't exist. So, but if it doesn't exist now, when will it? I guess it's the next question. Tony Parisi and others have quipped that it will be, we will have some form of the metaverse by the end of the decade, as in this decade, as in the end of the 2020s, we will see some early formation of this. So that's why we care in Queens. We want our education to be future proof. We want it to be immersive for students. We want it to be interesting for students. So what are we doing? We started with an early exploration, I have a lecture in our natural, school of natural environment who is an architect by trade, but he's developing a new program, essentially, about sustainability. And he has musicians who are also social activists in Columbia, instead of bringing them, flying them all the way over to Belfast from Columbia, you wanna see how feasible is their workshop to do in the metaverse. So we started with Mozilla Hubs, which was a free service. It's not anymore. It was when we put in the pitch for the conferences. The other thing is this stuff is changing so quickly that it's here today, maybe gone tomorrow. But essentially what you'll see here is, we took what was already an open resource. So it was a space that was created in Mozilla Hubs, lifted it from somebody else, remixed it in their in-browser editor, which is so fairly easy to create. And then we stuck our Queens, this is part of our campus, a 360 photo in the background. What the musicians did was they took scans of the instruments as they had created in their workshops. You can scan these with your phone. If you have a smartphone that's from the last two or three years, there's a host of apps that you can do this with. Create a 3D model of the instrument and then plug in tutorials about how to do that in the background. You can see another example here is a guitar they've created from a hubcap. And we used photographs of murals from a community in Medellin where they're from to kind of set the atmosphere, to give a sense of where they're from. Since they're musicians, we also put some music in this space. So we had this sort of immersive multimedia space. And this is another example of a drum that they created, again, with the tutorials in the background. The other thing about creating these 3D objects is if students, and I forgot to mention students can interact with this from their laptops, from their phones, and also from a VR headset. So it's hardware agnostic, which is one of Tony Parisi's rules. So they were able to manipulate that three dimensional object, not play it yet. That's not something the metaversists figured out how to do, or that this space is figured out how to do, but they can, if they're in VR, they can rescale it. They can move it around. The laws of physics apply. They can actually chuck across the room if they wanted to. So with this workshop, we did run a test and a couple proof of concepts. I would say we had mixed success. You definitely get what Mr. Kitties calls a sense of co-presence in the form of language anxiety for me, because the musicians did not really speak English. I don't really speak Spanish. So we were there in the same room, and it was that really familiar feeling of not speaking the same language. I don't know if you travel to another country and you have that like, ah, okay. That kind of anxiety, it was there. So I actually take that to be a good sign. If you had kind of experienced that online, then there's probably something more human and more visceral about that interaction that you're having with people. But we did have some serious technical issues in terms of the YouTube videos not playing, various pieces. It didn't like the textures of the 3D model. So we looked around for some other platforms. The focus of the course was shifting as well from doing workshops and the metaverse to doing fieldwork. So we were trying to get students who are already in work who maybe don't have time to go wander around Northern Ireland or Ireland more generally to do fieldwork. So what we're looking at is putting the fieldwork element of the course into the metaverse. So this is just a proof of concept we did. This is a park next Queens University Belfast. We hooked it up with a lot of other 360 videos or 360 photos. If you've ever used ThingLink, it's very like ThingLink except that the advantage here is that you and the guys of your avatar can wander around inside of this and you can put 3D objects in there. But again, you can manipulate. In the meantime, we're also moving forward with a few other projects. That program that I was mentioning there with the fieldwork doesn't start until September 2024. So what we want to do is get more practical experience, try to get students in and also try to build a community of other people working in this space. What I found in trying to do those early explorations was really hard to do this on your own. And we had the expertise in Queens. We have lots of people working in this space. What we put together is a metaverse community of practice. So we started with the Lego series play. If you're not familiar with the methodology I know Claire is familiar with the methodology. But if you're not, it's just a problem solving methodology. So we were talking about what kind of projects would we like to pursue? What would work well in the metaverse? What would be a value add to our educational goals in the metaverse? So a couple of projects that we're starting on here. This is what we already do for our architecture students. We do a 3D model of their end of year show. So you can actually go online to a website and wander around their show as if you were there. But what we're actually looking to do is get them to upload their architectural models, their digital models into the metaverse so that people can have their critique online inside of their architectural models. So even people who are very experienced readers and blueprints say that this is a different experience for them. So that's one project we're doing. We're also looking at a sensory space for children with autism. It's part of a behavioral, I've forgotten the name, but a research into behavior about autism and whether or not VR spaces can be of help to these children. And another one about preserving human tissue samples for our anatomy department because the tissue samples are kept in really old personogenic liquids and it's very difficult and dangerous to be bringing them out to show them to students. So we're looking at digitizing those 3D models but there's all kinds of hangups around the legislation. You can't just be putting these things online. So you have to control that really carefully. So there's some of the things that we're doing. In addition, the modern languages department approached me to say, we have all these great photos that students have taken on their year abroad but we don't have enough space to actually show them. Can you help us? So this is something that's spatial. The platform I was talking about there does really well. So essentially you have a template for an art gallery. You upload your photos. It's very quick. The feedback on that was very positive. So the students were pretty happy with that. That's the only time we've actually been able to use it with students so far because it's all very in the very early stages. So far they're happy. But in terms of, it's not really there to make the students happy. So what we're still trying to do is figure out what is good. If you start talking about the metaverse and teaching, this is the kind of image that tends to bubble up. And this seems like a dystopian image to me. I don't know why you guys are so horrible. I don't want to be sat in a replica of a boring room in some kind of crazy avatar just basically watching a screen within a screen. So we have to think about where is the value at? We don't want to use a tack just for the sake of using it. We want to use it to get something out of it to really push forward and to make the online learning experience good. So Paul Whedon and Weller talk about what is good online learning? And this is kind of their six best practices. And I think the metaverse can help with at least four of those in terms of building a community, in terms of exchanging ideas, using your online tools for interaction because the interaction in the metaverse is so much more natural and so much more immersive. And in particular, creating an environment that's not just student-centered. In this case, you could have an environment that a student designed. I imagine going into different workshops or different classes in a space that the student has actually designed themselves purpose-built for a lesson that they've created or an architectural model that they've designed. So I think that's where the real exciting possibilities would lie. For practical advice, I would say define your learning objectives. So that's a mistake that we have made. Always be clear what you want before you go in. Don't limit yourself to one platform. There are literally dozens at this point. And we don't know which one or where the metaverse is going to go, what it's going to be like, and all likelihood, the one you choose is going to be passe in five years. So don't worry too much about, don't get too over-invested in one platform. Again, it can change, it can be free today, it can be paid tomorrow, you don't know. So just define what you want from the platform and be okay with being flexible and be okay with it not being the one that you're going to stick with forever. Last piece of advice, build in a test session. Always, always, always say, okay, this is a session with absolutely no stakes writing on it. The whole point of this session is for you to come in, get used to it because it's a bit of a learning curve, learning how to interact with these spaces, work out your tech, work out your wifi, that kind of thing. So I would always, always, always build in a test session. So in addition to, I mentioned this briefly before, in addition to open textbooks and open lesson plans, what we're seeing now is your emergence of open three-dimensional spaces. You can go online right now, build any of these for free and your students can join your own private room just through a link. Is that done? Sorry, that's your 50 bucks, you know? I just don't know if it's gonna do that job. That's all right. It's got my sales button, it's not working. So just to finish up really quickly, is what I'm saying here is that you can go ahead and start building this now. There's nothing to stop you other than fear of the unknown. And if you want to come and talk about this, I'm very, very keen to talk about it. So thank you very much. Thank you. That's my bonus for questions. Oh, right, thanks. Yeah, anybody has any questions for Shelby? We'll take a couple of questions. Yes. Thanks, Shelby. I really enjoyed that presentation, but I did have quite a few in this DJI booth for second life. Remember back on the day, every university had a second life campus and we rebuilt the whole campus there. And it was, but there's a lot of research and a lot of people did a lot of really good work in second life. So I think there's possibly, sometimes it's not to forget, but I know my experiences of second life were just like having a crazy avatar and spinning around and then my computer crashing. I think there's a lot that could be learned for this next phase as well. So I just, not really a question, but I think you did great work once it's done. Yeah, I think second life is one that comes up over and over again. And the people who are working in this space would be people who have been there and worked in second life for a long time. I think where second life falls down and where the metaverse has a potential to fall down is if you don't know what you want out of it, you get students in and you go, well, that's cool. Why do I do not? So I think that's where that you have to really focus on what your learning objectives are. And I don't see this at least now being the kind of thing you use every single week in your teaching. Probably you do a workshop here, you do some field work there. You maybe have a kind of, you can do even like training simulations. So I think at the moment what we're looking at is really, really focused, very deliberate uses of it. But yeah, I can see that the problem you're going to second life and you're like, well, I can move around. It's like a video game. This is really cool. And it's cool for about two hours. Two minutes. Two minutes. I agree. Yeah, no, my question was about the second life part and the crashing part of that because whenever you put up the currency, things, the metaverses for everyone. So everyone with the hardware, everyone with the internet. So it's just how much of that bandwidth is available to people? Is it as heavy a second life? It's like my really high end work computer. I don't think I ever got second life. Oh, probably. So is this lighter? It is lighter. Well, typically they are lighter these days because they're all browser based. So you don't even have to install or download anything for most of these. A lot of people can get on with their phones with our experience. Tony Parisi in another course talks about widening access. Now, you can't do much if you don't have an internet connection. You don't have an internet connection. There's nothing that anyone developing the software can do about that. So there needs to be a piece as well about widening participation in the world in terms of building in broadband infrastructure, building in 5G infrastructure, so that it's available to people to be able to access this kind of space. Because, yeah, it won't work if it's a very small subset of population. There's no point in that. Hi. Yeah, hi. Thanks for talking to me. And what platforms are open source? So there's Zookaband 1, which is a plain source. Which platforms are you looking at? Well, we looked at several. Azilahubs would be open source. Spatial, not open source, but you can develop for it and immunity. So in that case, it's open development, I guess. With some caveats, FrameVR is another one that we've looked at that would be open, although they are a paid model as well. So yeah, the thing is a lot of them that were open are now moving to paid models. So it's not everything that would be open at the moment. Do you see it as a development of the web or the internet? Yeah, yeah, well, I think that if it's not that, then it's not the matter of which one. Oh. Either the web or the internet. What's the distinction, sir? Well, the web is the browser-based and the internet is the infrastructure, the RSC environment, all these other environments. So they're kind of distinctly... Well, I think it has to be both. The one-wide web sits on the internet, if you like. The way I've heard it described is that the metaverse, to make this stuff run, to make the web available, you're going to have to have a lot of that infrastructure, and that's something that's still being built. And frankly, it doesn't exist. That's why it doesn't exist, is because we don't have the technology to be able to run this at scale yet. So it will have to have this infrastructure piece around it. So I guess both is the answer. I think we're going to have to... I'm sorry, we're going to have to have the questions now. If you've got any questions for Sherwin, you can maybe... Let's see if we can get this done. You can just watch from the side. Yeah. Sorry. You can go. Yeah. Right. Well done, folks. Hey, Nicholas. How are you, Bill? Hey. Hello, everyone. My name is Nicola Ruiz. I come from Colombia. I'm a PhD student in the University of Edinburgh. But I come here as the founder of FED. It's a nonprofit organization that works since 2020 in Colombia as a partner to rural schools and rural teachers. Well, to tackle one of the biggest wicked problems that is educationally in FED. We do this by using OERs. So we're not solving educationally in FED, spoiler. But we are learning a lot with teachers from them, and they're also having an opportunity to learn things along the way. Yeah. I'm going to begin with a little bit of context. So you can have a little bit of the idea of how it is back home. Everything began during 2020. It was a horrible year for rural schools, as they had to shut down as any other school. But the problem was that only 26% of them had access to both the device and internet and referring to students. So they're sent back home, and suddenly they will have an opportunity to have an approach to education or to continue their educational process. Teachers were pretty creative. They printed their own PDFs. They sometimes pointed us to house, knocking doors, providing the printed documents. And, well, I must say that what got me into beginning everything was that I have someone that I care about in the rural area, and I called her, and she told me how her nephew was taking classes. And it was, well, quite sad, not saying anything else. And as you remember, we were all locked down, and people were like, some people were like, empathetic to the situation of others. So it wasn't a non-profit organization at the moment, but it was an idea to help empathically. So, well, I'm just, like, jumping around my presentation, sorry. Quite nervous, but I'm going to return to that eventually. So also, rural schools are multigrade classrooms, which means that teachers must teach from pre-K to 5th grade at the same time all of the subjects. Some might argue that I have read these literatures from people that are proposing to come back to multigrade classroom because it allows many things, but for them it's a disadvantage because they have to do many labors, they have many remits that are not counted into their formal remit. For example, they have to do the cleaning. Some schools do not have water sometimes. They have to be attentive that students are eating. And on top of that, they have to be expert in math, English. Well, we do not speak English. Social sciences, everything. And to give us at the same time. So it's a big problem what we have back home. It's a big problem. And for example, only 2% of rural students access to higher education, historically, while European students, well, it's another story. So I can tell the story about them with their permission and also the story about my team who are working with them. As I'm right now here, since some months ago. He's Freddie, one of the teachers that we work with. And I admire a lot rural teachers in many ways. Because first of all, the history of teaching in Columbus, maybe something that you can relate to because I think teaching as a profession has been not valued and it's not prestige in many ways. And in Colombia, it had like many layers of violence. For example, it had the inter-violence. Only teachers are women because it's not a valid and prestigious job. You know, as being a doctor, whatever. Or teachers are not well paid. So these teachers have built the biggest union, which is in Colombia, that has allowed them to win many battles. But on the side, some things has happened. For example, curriculum design, which is the topic of this conversation, where we cooperate with rural teachers to participate in curriculum design, has generated center problems. For example, during the 70s in Colombia, the Ministry of Education intended to give every teacher a single curriculum so they could make education teacher-proof. So curriculum became a phenomenon as an instrumentalization of education and they opposed the word pedagogy to curriculum. That problem evolved to the point that curriculum design is not taught at the universities that are developing teacher-professional development. Sorry, initial teacher teaching. You've got the game. And so Juni Montoya, which is a researcher, which studies the history of curriculum in Colombia, argues that it can be related that the characters have been right to post-government attempts to introduce a teacher-proof curriculum, but they have been wrong to prohibit the curriculum and curricular thinking, even from teacher preparation programs. So it became a political battle because they have a lot of reasons to be political engaged teachers. But as a side thing that happened, curriculum was not part. Colombia has won several political battles. One of these, one of my colleagues, the Union, is that education is decentralized and we have a law which allows each school to decide its own curriculum. And the downside of this is that as teachers do not do curriculum design, they buy curriculums from editorial houses. So they just buy primitive curriculum, just use them, which was not the idea of having this internalization in my opinion. It was the idea to have autonomy, to have agency and other things that are valid, but it became a business in a big way. So this is the context in which Fe is operating right now. And now how it was worked. So this is at the beginning of the pandemic. Everything was closed. People were fearing for many reasons. And to move around, you needed the government permit to actually drive a car outside your house. I was trained as an instructional designer or learning designer. You guys pull it one way, you call it the other. And I felt like, well, I'm just in the house, I can maybe do something for someone, for these people that I talked with and just managed to fundraise sim cards with a small quantity of gigabytes or a several number of families and also do these WhatsApp campaigns to receive donations of used laptops or in this case, not laptop computers, but other computers, desktop computers. So actually it was like magic because it worked. We managed to raise 21 computers and 21 sim cards for the families. I trained teachers and teaching online with these new resources, which was something that government should be doing, but it's Columbia. And it was fantastic. So this is like the beginning and it's like the first stage of the nonprofit. And I'm gonna tell you about the second stage. So here we talk a lot about technology and OERs at parts of digitality, like technology and OERs are like married. And in the second step, more teachers were involved because of the government liked what we were doing and provided us more laptops, but no money for internet. And we got more teachers to be involved. We actually were not doing it right because technology can become a burden. And so OERs. So this is one of the teacher development programs that we were doing with more teachers. And these teachers have caring responsibilities that were scared for their lives and a lot of things, but they were gathering with us. And they were like, how do I have to learn this? And they had to learn how to use Raspberry Pi with Colibri installed, which is fantastic, but it has its learning curve. And some teachers do not have digital literacy. For example, I wanted that in the picture. So it was really distressing at the moment to be in this project where everything was so adverse in many ways. And also to have this new technology and this promise of access, which were OERs in the server that was online. And well, so this was the second stage. Some teachers hated us. And they were right. So we learned a lot. And it's also something that I want to share here. And that's why I talk about participatory curriculum design. When there's technology involved and there is marginalized communities and there's a lot of development projects. And you're hearing the northern part. Sometimes most of OERs go to the south to develop here because we don't have resources to develop. Well, people do not have the same resources to develop OERs, but we just like for them. It's important to think which values are embedded in these and how the processes are done rather than just go and pick something for someone. You know, that's a big mistake. So this is our third, and I'm going to use this picture for our third stage of our process. And in this stage, we decided to just give them more power than having more power us. Sorry about that. Yeah, that's all right. We do this by allowing them to choose how to involve with us, which topics to actually decide to develop their OERs, which is quite important because we noticed that most of the OERs that were embedded in college didn't weren't meaningful for them in many ways. For example, there was nothing on Columbia history. Math was taught another way, each math. So we embarked on this small, but epic journey of for social inclusion. Maybe you have read this, but it's on OERs social on the Global South. So social inclusion means in power indications students to be the creators of their own materials and knowledge, not just recipients or adapters of their father's work. So we embarked on this journey because it's epic because we have so few resources, but at the same time we have so much willingness. And I say that it is being successful at the moment because teachers want to be there. So we have to be imposed by them as in the second stage by the government as schools, but they just want to be willing there to put part of the time to do this. How do we do this? I'm going to just do some things. Maybe something you know, it's UBD, understanding by design. I'm not an advocate for that. It's what we just founded works for us. And we negotiate everything, everything, everything, everything from how long were the workshops will be, to when there will be there and what are the objectives, what's everything. We negotiate also how to create the learning objectives. So this has been beautiful because we have been able to embody the pedagogies and for example we have made videos on how they teach with verbal skills like storytelling that is vernacular to rural Columbia and that has been a really beautiful thing to see and how they get excited with this and the final product. And I'm just going to show a little bit of that if I have time. Two minutes. So there's going to be puppets I hope you like them. To give more visibility to the people who are working right now with the teachers. It was in colour in Spanish rime so it is like a way to rime to remember things and it's called Rondas and that's how they play sometimes with school songs to learn. And this is Stephanie and Dicela. They are the people that are right now working with the teachers frequently and well part of the reflection that we did before me coming here to speak with you was that what they value more of the process was the social weaving that was made with the teachers. Is that about the technology at last? We have a lot of problems for example curriculum design didn't became part of the everyday practice of teachers because they still use the books. Ours are just still a few of them but what became like that at the end of the journey would be that teachers are invested in and having a community and reflecting about their identities and their pedagogies and how can they be embodied in this type of exercises. So yeah to make this to close this I have here more information for more puppet videos and our web page and I would say that it's an opportunity being in the world and you being people that create OERs in the global north the idea about how do we engage participatory participatory methods with the people that you intend to for example in the global south to send OERs to involve think about relationships, think about how technology can make things worse don't do the same mistakes as we do and negotiate whatever they want to do because there are educational futures and that's the right so I wanted to share this with you and thank you so much for taking me. We do have a few minutes for questions if you want to take some questions then the question that would be great when do you want to in about 15 minutes let's just leave 5 minutes for questions I can give you time and you still won't find much So good afternoon morning I think is where we're at now so Shelby mentioned she was a hybrid of Scottish and Oklahoma accents this will be the full Oklahoma accent so we're taking it full circle here so my name is Wesley Adam Stroud I'm an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University my role is the liaison from our library and I work with ag, animal science, life science but I am not historically a librarian my path has been through education I was a teacher for 10 years before I went to the library to start working my PhD is in instructional leadership and academic curriculum so one of my favorite things to talk about is the puzzle of bringing curriculum together to make it work I have a classroom in different settings I said I'm not historically a librarian and I am not traditionally trained in the sense of open ed I value the conversations very much I am new to them though I will be honest in that but I learned about open ed by default in my experiences teaching so I am from Oklahoma I've been teaching for 10 years I only have taught one year in the states though my first two years I was teaching in China at an international school that had 120 students and 24 nationalities represented so when we are talking about finding resources for populations like that and if there are any copyright individuals in here please don't turn me in because when we were at that school this was in 2009 in the theme of making things open for students the textbook that represented so many voices was near impossible for that many nationalities that many backgrounds so we had to borrow a lot of information off the internet print off one copy and then send them to someone who would make additional copies for us and we would distribute those out to our students so much like I think Nicholas was getting at some of those problems of bringing the materials to students can be complicated I worked with a group in Uganda for four years where we were creating an adult primary education program for women who had been impacted by some of the conflicts that were happening in northern Uganda and in that instance the government had no support for women who had been abducted by militant groups in northern Uganda so when they fled from their situations and came back to maybe their home communities throughout Uganda they had no opportunity to return to primary education because they were abducted at those ages so the challenges of developing curriculum making things open for individuals can be very tricky and through some of those experiences that's where I was introduced by default to open it of trying to build opportunities for individuals to have access to information to support those individuals who are building those opportunities for the students so that's where I wanted to begin now what I'm going to talk about for here and try to be on theme of some of the the presentation so far today is because I am historically an educator which button is it we're going to practice here okay great because I am historically an educator I had the the luck of getting courses in education to prepare me to be an educator now as my role now at an R1 university where our university is making movements to hire researchers first and then asking those researchers to then become teachers that's not always an enjoyable process for those researchers to make that jump into the classroom and historic way you see often those individuals have never had a chance to take an education course so just talking about overarching topics of education can be tricky so what I have set out to do and this took five years was create a course for doctoral students to take that would give them some preparation to enter and become teachers at the higher education level so the course that I'm going to talk about and just give you a little bit of description is designed to help future faculty be engaged in conversations around education what it means to be a teacher what the process of learning look like so approaching topics of education is a little bit easier because if you've worked with faculty or faculty or from whatever degree finding a common area that we can share language around education is sometimes tricky to find and sometimes we are also hesitant to do that because we don't want to expose ourselves as someone who may not be a professional first in all of the readings and theories that are out there so we try to find an easy space for individuals to talk about so I looked across the 96 different doctoral programs at Oklahoma State University and only one course outline scope and sequence included a course in education so that means the other 98 individuals who are receiving their PhDs in different fields whatever it may have been we're not going to have a there's that Oklahoma accent coming out we're not going to have the opportunity to take a course in education so that is a wrong that needs to be fixed so in I got lucky with some relationships across campus it took five years of negotiation between the spear school business this was one of the colleges in our campus that was most interested in creating a course for their doctoral students but like I said it took five years across different deans and department heads someone to finally sign off and say oh it makes sense for a higher education institution to provide training and education for their higher education profession so after that amount of work a course was designed titled instructional leadership and academic curriculum and this course as I mentioned is designed to introduce the nature of education practices ideas around education this is a class that meets only 16 times for one hour a day once a week so that's all they were willing to give time to allow these conversations to take place so we try to cram in as much as possible these are the topics that we look at we help so these are all doctoral students who are getting ready to finish their phd's and then while they're enrolled in this class they're already going through the process of interviewing which is already stressful and so what we try to do is one prepare them to be a teacher but when they go to these interviews they have talking points to represent themselves adequately as the teacher that they want to be when they are going to be hired by an institution so you can see some of the topics that we talk about we center and begin with looking at ideas around pedagogy epistemology curriculum ideology just so and I think Shelby said this really well we don't want them to become teachers who just use the tech because it's there and not know why they're using the tech right we try to back up and allow them to have conversations to position themselves to understand who they are as a teacher so they're better able to go into the classroom and relate and be approachable accessible to their to their students these are some of the learning goals so some of the things that we work on is for them to do an educational autobiography which I'm going to talk about in just a second they're going to generate a teaching and learning philosophy statement which is a big thing that they will need when they go on to begin their slow and long process of finding a job somewhere which it all feels like that sometimes no, Siri you get what I was saying so hearing some of the presentations earlier and if this is your situation where you're trying to find common ground to begin conversations with faculty to help them find a place to adopt or look at, consider open practices this was a goal from the very beginning in this class and just allowing future teachers to unlearn all of these traditional pressures or bias in what education may look like from their peers that and this is what sits with me when we're looking at open pedagogy right just being open is to share and improving ideas around education looking at issues regarding access like Nicholas was talking about earlier everybody's been talking about earlier part of this class is all of the student generated artifacts that they make like their autobiography which I'm going to talk about in a moment stays available through Canvas for next semester students to be able to come and look at these materials and gain those ideas and see what other people are maybe struggling with when it comes to education so they can find some common voices and some places to feel like I'm not the only one going through this we are all in this together thank goodness