 Okay, my name is Mya Karzych and I am an associate professor of soil science in faculties of land and food systems and also faculty of forestry. Okay, so Lukas gave me a little bit of a background on you and so I can give you a general sense of some of the questions that I might ask. So the idea is to talk about open education in general. So I'm going to ask you about your 3M teaching fellowship, about soil web, about the general importance of open education, how that relates to forestry and your teaching, and also about your recent TLAF grant. Oh, I got one. I just got one. Again. Again. Okay. For this year. That just came, I think, after we set up the interval. Yes, yes. We could start with that first question. Can you talk a bit about your 3M teaching fellowship and what it's like to be a fellow? Well, I just heard that I became a 3M national teaching fellow about a month ago. So what does it mean? I don't have full grasp of that, but I think from my understanding what this award brings, it's letting you collaborate and get in touch with other people who are pursuing the excellence in teaching and leadership in education. And you are able to connect them between your institution and UBC is lucky to have, I believe, 11 of us now who are active. 3M fellows and also across Canada. So there are different workshops and conferences where 3M fellows teach and develop visions and ideas for, you know, moving forward. So again, I have very limited experience of a month behind me, but I am very, very excited to be part of it and see what it will bring. Do you have any plans in terms of how to? Because I do have a bit of experience with open education and especially these open learning resources that I've been developing over the years. It makes kind of sense to see what kind of platform 3M fellowship is going to provide for that because I believe that there will be others who are doing that kind of work. I come from soil science, which is relatively small discipline, but among 3M fellows there are people from various kinds of disciplines and that will be very, I think, useful for me to see how in other sciences and non-science disciplines people are applying open learning resources and can I learn something from them or can I help them with my experience on developing what we have so far and reach their experience. And maybe transitioning into open education, could you talk about soil web, maybe how it emerged, what the goal you have for it and your experience so far? Well, when it emerged, it was just one project, one TLEF project that I got in my first year as an assistant professor and I just wanted to develop something that's web-based. To remember, to put this in a perspective, that was 2003-4, so a long time ago when it comes to web-based and open learning kind of educational resources and at that time I just wanted to have something for my course that will enhance that one course. But because I ended up working on that project with folks from CTLT or OLT, I believe it was called at that time, I quickly realized that there is much more opportunities out there to enhance that so after that I applied for more TLEF grants and basically that one project got the ball rolling and very quickly I realized that this is not just opportunity for me personally and my own courses between UBC but I saw the opportunity to bring my colleagues from other BC-based universities and I think my third project that we got from BC campus, online development fund, was in developing something collaboratively with people or my colleagues from Thomson Rivers University and University of Northern British Columbia and we got together and created set of videos based on soil classification so that was a first collaborative project that I had and then that opened more doors for another collaboration and now 12 years later this soil web initiative includes soil scientists, so undergraduate and graduate students and also multimedia developers across Canada and it just, it was not a planned thing 12 years ago when I started this but it obviously showed the need for something like this to emerge and because I am one of the soil scientists that comes from relatively large university and university that does have funding for innovation in teaching I am happy to bring the opportunity of collaborating on projects like this to my colleagues, soil scientists from smaller universities that don't have equivalents of TLEF grants or any other provincial funding where they might be located to participate and collaborate and contribute to open learning resource development when you provide the platform an opportunity I guess that's what soil web has done, you will find interested partners that's been my experience and I hope it will continue to grow because there is an outstanding need out there for these kind of resources again I've been working in soil science because that's my science but I believe any other natural resource science follows the similar path as what I just described or could follow similar path what we've done in soil science and maybe for the purposes of the video could you sort of explain what soil web is? Yeah well soil web as I said started with one project but over the years it has grown I believe into 16 different open learning resources focused on soil science, different aspects of soil science, different learning objectives that they have and different courses or levels of education where they can be implemented but it also allowed us to get a grant from NSERC CREATE to establish a training program for natural science students promotion and outreach we also created as a group several online or distance ed education courses focused on soil science it's a kind of loosely held group that does have members of some of us that have been on most or all of the projects but other members of the group come on a project basis so this project that I just mentioned that I will start this year with TLEF funding really involved even a person from University of Washington a former undergraduate student who worked on several of our previous projects that got the position at their IT department over there and now he will collaborate in that function on a new stuff that we will be developing so it's a group of different soil science professionals either from academia but also from provincial and federal research institutions lots of graduate students some of the undergraduate students some of them are former undergraduate and graduate students but current professionals that came along and work on these projects and also IT and multimedia developers and educational developers those mainly come from UBC simply because among the universities that have soil science programs UBC seems to be the one that has the strongest center that provides that kind of development so we are using UBC's manpower to kind of move forward the technical side of soil web which has been I think very beneficial for the Canadian community of soil science and you mentioned in your previous answers about you lightly touched on sort of the progress since you started 12 years ago could you maybe elaborate on that how you know that first open resource maybe compares to some of the stuff that you do today how has it progressed well over 12 years technology changed tremendously and capabilities of what can be done now are way more enhanced than we were able to do 12 years ago so it's not just these things are posted or host on websites and different servers but over the years lots of especially video based material that we developed is now placed on YouTube we also started implementing various games mobile games in our open learning resources the new project that we will start developing this year will involve an app that will allow students and interested members of general public to do a citizen science data collection that's something that was not possible even couple of years ago so there are different ways how technology has been incorporated into these open learning resources but one thing that stays common from the very beginning is that everything that we've developed has always and continues to be open access and by that I mean that it's not password protected anybody in the world can use and see that some of the stuff that we have now on wikipedia can be modified with CWL access but still it's possible to modify that and some of the stuff my students are starting to slightly modify repackaging is also a possibility so there are all kinds of different things that have been changed another very important technical change was over the years is that in the past when we started it was innovation to have something on the web and it had to be web based and web tailor made but these days with emergence of mobile devices you have to be aware that whatever you are producing has to fit the screen and not just fit the screen but fit that mode of technological use of your resource so you have to I guess in short what I'm trying to say is you have to continue to follow the emergence of technology if you want to have online open resources that are going to be continuously in use innovation of course to develop a good content because that's given if you don't have a good relevant content it can be packaged in the best way it's not going to be used but it has to have the technological currency as well and one of the points that I just mentioned now is how some of your students are you know adapting or modifying the resources that have already been created how do you think that or do you think that students have any role to play in the development of open education? Oh absolutely they have I mean I always on every single project that I had so far I had students on the development team I include them from the moment of proposal development I run by the idea by them and ask them for input and refinement and then I always make sure that there are students on the team as reviewers and advisors sometimes they also take an active role of participants or as my multimedia and videographer experts would say talent so I would put them on camera and they would engage in whatever material is being covered in the video they also refine content that's been developed and then at the end of the day they are actively providing the feedback because everything that we've developed as part of soil web group has been developed for a specific course and every time when we develop something we want to get feedback from students how while it worked what needs to be improved what was especially well done and we try to do the refinement of the material and the resources based on that feedback so that's how we involve students but with emerging capability of these platforms like Wikipedia and many others where students can engage with the material that's online that's opening new avenues the time just starting to explore as a course instructor or somebody who is really keen on these open resources how they can contribute to the material that's on the website so I post as an instructor a PBL case for example that I'm using in my fourth course what students can contribute to that PBL case and this is in my case some people have done this way more in advance way than I'm doing it but I'm trying to experiment with that and I'm allowing students to upload videos if they have or photographs of a particular site which is a location where PBL case is focused or located on if they have ideas for changes of the case material that's a nice platform to have their contribution so that's another avenue that it wasn't even on my radar several years ago and it wasn't possible to do but now technology and social media are allowing us to do that kind of stuff and those were the examples where students can play an active role the TLVF grant that you just got can you talk about the digging in digging in the NTS well that's a installation of number four of the ongoing project that started as a master's project of one of my former graduate students who wanted to do the assessment of community gardens in city of Vancouver and in order to be successful in that assessment you need a soil map and surprise surprise there is there was no soil map of Vancouver it's very actually common situation in many urban centers around the world that we don't have soil maps because in order to develop a soil map you have to go and dig many pits or holes in the ground and to do assessment of soil properties and to be able to do that you can't do that kind of assessment in the paved environment as urban centers are so many cities don't have soil map and Vancouver was not an exception so the student ended up shifting her focus into development of soil map of Vancouver and it was it emerged as a paper copy in its first installation and then she was able as a second installation of the project she managed to digitalize the map then we got couple of years ago another TLEF grant and we put the digital map online and in addition to that we also went to several locations with a group of soil scientists and graduate students to describe typical soils of Vancouver on video and now we have a digital map with videos associated with it and discussion how certain types differ in terms of land use and because the digital map of soils of Vancouver is based on geological map and elevation which is a crude way of starting a map we know that some of the boundaries between soil types are not exact and they don't really match what's on the ground so in order to take it to another level of accuracy we envision that we can combine the citizen science approach through an app for various mobile phones and send students in my introduction to soil science course which is a large course with almost 300 students to different locations across Vancouver where they can observe the lower part of the soil profile or rocks on which soils have developed because that part of the soil in urban centers is not changed it's close to its native state so describing the top of the soil it's not the best in urban centers is not the best approach but if you look deeper down that provides you useful information and with all kinds of construction sites you can do that so the idea is that students will go with a mobile app to different sites across Vancouver they will find these open pits or road cuts or various construction sites and they will try to identify the type of the rock or parent material on that particular location through the app they will bring the information back to the website and then we will verify is what students are classifying and identifying on the ground is that really correct? If it's correct then we deposit the data in our data depository but also we will use that data to correct the boundaries between soil types on our soil map and on the top of that learning part of the whole project for students will be to better be able to identify these rocks in the natural setting because that's something that we are doing currently in my introduction to soil science course but we do that exercise in the lab through video engagement but this will take them to the field and bring them a really important real life component to their aspect of learning so it's a multifaceted project, it allows better learning I hope we'll find out it allows data gathering and it also allows improvement of a digital map that we developed in the past but that we know needs improvement, it's a long story those are just angles more general terms Forestry or soil science? Soil science Let's focus on soil science We can focus on soil science so maybe if you could comment on that where do you find that that intersection exists and what do you think open education practices look like in the context of soil science? Well as a soil scientist who's been a soil scientist now for 30 years and has seen a progression of the peaks of soil science back in 80s to a slow decline in number of students and even number of faculty members around the world I see open education as a very powerful tool or pathway for soil science to open its relevance or to advertise its relevance I should say to the general public because soil science traditionally has been taught in faculties of agriculture and forestry and that worked really well for several decades when majority of our students were coming from rural settings as kids or farmers or foresters you didn't have to explain to those students coming from those backgrounds what's the importance of soil science but with ongoing urbanization around the world our students are coming from urban centers, they're urbanites and they're coming from educational setting and this is true not just for Canada but from around the world where soil science is not even mentioned in the previous education so a typical undergraduate student comes to a soil science course in post secondary institution without even knowledge that there is something like soil science they don't think about importance of soils because they live in urban centers and most of our soils in urban centers are paved over they haven't been taught about any of the issues where soil plays an important role in their previous education and then they're stunned I mean it doesn't sound that sexy soil science so you're having students that don't know much about it and you have to excite them from the get-go and grab them as soon as possible because once they are in university setting there are many different competing disciplines that might grab their attention so in my mind because I was hired to teach as an instructor for introduction to soil science course which is the first course that first or second year students take in soil science ever I see that as an opportunity and challenge to grab their attention and if you grow with traditional methods of teaching and their learning in a classroom, in a very traditional setting that's been done when I was an undergraduate student or even many decades before that while you are sending a message this is really boring, it's irrelevant it's for a very limited group of weird people to study you really have to bring some kind of excitement to these students from the get-go to sell your discipline and to really explain to them the importance of soil science bringing new ways of teaching and new technology into your teaching is absolutely important for a discipline like soil science that has lots of challenges because of its history and how it's been organized in university setting but on the other hand we as a soil scientist we know what are the important roles in all kinds of different issues where soil is absolutely relevant food security, soil degradation, climate change these are all issues where soil plays a central role and somehow because its soil is not on the radar of the general public in these urban centers it's very often overlooked lots of people in urban centers are aware of air quality, water quality which are absolutely important issues but soil as a resource is as equivalent as air and water and very slowly it's getting to the radar of the general public so I think in intersection of open resources or open learning resources and soil science are really complementary and I think soil scientists are around the world from what I'm seeing they're engaging in this and they're engaging I think more and more with the vengeance because we realize this is a really good avenue for us to use to send our message because otherwise we are just trapped in this setting that we had for almost a century how our discipline is taught so I'm hopeful that it will continue to grow in popularity and use in my discipline Can I jump in with one? I'm just curious with student learning so I imagine you taught previously without using student producer approaches What sort of differences do you see with students when you engage them in this one? Do you see differences? Well I see one of the differences because I to step back a little bit I use open resources in a blended model I never would actually want to completely move into just online or distance education because I like a personal interaction with students and I think that's very important both for students and for me because there is an ongoing feedback and as I said I don't like to be on camera I think this personal communication does have a value in education so the online and open learning resources in my mind are a supplement to good educational approach That being said how it differs now when I'm using it as a blended approach versus just traditional classroom based approach that was something that I was doing at the beginning of my career I think one thing that is different now that I have these online resources is excitement of students to use them Excitement that they're capable to continue learning beyond the classroom It doesn't work in every single aspect For example, I think it works really well when you have an open learning resource If material or topic that you are trying to teach to your students involves repetition in terms of looking at clues classification of anything, soil classification, classification of insects, classification of plants or any classification where you need to know these visual clues to be able to learn the topic is a very good example where having this ongoing access to material is absolutely essential So it's not surprising that one of the first topics that we started developing these online learning resources was soil classification because it really allows students to step outside of traditional way how you can teach this topic on campus based learning Another thing that I think is very useful for certain students is if they require more time because in a traditional way of learning you have x number of hours in your classroom, x number of hours in your lab and even when you take students to the field where you have field trips or all kinds of hands-on activities it's always a limited number of hours when you are on the site or in the classroom and you are teaching whatever is the subject that you are teaching and then it's done and then everything that students have after that are their notes or written material with open learning resources you can have video footage or some kind of engaging activity maybe some kind of animation that follows on what's being covered in campus based, classroom based and even field trips because lots of things that we developed over the time supplement and enhance field trips if you ask students often they will tell you at least in soil science they will tell you we like field trips but even field trip on its own can be a complicated learning activity when you take large number of students you are the only instructor how many of them they really heard what you said how many of them observed what you pointed in the soil pit which is a relatively small hole in the ground this way if you have a video that supplements what you've been saying or mimics what's been demonstrated in the field provides additional material that students can use on their own time another thing I guess why I am prone to provide them this ongoing learning is I also know from personal experience is not being a native English speaker that when you are not a native speaker in language that is used at your institution you do require more time to absorb the material and I know for non-native English speaking students having that opportunity beyond the classroom or beyond the traditional way of learning is absolutely essential and they like that so those are maybe little examples but I think in nutshell the approach stays the same it just allows you to enrich your teaching and student learning