Digital Learning

Category: Open Education

  • OpenEd Week 2022 Highlight: A Student’s Perspective

    Guest author Rachel Bensimhon is a Muhlenberg College senior and third year Digital Learning Assistant. Here are her thoughts on OER at Muhlenberg.

    When I first joined Muhlenberg’s OER community as a sophomore/student representative in 2019, I wasn’t sure what to expect. When I thought about OERs then, my mind went to free textbooks/eBooks and online resources designed for open access and a “one-size-fits-all” approach. These are great in and of themselves. But as I attended more workshops and summits, I was pleasantly surprised to discover an entire world of OERs waiting beneath the surface. 

    OERs come in all shapes and sizes, and anyone can help contribute to them. They can be the classic archetypal free textbook or website, sure. But they can also take the shape of blogs with student-authored posts, or customizable PressBooks, or Wikipedia-style repositories of knowledge, or databases assembled through Omeka. I could go on! To me, OERs are creative expressions – transformative works rife with new possibilities for education. In looking to digital tools for OERs, we might expand the possible shapes that educational resources can take, and in doing so make them even more accessible and engaging for all learners.

    Speaking of accessibility, OERs are highly inclusive and accessible. Not only do they allow for open access, they also allow for the expansion of authorship itself. Professors can make their own OERs, and students can contribute to their creation through their own writing, as well. In this way, OERs serve as a record of collaboration and knowledge-sharing, where unique perspectives can be made visible. When professors and students create and contribute to OERs, they add their own experiences and knowledge to the existing body of work. 

    On some level, I think OERs are gestures of openness and compassion – of storytelling. When I attend OER summits, I’m always struck by the level of care that goes into the work. From what I’ve seen, OERs are often born out of a desire to share knowledge with others from unique perspectives: to tell new stories in new ways, beyond the scope of traditionally-published textbooks/educational materials. 

    To me, OERs say, “I have this specific knowledge [of a certain subject area], and I want to share it with you, openly and in my own way.” And by bringing in multiple collaborators, that desire becomes “I have a story that I want to tell, and I want you to tell it with me, and together we might make something new.” 

    Digital tools, then, represent these “new ways” that stories can be told and knowledge can be shared. We might imagine an art history textbook as an online museum built with Omeka that anyone can visit, with metadata filled in by student contributors. Or we might envision a literature curriculum as a digital library powered by Zotero, where open texts can be read freely. As a DLA, these are only a sampling of the concepts that I want to help envision, facilitate, and make into a reality. These sorts of ideas are ones that we can envision through the possibilities that OERs have to offer. Through them, we might forge a more inclusive, accessible landscape, characterized by openness and compassion. And by advocating for open access, we can strive to build an equitable, engaged peer community where everyone can tell their stories.

    Accessibility, inclusion, openness, care, compassion, storytelling: these are all ideals that OERs represent to me, and ideals that I want to facilitate through this work. I’m proud to be a member of a peer community that values these things!

  • OpenEd Week 2022 Highlight: History

    OpenEd Week 2022 Highlight: History

    In a previous post, I highlighted the distinct focus on OER co-creation with students at Muhlenberg. Students have been drivers of digital learning since we began in 2015, and one of the guiding principles of our digital learning work at Muhlenberg is the value of student voice and agency. In this, we connect to a longstanding focus on peer partnership at the College, where student Digital Learning Assistants join up with Writing Assistants, Peer Tutors, and Learning Assistants, to create a strong presence of students as teachers and pedagogical partners in our teaching and learning environment. This was the focus of a 2018 workshop series, “Engaging Students as Partners,” led by Alison Cook-Sather, director of the Teaching and Learning Institute
    at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, along with her student collaborators, Melanie Bahti and Sasha Mathrani. In one of those workshops, Tineke D’Haeseleer, Assistant Professor of History at Muhlenberg, began to consider possibilities for student-teacher co-creation in her pedagogy. This post is dedicated to the creative and often daring digital pedagogy that Professor D’Haeseleer has evolved, focusing in particular on the OER co-authored by students in her Spring 2018 course, China’s Magical Creatures.

    https://open.muhlenberg.pub/chinasmagicalcreatures/

    The book’s opening begins with the opening of another book, Story of the Stone (or Dream of Red Chambers, Honglou meng in Chinese):

    “Gentle Reader,

    What, you may ask, was the origin of this book?

    Though the answer to this question may at first seem to border on the absurd, reflection will show that there is a good deal more to it than meets the eye.” [1]

    It is a perfect path into this open text, as Professor D’Haesesleer explains at the end of her introduction:

    The magical Stone in the eponymous Story of the Stone was incarnated into the world of humans as a man who lived a full life, before it returned to its existence as a stone in a different plane of existence – but bearing an inscription detailing its adventures. Like the Stone, this textbook is now ready to go out into the world of humans, and hopefully its adventures will also be inscribed in the object itself, as future readers use, reuse, and remix the text.

    Not only does Professor D’Haeseleer situate the co-created OER in relation to an important literary text, she alsos invites readers to reflect on what it means for students to situate themselves, and be situated pedagogically, as, co-creators of knowledge:

    What meets the eye at first is a set of chapters written by the students who took the course in Spring 2019. The students are not experts at China, they do not know Chinese and thus had to rely on English-language materials available to them through our library and my personal collection. Many are at the start of their journey of learning to write for their college-level peers.

    It may seem absurd to let these people write a textbook: shouldn’t we leave that to the experts? But although I know more than my students about Chinese history, and a bit more than they do about its magical creatures, I am not an expert at textbooks: I use them only for some courses, and I haven’t used one as a student would in many, many years. But I teach students who use textbooks all the time, and I thought they would have better ideas about what makes a textbook on the one hand attractive and inviting, or on the other hand abstruse, or otherwise becomes a roadblock to learning and discovery.

    At the outset, readers encounter students giving voice to the process, practice, and purpose of the OER work, including the following perspectives:

    Nyjah: I feel this online book is a great idea … “Chinese Magical Creatures” is such an odd class, there is not real material for it. Having people in the class help to put it together makes it even better, because as students we know what we like and dislike in textbooks, and we know what we feel was necessary and important to include.

    Lauren: In all of my other classes, I have always felt like I gained a lot of knowledge, and then had nowhere to put it all.

    Jess: Being part of the project instilled me with a sense of responsibility. I needed to be clear and accurate.

    Lushu creature with a horse’s head, and tiger stripes.

    As a co-created production, the book encompasses so many diverse topics, including the meanings of a ceramic bowl, creatures that lay within the mountains, the origin of dragons, Taoists exorcism rituals, and many other topics carefully researched, documented, and presented by students for their readers. Their bibliographies for each entry are extensive and invite further, deep exploration into the history of the artifacts and stories they are researching, demonstrating engagement with historical methods and also the affordances of open publishing to open and link to connected content and material.

    Professor D’Haeseleer is building on this experience this semester, with another co-creative open educational project underway in her course on Korean history. It is one of many critical and creative ways she is practicing digital and open pedagogies at Muhlenberg. She shares reflections on a lot of this work on Twitter @tinebeest. Follow along! These collaborations have been so rewarding and generative for the Digital Learning Team in the last few years.

  • OpenEd Week 2022 Highlight: Department Driven

    OpenEd Week 2022 Highlight: Department Driven

    As OpenEd Week continues, it’s clear that one week is not time enough to spotlight and recognize all of the energies and efforts directed towards opening education at Muhlenberg, in relation to open educational resources and open educational practices more broadly. Today, we’re recognizing the momentum in a department, Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, where the introduction of OERs across multiple courses connects up to a larger department commitment to foster open pedagogies.

    In 2016, the Digital Learning Team at Muhlenberg began offering workshops to faculty and staff to raise awareness about open educational resources and the possibilities of this work at Muhlenberg, This included Tech Talks (one of the earliest opened Tech Talks: https://muhlenbergcollege.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=6f9132c8-c826-475e-a034-acea003e3ccb&start=7.835123 ) and a campus visit from Robin DeRosa who led a seminar and workshop for faculty and staff (archived here: https://muhlenbergcollege.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=3c8b9c57-4830-4816-8354-acea003e3cb3&start=145.642921 ). In that early moment of the work, it was two professors of Italian who first approached us with an interest in creating their own digital textbook to align with their liberal arts pedagogical practice in a way that no commercial textbook was able to do. In supporting the efforts of Daniela Viale, Lecturer in Italian and French, and Dan Leisawitz, Associate Professor of Italian and director of Italian Studies, we have had opportunity to discover so much that informs our approach to collaboration and partnership with faculty interested in OER, as well as an approach that recognizes the transformative experiences of students who contribute their insights to OER development and iteration.

    Buongiorno!

    Welcome to Spunti: Italiano elementare 1 – a unique program authored by the Italian faculty of Muhlenberg College that takes the place of a traditional language textbook.  Spunti is a fully designed course available to all college instructor of Italian for use and adaptation…

    …Spunti is a work in progress, and we would greatly appreciate any feedback, suggestions, and adaptations that anyone can give us.  Our hope for Spunti is that it can benefit from the input of Italian instructors and students from around the world.

    A strong foundation of knowledge and experience has been critical to growing department-wide thinking about the value of open educational resources and practices. Alongside the development of OERs in Italian, French professor Eileen McEwan has developed and published her text, Paris à travers les pages, another example of OER co-creation with students, so well suited to the pedagogical context at Muhlenberg:

    Paris through the Pages is the culminating project for an advanced level undergraduate French course that explores the images of Paris in literary works from the 17th to 20th centuries. As an open source book, it is intended to be re-used, revised, and repurposed by undergraduate students and academics in French studies.

    In our current pedagogical learning community on open education this semester, no department is more strongly represented than Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, where open educational initiatives exist and are expanding in Italian, German, French, and Spanish. Together, they are helping to radically expand access, equity, and engagement in foreign language study at Muhlenberg, a general academic requirement for all students at the College. Their work to create and integrate more OERs contributes importantly to the wider College commitment to foster inclusive pedagogies.

    Here are links to some of the OERs created in Pressbooks by faculty in Languages, Literatures, and Cultures:

    Cover
    Cover
  • OpenEd Week 2022 Highlight: Political Science

    OpenEd Week 2022 Highlight: Political Science

    This year, International Women’s Day falls within Open Education Week–an ideal time to highlight an OER focused on women and politics created by Professor Lanethea Mathews-Schultz and her students. In Spring 2019, Professor Mathews-Schultz taught a special topics course called 2018: The Political Year of the Woman, focusing on the record number of women elected to Congress the previous year. Students in the course collective researched and co-authored an OER book, 2018 Political Year of the Woman Election: A Critical Examination.

    In the introduction, Professor Mathews-Schultz and student co-author Alison Cummins write:

    This collection of papers, authored by undergraduate students at Muhlenberg College in the Spring of 2019, considers how women’s electoral successes and challenges in 2018 are both cause and consequence of the increased saliency of gender and of women’s and gender-related issues in electoral politics. Collectively, the authors include students in the sophomore through senior year and represent a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds and expertise, with majors ranging from political science to English to psychology to media and communication. Our diversity made this project an especially rewarding one. We offer this research, not as experts, but rather in the spirit of open inquiry, scholarly dialogue, and moving the conversation forward. We view our work as very much “in progress,” and with that in mind, we welcome feedback and dialogue…

    This class project, an example of open pedagogy in practice, illustrates the possibilities for supporting students’ development as authors and knowledge-creators, as well as their awareness of scholarship as a collaborative act. It is an early example of the way faculty at Muhlenberg are integrating OER co-creation in their courses, a practice that distinguishes much of the open educational work on campus, to be highlighted throughout this week.

  • OpenEd Week 2022 Highlight: Philosophy

    OpenEd Week 2022 Highlight: Philosophy

    Between March 7 and 11, Open Education Week, the Digital Learning Team is highlighting open education projects by faculty and students at Muhlenberg, including open educational resources and open educational practices and pedagogies. As we begin to build momentum, support, infrastructure, and expertise, we want to create space for recognizing some of the earliest open education efforts at Muhlenberg that have helped us learn what is possible and what kinds of organization and support are necessary to continue to build these efforts.

    The first project we highlight is the recently published OER by Tad Robinson, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Arguments in Context: An Introduction to Critical Thinking, available in our Pressbooks catalog here: https://open.muhlenberg.pub/arguments-in-context/

    In his acknowledgements at the outset of the book, Professor Robinson writes, “In my view, courses in ‘Critical Thinking’ are difficult to teach well, and this text is my effort to make this task a little easier.” This OER project grew out of Professor Robinson’s engagement in the 2019-20 pedagogical learning community facilitated by Tim Clarke and Tina Hertel. Tad also acknowledges, in addition to support and feedback from colleagues, “the many students whose questions and comments helped me to improve and refine the text along the way.” With its open license (Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial), the text can be adopted and adapted, in part or in whole, by faculty elsewhere teaching critical thinking. “Overall, the text aims to equip readers with a set of tools for working through important decisions and disagreements, and to help them become more careful and active thinkers.”

    Choosing to write and openly publish a textbook is an enormous challenge and I recall the questions Professor Robinson posed during the learning community seminars that helped all of us critically consider the case for open educational resources. Two years later, it is very exciting to see this book now published in the open!

  • Call for Participants: Faculty Learning Community on Open Scholarship

    Dear Muhlenberg Faculty,

    logo for the open faculty learning community that reads hashtag openberg

    You are invited to join a yearlong Faculty Learning Community on Open Scholarship, facilitated by Ben Carter, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, and in collaboration with the Digital Learning Team. This FLC is supported by the office of the Associate Dean for Digital Learning. Open scholarship can be broadly defined as scholarly activities that aim to increase accessibility to the data, processes and/or results of scholarly research through engagement with communities beyond our disciplines. However, because it is open, is practiced in many different ways and is actively in flux, open scholarship is difficult to define. It includes:

    • Open access publishing- i.e., publishing in journals or books that provide access to all- usually via the internet.
    • Open publishing- i.e., forms of publishing outside of the “normal” book and/or journal formats, e.g. multimedia, data, community presentations, or software code.
    • Open pedagogy- i.e., engaging students with “publics” as a form of teaching and research.
    • The use of open source tools- i.e., community-built tools freely available to anyone (usually, but not exclusively, software) and/or contributions to the development of open source scholarly tools.
    • Open educational resources (openly available textbooks- frequently written by faculty and peer-reviewed).
    • And more, including the dynamic interrelationship of the above.

    The purpose of the FLC is to provide faculty with a community in which to read, digest, and discuss current scholarship on “openness” and combine that knowledge with disciplinary, institutional, and individual factors to construct an open scholarship plan.

    Goals

    Note that, in the spirit of openness, the final learning goals of the FLC will be derived from input from the participants. However, these goals may include:

    • Providing a scholarly community in which to discuss and critically assess scholarship on “openness.”
    • Increasing awareness of the ethical dimensions of open scholarship, including those associated with diversity, access and inclusion.
    • Fostering awareness of issues surrounding the ways that non-traditional deployments of scholarship are evaluated and considered for tenure and promotion.
    • Discussing and weighing the benefits and drawbacks of the wide variety of possible ways to interact with “publics.”
    • Analytically evaluate different means and modes of publication.

    Expectations

    The FLC will entail two components. First, there will be four (1.5 hour) in-person meetings during the Fall Semester of 2017 largely focused upon the ethics and practice of open scholarship. Potential topics for those sessions include those above and will be determined based upon the collective input of the participants. Open scholarship is an extremely broad concept; we hope to engage with those most appropriate for the participants. Second, there will be a final project. This project may take many forms. One possibility is a personal open scholarship plan.

    Schedule

    4 meetings in the fall.
    2 meetings in the spring.

    Benefits

    Faculty will receive a $500 stipend to support their participation in this FLC and their work on a related project. This compensation is in recognition of the time and energy that participation in the community entails. Of course, the primary benefit is the face-to-face engagement with your colleagues.

    Application

    To apply, please use the following form to submit a brief statement on your interest in and experience with open scholarship, and what you hope to learn through this experience.

    https://goo.gl/forms/WEJKAPIN3uFd2nEh2
    Application deadline is June 9, 2017.

    At the end of the FLC, participants will be asked to complete a short survey reflecting on their experience and how it will likely impact their teaching practice and scholarship.

  • Open Education Workshop & Talk

    poster for this event is embedded. text from that poster follows Working in the open: tools and techniques to open learning open education: ownership, access, and the place of pedagogy

    The idea of free and open sharing in education is not new.  In fact, sharing is probably the most basic characteristic of education: education is sharing knowledge, insights and information with others, upon which new knowledge, skills, ideas and understanding can be built.–Open Education Week

    Open pedagogy uses OER as a jumping-off point for remaking our courses so that they become not just repositories for content, but platforms for learning, collaboration, and engagement with the world outside the classroom. –Robin DeRosa and Scott Robison, “Pedagogy, Technology, and the Example of Open Educational Resources”

    On February 17, 2017, the Digital Learning Team and the Faculty Center for Teaching are co-sponsoring two events exploring the topic of open education with Robin DeRosa from Plymouth State University.  Robin is a professor and the director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at Plymouth State, where she also contributes widely to conversations about the future of higher education, and the ways that collaborating around open education can help make academic scholarship more relevant and accessible to the public.  The resources gathered here will help orient interested faculty and staff to the topics we will be exploring during Robin’s workshop and lecture on Friday.  For those who were unable to attend last month’s Tech Tuesday, Jen Jarson and Lora Taub facilitated A Conversation on Open Education, and the video recording of that session is available here.

    Readings

    The reading by Robin, “My Open Textbook: Pedagogy and Practice,” offers a detailed narrative of her engagement with open pedagogy over many semesters, and a look at how her practices and beliefs about teaching and learning in the open and online have continued to develop.  Towards the end of the article, she raises several critical questions about the “pitfalls, barriers, and challenges” she’s still wrestling with.  These questions provide some rich ground for our conversation with Robin while she’s at Muhlenberg.  Because she shares her journey into open education, Robin’s account is particularly instructive for those of us just beginning to think about this.

    Steve Greenlaw is a Professor in the University of Mary Washington Economics Department and describes in this short article his interest in OERs as an alternative to the expensive commercial introductory textbooks in his field. In Open Educational Resources (OER): One Path to Making Higher Ed More Affordable, Greenlaw writes:

    Estimates of annual textbook costs range from $500 to more than $1000 per student. Note the disconnect between the price per book and the spending per student. How can we reconcile these two points? One way is understand that 50% of college students report going without the text required for a course. Another way is to recognize that increasingly students spend their textbook dollars on used books or rentals, which while cheaper than new books are still pricey.

    For many faculty, the pressing issue of access and expense drives their turn to OERs.  In this regard, there is a social justice dimension to the open education movement that merits our discussion.

    But there is more to open pedagogy than just replacing expensive commercial texts, says David Wiley in “What is Open Pedagogy?”  Wiley is Chief Academic Officer of Lumen Learning, “an organization dedicated to increasing student success, reinvigorating pedagogy, and improving the affordability of education through the adoption of open educational resources by schools, community and state colleges, and universities.” You can read more about him here.  In particular, Wiley is interested in the potential of open pedagogy to “kill the disposable assignment.”  What is a disposable assignment?

    “[A]ssignments that students complain about doing and faculty complain about grading. They’re assignments that add no value to the world – after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away. Not only do these assignments add no value to the world, they actually suck value out of the world.”

    In Wiley’s terms, instances of open pedagogy are assignments that engage with OERs. Indeed, for Wiley, the ultimate test of whether an assignment is open is that “the assignment is impossible without the permissions granted by open licenses.”  How are the kinds of assignments he’s iterating similar to those that Robin DeRosa is describing in her work?

    The last reading included here describes the work of a learning community at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where a group of faculty and librarians explored OER integration.  In What Does It Mean to Open Education? Perspectives on Using Open Educational Resources at a US Public University, the authors consider the variety of reasons participants came to consider OERs, and the questions and discussions that emerged for them along the way.

    “[W]e realized that in asking a relatively straightforward question about using different learning materials — “What does it mean to use Open Educational Resources?” — we were, in fact, looking at the foundations of higher education itself. We were not just asking about credible educational resources; we were asking, “What does it mean to open education?” In so doing, we also began to question how much the systems of higher education are themselves closed and self-replicating. We questioned how these systems prioritize conserving the educational institution itself over actual mastery of content and developing intellectual habits of mind. Through our discussions, “opening education” grew to mean encouraging a revival within our students and ourselves of the essence of scholarship: to experiment and discover rather than to assert and repeat, and to engage in a practice of openness as part of a community of teacher-learners — both inside and outside of the classroom.

    What can we learn from the discussions and processes presented in this article? What would a learning community to support exploration and integration of OERs in teaching and learning at Muhlenberg look like? How would this intersect with the Domain of One’s Own initiative, and other pedagogical initiatives aimed at creating more open, more inclusive and accessible learning experiences in the liberal arts at Muhlenberg?

    Please join us on Friday, February 17, as we begin exploring these questions with Robin DeRosa.