Students and faculty have completed the first three weeks of the semester at Muhlenberg. Most teaching and learning is happening online, with a smaller number of courses for first year students being taught on campus or in a blended environment that integrates in-person and online learning activities. We dedicated the summer to helping faculty prepare for this semester, offering 14 sessions of our faculty development course Camp Design Online. Throughout the summer, we were awed by the generosity staff and faculty poured into this effort, as well as an outstanding and dedicated group of student Digital Learning Assistants who ensured that student perspectives were present and shaping conversations around online course design and instruction.
This is one of several upcoming posts featuring the variety of practices animating and humanizing online courses at Muhlenberg. A good place to begin for those interested in understanding more about teaching and learning online is this video interview with Flower Darby, a leader in online learning and author of the text Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science to Online Classes.
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.
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?
“[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.
In mid-October, Jim Groom and Lauren Brumfeld of Reclaim Hosting spent two jam-packed days with us at Muhlenberg, helping us open the door (or Pandora’s Box, as Jim might argue) to our Domain of One’s Own faculty and student learning community. Time spent with Jim and Lauren was everything we’d hoped it would be–catalyzing and supportive, a chance to peer around some corners to glimpse “what might be” even while we’re in the thick of what is needed now to get off to a strong start. I’ve reflected on our work with Jim and Lauren here in some detail, but in this post I just want to provide a roundup of the several blogs that have spun out of those two October days.
Over on his domain, Tim Clarke is inviting us to consider What Would a Domain of One’s Own Implementation Cohort Look Like?
This post is my effort to extend this question, and share my thinking about what may, and what may not be helpful to schools as they implement Domain of One’s Own initiatives. I’m especially interested in teasing out if there is enough commonality among institutions, or enough similarity around this work, or enough fun to be had, to warrant effort to form an implementation cohort.
One of the things that strengthens our Domain of One’s Own initiative is the multiple perspectives and backgrounds of the people collaborating to make it happen. Jen Jarson, over on the ACRLog blog, situates Domain of One’s Own in the context of her work on information literacy within librarianship. In her post, Jen asks, “What does open pedagogy for information literacy look like?” and is connecting our work on Domains to larger interests in open pedagogy:
The success of Domains, Jim said in his keynote, is not about technology. Instead, its success is the openness it facilitates: thinking out loud, engaging in reflective practice with a community of peers. As part of the Domains story, Jim shared his experiences creating ds106, an open, online course on digital storytelling. As described on the site, the course was “part storytelling workshop, part technology training, and, most importantly, part critical interrogation of the digital landscape that is ever increasingly mediating how we communicate with one another.” The course embodied openness in many ways. UMW students enrolled in the semester-long course and served as its core community, but the course was open to anyone who wanted to participate alongside the UMW students. But the part that piqued my interest most was its open pedagogy; Jim talked about how he did the assignments with the students and also described how students created the assignments. “The only reason it worked,” Jim said, “was because we built an open ecosystem for it to thrive.
Jen’s post concludes with the observation that “Open pedagogy is about being flexible and responsive. It means meeting learners where they are, rather than where we think they are or should be”–and this seems to me another excellent way to think about the value of students working with/on their own domains.
We were really excited that Lauren Brumfeld accompanied Jim on this campus visit, because as a recent graduate, she paid close attention to student perspectives and experiences. This is a focal point in her reflections on A Visit to Muhlenberg College where she casts special attention on our student Digital Learning Assistants:
The Digital Learning Assistants, DLA’s for short, are in the beginning stages of something very similar to UMW’s Digital Knowledge Center. The DLA’s are a diverse group ranging from incoming freshmen to graduating seniors. These students are all at different stages of finding their “niche” in the digital world. This semester they’re framing out what it means to provide peer tutoring to other students, and how they can best teach themselves and learn from each other.
Jim and I had a chance to chat with them on Friday afternoon about what this teaching and learning could look like. Any passerby could have seen how much excitement was sitting in that room- the DLA’s are so ready & willing to better themselves and their peers. I loved it.
One of the DLAs, Meredith Salisbury, has published her Notes on DLAing on her domain–her first ever blog post.
I’ve spent the last few years of my life nerding out about social media + new media research. I have this fascination with how we portray ourselves and communicate with others online. I wonder how the concept of a DoOO impacts the ways in which we think about what we put online and how it will be different then the existing social media and web presences that we have already. What’s different about domains is that I own whatever I put on my site instead of it living in something like canvas or being sold as data by Facebook or Tumblr. But, the thing is that sites like ello were created with the same concept and they didn’t get adopted… I guess my lasting question is do students (or anyone) care about owning our data or are people so used to being the product that its to late…
P.S. Follow the DLAs on Twitter cause we’re the best
Really, follow the DLAs on Twitter @bergDLAs. They are the best!
Poster above reads: Jim Groom, co-founder of Reclaim Hosting. A Pandora’s Box for teaching, scholarship, and identity. Thursday, October 13th. 7:30 p.m. Trexler Library Concourse.
Co-sponsored by Provost’s Office, Digital Learning Team, Office of Information Technology, and Trexler Library. For more information contact Tim Clarke. Muhlenberg College.
A liberal arts education has never been more important than it is today as digital modes of communication enable us to connect with one another or to retreat into a fragmented world of reinforced prejudice. In this interactive presentation, Chris Long will use Twitter to demonstrate the meaning of the liberal arts and the capacity of words to create … and destroy … community.
Participants arrived prepared to engage one another through Twitter. Dean Long’s Twitter handle is @cplong and the hashtag for the event is: #MCLA16.
He is also co-founder of the Public Philosophy Journal (@PubPhilJ), a project that has received over $780,000 of funding from the Mellon Foundation to create an innovative online space of digital scholarship and communication.
To learn more about his administrative approach and his recent research in Philosophy, digital scholarly communication, and the educational use of social media technologies, visit his blog: www.cplong.org. He is the host of the Digital Dialogue podcast (thedigitaldialogue.com) and can be reached on Twitter @cplong and @deancplong.
