Estimated reading time for this article:
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Speakers:
Apurva: Welcome everybody, hello. It's always exciting to be hosting another Office Hours on the Rebus Community side and with the Open Education Network. My name is Apurva Ashok, I'm the Director of open education at Rebus Community. And I want to start off by first acknowledging that I am coming to you today from a warm, but very gray city. I'm located on the traditional territories of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the First Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples.
And I'm very grateful to be enjoying some warmer weather and enjoying some rain on this lovely Tuesday. You may also know this city as Toronto, Canada. As I noted, I work at the Rebus Community. Rebus is a Canadian charity that helps educational institutions build human capacity in OER publishing and open education through a variety of ways, including free resources, professional development and webinars like this one.
As I mentioned earlier, the Office Hours sessions are co-organized with the Open Education Network. And I'm going to turn it over to Karen, to tell you a little more about her and the Open Education Network.
Karen: Thank you, Apurva. We are happy to be here, as always in hosting Office Hours with you, in the Rebus Community and with everyone else on this call. My name is Karen Lauritsen, I'm with the Open Education Network. And we are a community of professionals in higher education working together to make things more open and equitable. Today we are joined by four guests, and we are going to be talking about OER and instructional design.
And we're calling it part two because we had a discussion last month that was lively and very engaging, and we just wanted to continue with that momentum. And so, today we're going to talk specifically about student-centered OER development. I'm going to go ahead and introduce our guests. They will talk for a few moments about their experience with the topic, and then we will look to you for the conversation and questions.
And so, before we get started I will say that while the OEN is based at the University of Minnesota, I am coming to you from San Louis Obispo, California, which is the ancestral home of the Northern Chumash. And with that, I will let you know who we are joined by today. Iwona Gniadek is here with us, she's the Educational Developer at the University of Manitoba.
Also, Veronica Vold, Open Education Instructional Designer with Open Oregon. Brenna Clark Gray who's Coordinator with the Educational Technologies area at Thompson Rivers University. And Nicolas Parés, who is Teaching & Learning Specialist with the University of Denver. And so, to get us started I'm going to turn things over to Veronica.
Veronica: Thank you, Karen, and good morning everyone. I am Veronica Vold, she/her pronouns, coming to you from Eugene, Oregon. I live on stolen land that originally belonged to the Kalapuya Ihili, the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians and the Winefully. And I am really thrilled to be with you and take this hour together to explore student-centered design and equity at the heart of open educational resources.
And I wonder if we would begin by just starting with some breaths together. Often when we talk about equity, we're dipping into some really deep experiences of exclusion and privilege and it's an emotional journey. So if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to use a technique that my kindergartener last year taught me, called volcano breaths. So just to set us off, if you wouldn't mind loosening your shoulders up a little bit, we're going to do three special kinds of breaths.
These are volcano breaths. So you're going to raise your arms above your head, if you feel comfortable and inhale, and then we're going to release that breath like lava flowing down. So we're going to do that together. All right, so first breath, we're going to inhale, exhale. Let's do that one more time, we're going to inhale, exhale. Yeah. Thank you. A big part of my work as the open education instructional designer is being with faculty and instructors as they are surviving the Covid-19 pandemic.
And living in an era of racial uprising and renewed awakening for dominant cultures and people who are occupying a lot of power in their institutions. And in my experience so far I started this job supporting all 24 public colleges and universities in Oregon for about five months now. And repeatedly as I'm meeting with people in these little Zoom spaces that we hold and hearing about the yearning and desire they have to support their students in meaningful learning experiences.
What I notice is a physical response that this doesn't just sit in our intellectual capacities, but this work actually rests in our bodies. And for many of us, the histories that we've lived through, the histories that our families and our generations have lived through, also surface and are present in the conversations we have. I wanted to start by sharing a quote from James Baldwin, the African-American novelist and cultural critic as he helps us to center that history.
James Baldwin said in 1965 in Ebony Magazine, "History as no one seems to know is not merely something to be read, and it does not refer merely or even principally to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities and our aspirations."
To me, when we start to focus on student-centered instructional design in open educational resources we have the opportunity to confront the history living within us and around us to start to think critically about the legacies of exclusion and control that entered the room before we did. Student-centered and equity-centered instructional design in open education doesn't happen by accident, it doesn't happen just by virtue of something being open or by virtue of something being OER enabled pedagogy.
It really is a journey of intention and of deep listening. One of the stories I wanted to share with you was the opportunity I had in my capacity in the state-wide role to start an open education instructional design community of practice. So colleagues from all over the state of Oregon who are working in instructional design and higher education have an opportunity to come together and we focus our time once a month on thinking through questions of equity in open education.
And repeatedly the urge has come up in our consultations, those one-on-one consultations with instructors and faculty to move at the speed of trust. That we are developing relationships that require trust, that require being seen, in order to talk about the experiences that students are having in classrooms that we design. And there's frustration with that, the one-on-one relationship building and the one-on-one conversations are so meaningful and so important.
But the operational agency around that instructor or around that relationship also create the conditions for the conversation itself. I recently read an awesome article on the intentional agency versus operational agency that instructional designers engage when they're talking about open educational practices. And I'd like us to consider in this hour together how we can move and build capacity for operational agency.
Our intentional agency is what we can bring to a consultation or to a conversation. Whose voices are we centering? Are we building a course for the full universe of learners, for students with disabilities, students of color, first generation students, students who are documented, or undocumented, students who are queer or trans? Are we representing their voices?
Those are really important conversations to have, and they represent what this article referred to as our intentional agency, the intention or the ethics that we're bringing to the conversation. The big shift is to operational agency, how we have the capacity to put concrete action behind the intention. So our institutions investing in instructional design and equity, our institutions creating professional development that focus equity in open educational practices.
Is senior leadership investing in those individual conversations and reflecting on its value for students? The other thing I wanted to encourage us to consider in our time together today is our relationships with DEI coordinators and units on our campuses. Often offices of online learning, units that are dedicated to instructional design, offices that are dedicated to teaching and learning don't necessarily have strong relationships or connections with the offices that are dedicated to holding an institution accountable to its values for students.
So that's one thing I'd love to open up together in our time is what is your relationship with your diversity and equity and inclusion office or coordinator on your campus? And then, finally, I also wanted to share a really exciting project that Open Oregon educational resources has taken up. We have an equity in open education cohort that is created by Amy Hofer and Jen Klaudinyi from Portland Community College.
And 60 plus faculty members historically have come together to focus on a four-week course where they talk together about culturally responsive pedagogy. And universal design for learning and universal design in general and open pedagogy. And we're starting a new cohort that's focused on teaching and learning support in particular.
So that all of the teaching and learning colleagues who are involved in creating learning experiences can come together, share their stories, and talk about how to advance and champion open education on their campuses. So those are just a few stories that I wanted to share with you. And I also wanted to offer us this final quote from Tressie McMillan Cottom, this is from 2015, pre-pandemic.
This is in response to a wonderful international conference on distance learning and online learning. Tressie says, "What I do need are specifics about how this moment is not like those other moments, those old moments of educational expansion that were shaped be powerful white interests, wealth, and racism to expand access without furthering justice." In my sense in the relationships I'm building, in my capacity to talk with many institutions in a single meeting is that this is a moment of change and transformation.
The pandemic has taken so much from us and continues to take so much from us especially those who are most vulnerable. And we have an opportunity to shift and to recenter our priorities in open education to think critically about what we are doing to advance equity for our students and not to repeat patterns that privilege wealth, that privilege white interest and to center justice in our expansion.
And I don't want to take too much time, I want to pass it onto our next person to continue our conversation. Karen, would you share who our next person is?
Karen: Sure, Iwona, over to you and thank you, Veronica.
Veronica: Yeah, thank you.
Iwona: Hello, jin dobre. My name is Iwona Gniadek, she/her pronouns. And I am located on Treaty One territory, in what is now Manitoba, Canada, the original lands of Anishnabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples and on the homeland of the Métis Nation. I also want to acknowledge Treaty Three and Treaty Five lands, which supply my home with tap water and hydro.
I have been a settler on these lands since 2007, and I am originally from Poland. My journey with OER started in 2009, when I joined English Online, a publicly funded settlement and language training organization for immigrants to Manitoba. The director was an avid OER supporter and advocate, so we shared our content on the English Online website and incorporated open practices in teaching and learning.
For example, we built self-directed open courses on Wiki Spaces, if anybody remembers Wiki Spaces. And then, I moved from English Online to the University of Manitoba, where I design non-credit and for-credit courses. And here for example, some HR courses included optional social media activities, specifically Twitter, so that learners could find like-minded professional peers outside of the course and engage in digital identity formation and expression.
And I also had an opportunity to incorporate open badges, a social currency to foster peer-to-peer engagement. And today I'd like to share with you some OER tools that I use during the design process. And these tools help me and the instructors focus on centering learners' needs, desires, contexts, when developing OER. I always say to instructors, "People first then content and technology."
So the first tool is called the persona, and I'm going to share a link in the chat. And so the folder has some templates that I use and an example. And I use the persona tool specifically to build a shared understanding of who we are designing for. So we don't think about a faceless crowd of students or of people but we focus on specific individuals. And also to build empathy for the learner, so the personas have a photo, have a name, they're detailed.
So we can easily empathize with the person we're designing for. And I invite instructors to create the learner personas with me, based on their knowledge and experience with their past or future learners. So I'll give you an example of a current project. I'm currently working on a self-study OER resource, focusing on incorporating equity, diversity and inclusion in teaching, which I'm co-developing with a committee of representatives from eight partner institutions in Manitoba.
And as a committee we engaged in creating a set of personas, one for each institution. And once we compiled the results, we understood how diverse the audience is, ranging from trades instructors to tenured professors nearing retirement, instructors working at urban universities, and small rural colleges. So the audience is very diverse and ideally you would perhaps want to build multiple resources targeting different audiences, but we have a brief for one.
So the personas helped us build a shared understanding of who our audience is and suggest content and pedagogical approaches to address their needs. So for example, we talked about including scenario-based activities to build empathy, relationship building activities, a glossary of terms, a statistical discussion of enrolment and completion of various learner groups.
We also want the resource to be fully downloadable, so that folks in areas where the internet is patchy can download and study offline. And these are ideas linked to specific personas in the set that we've created. And the persona can also be used to empower learners and support their agency. In one course, I shared the personas with my learners and in this case the persona descriptions were accompanied by suggested learning pathways through an online course.
And learners were tasked to review the personas and choose one that matched them and follow the suggested pathway. And if there was no match, learners were encouraged to draw their own persona and speak to a facilitator to build a personalized learning plan depending on their interests and goals. So the learner was always at the center, is always at the center with the persona activity.
And the second tool that's also the template is in the folder is called transition matrix. And the transition matrix is a story told by the learner persona about the learning change that they've experienced as a result of engaging in a learning experience. So the story starts with an initial state, before taking a course and then ends with a target state. And the target state is illustrated by some tangible outputs which naturally lead towards specifying learning objectives, which sometimes are difficult conversations to have when we design courses.
So if you're looking for tools to create learner-centered OER, I highly recommend using those two tools to guide your conversations and learning design decisions. Thank you, and over to Brenna.
Brenna: Thank you. Hi everybody, I'm so pleased to be here. I warned the organizers at the beginning about my kid who was home sick from school today. So he may arrive, he usually chooses when I'm in the middle of like the most genius thought to appear with some unspecified meat. So just a heads up. My name is Brenna Clark Gray, I'm Coordinator of Educational Technologies at Thompson Rivers University.
I'm an uninvited settler in Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc in the unceded traditional land of Secwépemc'ulucw. And I also like to reflect that my journey to this space has also been shaped by time spent in Algonquin Anishnabeg, in Mi’kmaq & Wolastoqiyik and in Qayqayt lands. And I like to reflect on that because we work many of us in settler colonial institutions that demand a certain lack of connection to territory.
This ability to kind of float and a lack of relationality, which is the exact opposite of what I want to talk about today. I wanted to open by asking how everybody is doing, and if you feel comfortable sharing how you're feeling today in the chat, I welcome it. I'm a bit discombobulated with a kid home and all the other competing demands on time. It's hard to center and focus on any one individual task.
And I particularly like to check in and genuinely ask how people are doing because we spend a lot of time in these very screen-y interactions, where we present information at each other. Which again, is not often as maybe relational as we might hope for particularly our educational interactions to be. So I hope that if you feel comfortable you'll genuinely share how you're feeling in the chat and reflect on a multitude of effective experiences that we bring to these sessions as actual whole human beings in whole human bodies.
Which again, I think our institutions would prefer we forget about, a lot of the time. I'm hungry, I'm also getting hungry and it's not even lunchtime in DC, it's the morning still, but I'm also hungry. Okay, so I am very interested in educational technology support which is what I do primarily faculty support. Although I do get the pleasure of working with students as well.
I'm interested in that support work as care work, thinking about it that way, and thinking about how to center care in the practice educational technologies. And we hold office hours like this at TRU. I hold four hours of office hours a week, my colleagues do as well. During the pandemic, a sort of upswing as we first transitioned to online and for that first fully online year we were holding six to eight, sometimes 10 hours of office hours every week.
And the thing that I really came to realize was that our community of faculty were very much using that as a place to vent, check in, make sure they were feeling like they were on the right track and get centered. And a faculty member said to me at the end of one session, she said, "I always feel so much better after I talk to you." And I said, "That's really nice." And then, she left and I was like, "Maybe this is why I'm burning out, because this is kind of like the whole campus' therapy session."
Thinking about my work as care work has really helped me to consider what my own priorities are in the work that I do. And so, I very much appreciate Maha Bali’s definition of care pedagogy as relational. Pedagogy that's relational and pedagogy that includes concern for the person. And I think that that's a straightforward thing to conceptualize in the classroom.
We're in the classroom and we're showing respect and consideration for the individual learners in the room. But sometimes when we're creating OER, which can feel a little bit like a one-sided thing, like I'm developing this thing that I'm then pushing out into a world as opposed to a relational project, it can maybe be a little less explicit or less clear how we center care in the work of actually just developing OER.
So I've got a couple of strategies I'm going to suggest and I'm hoping that together we can think through some strategies for centering care in OER development in the same way we might expect of ourselves in a classroom setting. So things like centering access first and foremost something can't be used by students who can't access it. And I do believe that centering access is a key component of centering care.
And these strategies don't have to be difficult, or they don't have to be complicated. Yes, learning all the nuances and ins and outs of UDL for example is a project that one undertakes as part of their professional practice. But I think there are small things, making sure videos that we include are captioned, using proper header functions instead of just straight up text so that screen readers can navigate through the documents we create.
Checking our H5P objects for accessibility, Iwona mentioned the idea of fully offline functionality for we certainly have tons of rural learners here at TRU, so thinking about if I'm going to include an H5P object because I want some interactivity in my OER, what does the offline learner experience? Can we create like a printout of the same exercise that they can do by hand? This kind of thing.
Attending to contrast and alt text, these are all really important key pieces of demonstrating care for the myriad of learners who are going to come to our texts. I think the trauma informed approaches are also useful here, particularly if your OER contains difficult or triggering content, thinking about how you orient the reader or the user to that content and doing so in a trauma informed way is really helpful.
And Karen Ray Costa has some great resources available for like thinking through trauma informed pedagogies in online spaces, which I think can be helpful here as well. I also think that centering care in our OER development can involve things like ensuring that we build in space for reflection when we're creating whether it's a textbook or an exercise. And especially reflection that encourages the learner to make connections to their own life and lived experience.
Not only does that help the content feel relevant to the learner, but it also suggests to the learner that even in this asynchronous relationship, I as the content creator am interested in you as the person and how this content applies to your life. I also think that we can demonstrate care by creating space for localization and indigenization when we share our texts into the world. So how does this text get adopted locally?
Is there space to recognize the people who live and work and breathe in the space where this text is actually going to be used? And then, finally and I think really importantly, centering care in our OER development involves building in space for feedback from learners. And I think oftentimes our OER processes are really good, we often have built in structures to do peer review, or check in with colleagues or get reflective feedback back from colleagues.
But building in the space for learners to reach out to you with feedback about an OER I think is an incredibly valuable step in a learner-centered text, that also lets learners know that their experience of OER is of value and that we want that feedback and we want to take it on board and use it. That also means though never ask a question that you don't know how to deal with the answer to.
So if you're going to ask for feedback, working into a workflow or a revision process how that feedback will be used is really important. But I think it's a central piece that sometimes is missing from the institutional processes is that learner feedback piece. I hope I didn't go over. I'm going to hand it off to Nicholas and he can share his thoughts. So thanks so much everybody.
Nicholas: Yeah, thank you so much, Brenna. And thank you for having me I appreciate this. The University of Denver and where I currently live resides on the lands of the Ute and Arapaho and Cheyenne peoples, way before I was here or my grandparents. This is a great group, I really appreciated the, acknowledge Brenna's focus on care, Iwona's focus on personas, I intended to speak to those things in practice.
So I won't do that, I'll get a little more philosophical, I guess, with you all as I approach and less practical. And I hope all of it ties together a lot of all of our thoughts, that it was a really great three little share outs there, so I really appreciate that. I guess for me, I think of maybe because in college I took a lot of humanities courses and I read a lot of Edward Said and the Occident and Orientalism and that kind of thing.
And so, otherness in our work and not othering our students and bringing belonging to our classrooms through care and a sense of belonging has been pretty, I've tried to make it as practical as possible, especially initial conversations with maybe not outcome conversations, sitting down and figuring out outcomes of a course. But maybe and even then there's some opportunity for reflection.
But I think I like to have instructors think about and almost use personas and frame it around how can we make sure that they feel like they belong? And belonging shows up in a couple of ways. A sense of belonging is defined as being accepted, valued, included and encouraged by others, teachers and peers in spaces. So a sense of belonging can be related to students' cognition, affect and behaviors.
In other words, students can think, feel and act as they belong. This sense of belonging can help them connect and engage, think and feel like they're students. Feel like they belong in the classroom. And at the same time, knowing that belonging can come and go, they can feel like they belong here in this class, reading this book, engaging with these students, and in this instructor and in other class they may not have that experience or in a larger space, the college space, the university space they may not have that sense of belonging.
So if we design with consideration of having our students see themselves whether that is through visuals that represent many students, many people in our course designs, in our pages and our chosen images and imagery. Opportunity to reflect and think about and bring their contexts and experiences into the chapter or into the page or the lesson. That's a really practical fashion, just some good really reflective essential questioning that brings them in and pulls them in.
Makes the reading less just page after page 30-pages of reading. And how did you bring this? What do you see? What were your steps? Is this the same experience that you had growing up? Or does this resonate with you? Those types of questions can help bring the students feeling and bring them into the learning and learning experience. And then, the behaviors and I work primarily as a teaching and learning specialist, I do quite a bit of course design and curriculum design.
But also a good half of my work is just with instructors while they teach. I like to tell them I'm a partner in teaching and learning but also an instructional designer on the fly. And a lot of my work is just helping them to engage students throughout the learning experience, create opportunities. Not just invite student experience and student opinion on materials but embrace it.
Let's plan to take action, let's plan to in the first quarter of the class they don't feel like the reading resonates with them or the experiences aren't super relevant. Well, how can we work to make those more relevant, bring them back into the materials? A lot of that is what a good facilitator, good instructor and instructors play facilitator and designer as they teach, in my mind.
Let's see, what else did I want to talk about? I feel like you all hit on so much. I also love to do, I just did a presentation last week where I brought in our office of disabilities and I had them share out on UDL. I didn't say a word, I love universal design for learning. But I felt like the student services needed to be the one to speak and share that opinion and it landed quite well and I've gotten emails, I have conversations coming with instructors around implementing UDL.
Because they heard it from someone who wasn't me, from the students, from the people servicing the students, and that was massively impactful in comparison to my own participation in UDL workshops in the past. So bringing them in, students into the process in this kind of belonging framing can be a very powerful thing. And centering care through Covid has Brenna mentioned has been huge as well. So I hope I tied some of this together. I really appreciate the speakers before me, they've laid some great groundwork.
Karen: Thank you, Nicholas, and thank you Iwona, Veronica and Brenna for sharing such thoughtful insights and guidance for all of us as we consider creating a sense of belonging in the student-centered experience. So this is the time when we turn to all of you to direct and guide the conversation based on your own reflections, your own lived experience or what you're trying to accomplish locally.
So please feel free to pop questions into the chat or unmute. We're, I think an intimate enough group here that should be pretty easy to have a conversation. So I see Kaitlin put something in the chat here. We spoke a lot about care work in today's session. I wonder if each of you can speak to what the biggest barriers for you have been in applying these approaches in the process.
Brenna: I'll start, if that's okay. I think that everybody is either burnt out or burning out. And care is sustaining and care is valuable and care can fill us up. But care is also a very particular form of labor that is emotionally taxing. And I went to a session on trauma informed approaches to burn out this time last year with Karen Ray Costa and she said, "How do you know when you're burning out?"
And I recognized in that session that for me it's often when my patience begins to ebb, when my capacity for care feels like it is… So there are all kinds of institutional structural issues like many of our institutions are in an austerity mode at the moment. An audacity mode too a little bit. But an austerity mode at the moment and I think many of us are experiencing extremely heavy workloads and a lack of appropriate staffing.
The demands for classroom instructors of multi-modal teaching that many people are either taking on either institutionally required or because they want to reach their students in this very complex moment. These are things that are impacting everyone's ability to care. And I think that that's going to continue to be an issue because we don't actually get over burn out very easily.
Apurva: Iwona, Nicholas, Veronica, any barriers that you see that you wanted to highlight?
Iwona: I think one of the barriers that I've encountered is time because courses usually are packed with content and with activities, with assignments. And there is not enough time to build relationships or to reflect on what's going on on what we're learning and connect with one another. And when I've spoken with some indigenous students that's what was one of their biggest concerns, that there was basically no space for relationship building and for showing that we care for one another.
So I think a very important consideration is to perhaps include a pause week, a slow week in a course, somewhere halfway through. Because face-to-face courses have reading weeks, online courses at least the ones that I've taken and I've designed with the instructors never had a reading week. But I think it would be a good practice to introduce and also give students this opportunity to slow down, to check where they are and care for themselves and for others.
Veronica: I think a barrier that I've seen in the work of creating communities of care is that historically as Brenna said, having a body hasn't been okay in the academy and institutions of higher learning. We've privileged very western, very white, very historically masculine understandings of what it means to study and engage in the work of building knowledge. And so, I think a barrier is having a body, having kids, having feelings, having emotions, having disappointment, and managing trauma.
And I think a solution to that is to acknowledge the burn out, to acknowledge the disappointment and especially in working with instructors to make it okay for them to disclose that they are also struggling alongside their students. I think a barrier to actually receiving care is to feel like I don't deserve it. I'm not worthy. There's something wrong with me, that's why I'm so tired, that's why I'm not learning.
And I think normalizing struggle right now, especially, is a collective solution. And being honest about where our institutions have failed us. Like the audacity of operating in austerity I think is a really important link because it means that students are taking on more of the burden. Instructors are taking on more of the burden and our institutions are chugging along rather than inviting pause or rather than inviting recognition.
So I think that that's huge, that's collective, no individual can address that alone. But I think speaking the truth about what we've been managing and how it's not separated from our desire to offer students what they need, our desire to offer ourselves what we need is connected to it. Yeah. And I see in the chat shamelessly sharing an essay, cool on feminist digital pedagogy, thanks, Brenna.
I will also shamelessly share in the chat we had the good fortune of hosting Maha Bali as our keynote speaker with Open Oregon Educational Resources this past Friday. And Maha's talk is recorded and openly licensed, and I invite you to review it and sit with it. One of the strengths I think Maha brings is the ability to normalize and validate where you are and what you're managing and see that as a strength connected to your work. So, share that in the chat as well.
Apurva: Veronica, and I'll drop in a link to Maha's blog because I know, Brenna, you referenced that earlier. And I'm also going to drop in a link maybe Karen Ray Costa's Twitter for those of you on Twitter, so you can learn more and continue this conversation outside of this hour. We're nearing the end of our hour, but I wanted to invite more questions to the room. And while folks are thinking, ask this one from Michelle.
Michelle appreciates the recommendation to include opportunities for reflection. I know, Nicholas, you mentioned that, I think all four of our speakers talked about different ways to encourage self-reflection from learners and incorporate those opportunities into any type of teaching design. Do you have any thoughts around how to do that well or how to do that at all?
Brenna: I don't want to jump in first every time. Good, Nicholas, you go first.
Nicholas: I'm a big fan of and have been for a very long time of journaling and having a journal as maybe not a major assessment. But I often frame it as critical thinking not for the sake of critical thinking, but for the sake of them making the learning their own and connecting it to what they're doing in their life and why they're taking the class and that kind of thing.
It worked really well a long time ago when I was teaching math in a turnaround, a dropout high school and I just kept it, I kept working with it through my teaching experience in higher ed. And I think that works, if you have the time and space, that could show up as exit surveys if it's like a hybrid in-person or a Google form if you're asynchronous or that kind of thing.
I've also used it to and gotten permission to share journals with other groups of students to help them see other people who they may feel a sense of connection to through the course. So on the front end of the course I'll share some journals exemplars or things like that and just share them upfront. And that's a bigger practice.
I think you could also incorporate questions into if you're designing some OER, you could end each chapter with some reflective questions or embed them throughout to have them really to stop and pause and take a moment. I do that in my synchronous Zoom class, I have a slide in every deck where during Covid, when we were locked up, not to say that Covid's over, when we were all locked down, I had a slide where I would stop and say, "Hey I want to take a moment and acknowledge.
And let's take some time to reflect here on how we're feeling and how we're doing and what we may need extra." So if you're teaching Zoom, I plug it into a slide deck. Yeah, I think those are some good examples.
Brenna: I have no research to support this assertion, but I think there is great value when we're creating OER of devoting actual physical space, textbook page real estate to the act of reflection. And this comes from my previous life before faculty support I spent nine years primarily as a composition instructor at a community college in New West, in the lower mainland of British Colombia.
And one of the things I realized is that in doing that work is that there is a world of difference between pull out a piece of paper, do this exercise. And here's a handout, do this exercise. Right? Those feel like very different things. And there's something about the act of devoting space or real estate and resources on our part to signal importance. And so I'm a big believer in not just a question in the OER but space to make notes.
And this is something that I've been increasingly using the H5P documentation tool to do in online resources because it very nicely and tidily creates this little journaling space for students that they can then export as a text file. But it is exclusively their own, it doesn't get logged anywhere, it doesn't come back to you. And so I find that a nice middle ground as a way to signal the significance and importance of reflective practice.
Like, look I'm devoting actual space to this thing that you can just click and type in. And not then having to mark it, if I'm the instructor and I don't also want to just get an avalanche of paper in. So that's my little plug for the documentation tool, which I think H5P is underused in writing instruction generally, but that tool in particular I find very useful.
Veronica: I wanted to share a document from the Southern Poverty Law Center, social justice standards for learning for justice anti-bias framework. This is a K through 12 document that's intended to help instructors to identify learning objectives that are related to domains that are traditionally perhaps overlooked or not centered when we think about course level objectives. So around identity, around justice, diversity and action.
And this is some rights reserved copyright and I've reached out to them to ask a little bit more about what it means for adaptation, I haven't heard back yet, but I can report back. I really, really appreciate the effort to create an intention around student reflection that's made possible when you're incorporating objectives that specifically asks students for example to recognize stereotypes and relate them and relate to people as individuals rather than representations of groups.
I think setting objectives that are set in these domains that are relational that are around identity development actually allow you to align assessments, like student reflection or connecting their lived experience to the content in really aligned ways. So that's a project that I'm really interested in as I'm working with instructors is to help them to identify unit level or chapter level or module level objectives that speak to the core of the learning they want students to do and advance the inclusion in their field.
I was in a great conversation last week in open ed week with an instructor who wasn't sure how to build an assignment around marginalized voices and the history of invention. And that's not necessarily something that comes fluently, if you haven't had that experience in your own education or you're modeling the kind of teaching that you yourself received as a student.
And so, thinking about how your course level objectives themselves could invite students to reveal and share their own expertise, their own knowledge and what they bring into the space especially as you're threading through assessments. I think that would be a fabulous best practice.
Karen: Thank you all for your thoughts, we have another question, this one's from Amy. She's wondering if any of you have successes to share about championing equity in OER at an institutional level. I will add another question as you consider that one. We've been talking a lot about how we can support students.
I wonder if in your work there are techniques or practices for demonstrating or encouraging students to support one another in the class and what that looks like. If that's a kind of behavior that can be encouraged and supported through the class experience. Thank you, Phoebe.
Veronica: I can tackle the institutional question. One thing that we've done as a team in Open Oregon Educational Resources is we've intentionally hired an equity consultant as part of the leadership team in our targeted pathway grant development. So we are investing our time and our collaboration in working with an expert who will hold us accountable to our values.
And this is not something that I think institutions can easily mobilize around because it does take funding and it does take senior leadership investment. But it is something that teams can ask and advocate for. Often the DEI unit on your campus, especially following the murder of George Floyd and worldwide protests, or at least this was the case at the University of Oregon, they were flooded with requests for collaboration and flooded with the need for guidance.
And thinking about how you can take ownership or responsibility within your unit, following the lead, or aligned with the goals that are developed by your DEI unit and share the burden of that work might be a way to approach it. And if you do have funding, if you do have the possibility of partnering with an equity consultant, leap on it.
Because having just an advocate on the search who's dedicated to thinking through equity as you're moving through your projects, having an equity consultant on a grant who is not necessarily involved in a given institution and can offer a fresh sight on the work you're doing and the processes and structures you're setting up, yeah, is definitely a gain for the project.
Karen: Thanks, Veronica. So we're getting a few farewells and appreciative notes in the chat for this conversation. We have just a couple of minutes left, and so I'll open it up and see if anyone, our guests, our attendees has any closing thoughts or things they would like to share. Or Apurva, anything you'd like to add? Brenna?
Brenna: I was going to share a link in the chat on the last question. We've had a lot of movement, I feel like success is too strong a word, we've had a lot of movement on the issue of indigenization and decolonization at our institution. And one resource that's been particularly good I think for those of us working in faculty support and instructional design has been the BCcampus pulling together a guide for curriculum developers.
And they frequently run workshop sessions, online virtual workshop sessions on this material. They do it for different, so pulling together as a series, a professional learning series, and you can take it as a leader or as an instructor. But the curriculum developer guide I think is particularly good. So I've just shared that in the chat in case it's useful to anyone's context.
Veronica: Thank you.
Apurva: Thank you, Veronica, thank you, Brenna. Iwona, Nicholas did you have any final comments or questions or thoughts you wanted to share before we wrap up?
Nicholas: I appreciate the opportunity to come speak to you all here and collaborate with you all. It's all about people and keeping our students centered and building a sense of care and belonging and not othering anyone. And centering disability, ability, centering those components as we move forward and not othering them and pushing them away. So thank you all so much for letting me be here and share with you.
Veronica: I would love to invite anyone to drop into the chat since we're just coming out of open ed week any specific session that you attended that you want everyone to attend, especially something that focuses or centers on students or equity. I want a whole stack of other opportunities that I might not yet know about.
So if you're comfortable thinking through everything that you learned the last week, it was a lot, and having a little chatterfall of opportunities to engage and learn and grow around equity and open education, I would love that personally.
Apurva: Thank you for that invitation, Veronica, and I will use that as an opportunity to note that we have a discussion space on the Rebus Community end. So if you're not able to think of an event that you attended immediately, and it comes to you at some point as this week progresses, feel free to drop in those recommendations there and we can have a public facing list to go back to when we find ourselves with a spare hour to catch up and reflect on presentations from last week.
I also wanted to use this time before I thank our guests and thank everybody here, to throw in another opportunity for reflection, just in the spirit of our discussion and conversation today. These Office Hours spaces are very much designed for community, and I would love, and I know Karen would as well, to hear from you all if there were other challenges that you've had, that you want to explore as a community.
If there's topics that you want to revisit, if there are people you want to hear from, other guests you would like. So I've dropped in a link to a very simple form, we really appreciate your suggestions. In fact our past two or three session topics have been community suggested. And I believe next month we're going to be chatting a little bit about more sharing and showing off the work, inviting guests to talk about tools for reporting impact.
But we don't have any other sessions planned for the rest of the year. So you really can take control of what these events and conversations look like. That form will be saved in the chat and shared on the forum for those who need it. We are at the hour, so I just want to ask everybody to please join me in thanking all four of our guests and thank you all as well for contributing your questions, your reflections and thoughts and resources in this conversation.
As always, I'm looking forward to continuing this discussion in the forum, but also at future Office Hours events. And I hope that everybody can get a short or perhaps longer break as we hit the hour and look after yourselves, as the week goes by. Take care and thank you so much everybody. Bye bye.
Veronica: Thank you so much for this invitation.
Brenna: Yeah, thank you, this was really fun.
END OF VIDEO
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Watch the video recording of this Office Hours session, or keep reading for a full transcript. For those interested in reading the conversation that took place among participants and the resources shared, the chat transcript is also available below.
Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please contact Tonia.
Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please contact Tonia.
Audio Transcript
Speakers:
- Apurva Ashok (Director of Open Education, The Rebus Foundation)
- Karen Lauritsen (Publishing Director, Open Education Network)
- Iwona Gniadek (Educational Developer, University of Manitoba)
- Veronica Vold (Open Education Instructional Designer, Open Oregon)
- Brenna Clark Gray (Coordinator, Educational Technologies, Thompson Rivers University)
- Nicolas Parés (Teaching and Learning Specialist, University of Denver)
Apurva: Welcome everybody, hello. It's always exciting to be hosting another Office Hours on the Rebus Community side and with the Open Education Network. My name is Apurva Ashok, I'm the Director of open education at Rebus Community. And I want to start off by first acknowledging that I am coming to you today from a warm, but very gray city. I'm located on the traditional territories of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the First Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples.
And I'm very grateful to be enjoying some warmer weather and enjoying some rain on this lovely Tuesday. You may also know this city as Toronto, Canada. As I noted, I work at the Rebus Community. Rebus is a Canadian charity that helps educational institutions build human capacity in OER publishing and open education through a variety of ways, including free resources, professional development and webinars like this one.
As I mentioned earlier, the Office Hours sessions are co-organized with the Open Education Network. And I'm going to turn it over to Karen, to tell you a little more about her and the Open Education Network.
Karen: Thank you, Apurva. We are happy to be here, as always in hosting Office Hours with you, in the Rebus Community and with everyone else on this call. My name is Karen Lauritsen, I'm with the Open Education Network. And we are a community of professionals in higher education working together to make things more open and equitable. Today we are joined by four guests, and we are going to be talking about OER and instructional design.
And we're calling it part two because we had a discussion last month that was lively and very engaging, and we just wanted to continue with that momentum. And so, today we're going to talk specifically about student-centered OER development. I'm going to go ahead and introduce our guests. They will talk for a few moments about their experience with the topic, and then we will look to you for the conversation and questions.
And so, before we get started I will say that while the OEN is based at the University of Minnesota, I am coming to you from San Louis Obispo, California, which is the ancestral home of the Northern Chumash. And with that, I will let you know who we are joined by today. Iwona Gniadek is here with us, she's the Educational Developer at the University of Manitoba.
Also, Veronica Vold, Open Education Instructional Designer with Open Oregon. Brenna Clark Gray who's Coordinator with the Educational Technologies area at Thompson Rivers University. And Nicolas Parés, who is Teaching & Learning Specialist with the University of Denver. And so, to get us started I'm going to turn things over to Veronica.
Veronica: Thank you, Karen, and good morning everyone. I am Veronica Vold, she/her pronouns, coming to you from Eugene, Oregon. I live on stolen land that originally belonged to the Kalapuya Ihili, the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians and the Winefully. And I am really thrilled to be with you and take this hour together to explore student-centered design and equity at the heart of open educational resources.
And I wonder if we would begin by just starting with some breaths together. Often when we talk about equity, we're dipping into some really deep experiences of exclusion and privilege and it's an emotional journey. So if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to use a technique that my kindergartener last year taught me, called volcano breaths. So just to set us off, if you wouldn't mind loosening your shoulders up a little bit, we're going to do three special kinds of breaths.
These are volcano breaths. So you're going to raise your arms above your head, if you feel comfortable and inhale, and then we're going to release that breath like lava flowing down. So we're going to do that together. All right, so first breath, we're going to inhale, exhale. Let's do that one more time, we're going to inhale, exhale. Yeah. Thank you. A big part of my work as the open education instructional designer is being with faculty and instructors as they are surviving the Covid-19 pandemic.
And living in an era of racial uprising and renewed awakening for dominant cultures and people who are occupying a lot of power in their institutions. And in my experience so far I started this job supporting all 24 public colleges and universities in Oregon for about five months now. And repeatedly as I'm meeting with people in these little Zoom spaces that we hold and hearing about the yearning and desire they have to support their students in meaningful learning experiences.
What I notice is a physical response that this doesn't just sit in our intellectual capacities, but this work actually rests in our bodies. And for many of us, the histories that we've lived through, the histories that our families and our generations have lived through, also surface and are present in the conversations we have. I wanted to start by sharing a quote from James Baldwin, the African-American novelist and cultural critic as he helps us to center that history.
James Baldwin said in 1965 in Ebony Magazine, "History as no one seems to know is not merely something to be read, and it does not refer merely or even principally to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities and our aspirations."
To me, when we start to focus on student-centered instructional design in open educational resources we have the opportunity to confront the history living within us and around us to start to think critically about the legacies of exclusion and control that entered the room before we did. Student-centered and equity-centered instructional design in open education doesn't happen by accident, it doesn't happen just by virtue of something being open or by virtue of something being OER enabled pedagogy.
It really is a journey of intention and of deep listening. One of the stories I wanted to share with you was the opportunity I had in my capacity in the state-wide role to start an open education instructional design community of practice. So colleagues from all over the state of Oregon who are working in instructional design and higher education have an opportunity to come together and we focus our time once a month on thinking through questions of equity in open education.
And repeatedly the urge has come up in our consultations, those one-on-one consultations with instructors and faculty to move at the speed of trust. That we are developing relationships that require trust, that require being seen, in order to talk about the experiences that students are having in classrooms that we design. And there's frustration with that, the one-on-one relationship building and the one-on-one conversations are so meaningful and so important.
But the operational agency around that instructor or around that relationship also create the conditions for the conversation itself. I recently read an awesome article on the intentional agency versus operational agency that instructional designers engage when they're talking about open educational practices. And I'd like us to consider in this hour together how we can move and build capacity for operational agency.
Our intentional agency is what we can bring to a consultation or to a conversation. Whose voices are we centering? Are we building a course for the full universe of learners, for students with disabilities, students of color, first generation students, students who are documented, or undocumented, students who are queer or trans? Are we representing their voices?
Those are really important conversations to have, and they represent what this article referred to as our intentional agency, the intention or the ethics that we're bringing to the conversation. The big shift is to operational agency, how we have the capacity to put concrete action behind the intention. So our institutions investing in instructional design and equity, our institutions creating professional development that focus equity in open educational practices.
Is senior leadership investing in those individual conversations and reflecting on its value for students? The other thing I wanted to encourage us to consider in our time together today is our relationships with DEI coordinators and units on our campuses. Often offices of online learning, units that are dedicated to instructional design, offices that are dedicated to teaching and learning don't necessarily have strong relationships or connections with the offices that are dedicated to holding an institution accountable to its values for students.
So that's one thing I'd love to open up together in our time is what is your relationship with your diversity and equity and inclusion office or coordinator on your campus? And then, finally, I also wanted to share a really exciting project that Open Oregon educational resources has taken up. We have an equity in open education cohort that is created by Amy Hofer and Jen Klaudinyi from Portland Community College.
And 60 plus faculty members historically have come together to focus on a four-week course where they talk together about culturally responsive pedagogy. And universal design for learning and universal design in general and open pedagogy. And we're starting a new cohort that's focused on teaching and learning support in particular.
So that all of the teaching and learning colleagues who are involved in creating learning experiences can come together, share their stories, and talk about how to advance and champion open education on their campuses. So those are just a few stories that I wanted to share with you. And I also wanted to offer us this final quote from Tressie McMillan Cottom, this is from 2015, pre-pandemic.
This is in response to a wonderful international conference on distance learning and online learning. Tressie says, "What I do need are specifics about how this moment is not like those other moments, those old moments of educational expansion that were shaped be powerful white interests, wealth, and racism to expand access without furthering justice." In my sense in the relationships I'm building, in my capacity to talk with many institutions in a single meeting is that this is a moment of change and transformation.
The pandemic has taken so much from us and continues to take so much from us especially those who are most vulnerable. And we have an opportunity to shift and to recenter our priorities in open education to think critically about what we are doing to advance equity for our students and not to repeat patterns that privilege wealth, that privilege white interest and to center justice in our expansion.
And I don't want to take too much time, I want to pass it onto our next person to continue our conversation. Karen, would you share who our next person is?
Karen: Sure, Iwona, over to you and thank you, Veronica.
Veronica: Yeah, thank you.
Iwona: Hello, jin dobre. My name is Iwona Gniadek, she/her pronouns. And I am located on Treaty One territory, in what is now Manitoba, Canada, the original lands of Anishnabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples and on the homeland of the Métis Nation. I also want to acknowledge Treaty Three and Treaty Five lands, which supply my home with tap water and hydro.
I have been a settler on these lands since 2007, and I am originally from Poland. My journey with OER started in 2009, when I joined English Online, a publicly funded settlement and language training organization for immigrants to Manitoba. The director was an avid OER supporter and advocate, so we shared our content on the English Online website and incorporated open practices in teaching and learning.
For example, we built self-directed open courses on Wiki Spaces, if anybody remembers Wiki Spaces. And then, I moved from English Online to the University of Manitoba, where I design non-credit and for-credit courses. And here for example, some HR courses included optional social media activities, specifically Twitter, so that learners could find like-minded professional peers outside of the course and engage in digital identity formation and expression.
And I also had an opportunity to incorporate open badges, a social currency to foster peer-to-peer engagement. And today I'd like to share with you some OER tools that I use during the design process. And these tools help me and the instructors focus on centering learners' needs, desires, contexts, when developing OER. I always say to instructors, "People first then content and technology."
So the first tool is called the persona, and I'm going to share a link in the chat. And so the folder has some templates that I use and an example. And I use the persona tool specifically to build a shared understanding of who we are designing for. So we don't think about a faceless crowd of students or of people but we focus on specific individuals. And also to build empathy for the learner, so the personas have a photo, have a name, they're detailed.
So we can easily empathize with the person we're designing for. And I invite instructors to create the learner personas with me, based on their knowledge and experience with their past or future learners. So I'll give you an example of a current project. I'm currently working on a self-study OER resource, focusing on incorporating equity, diversity and inclusion in teaching, which I'm co-developing with a committee of representatives from eight partner institutions in Manitoba.
And as a committee we engaged in creating a set of personas, one for each institution. And once we compiled the results, we understood how diverse the audience is, ranging from trades instructors to tenured professors nearing retirement, instructors working at urban universities, and small rural colleges. So the audience is very diverse and ideally you would perhaps want to build multiple resources targeting different audiences, but we have a brief for one.
So the personas helped us build a shared understanding of who our audience is and suggest content and pedagogical approaches to address their needs. So for example, we talked about including scenario-based activities to build empathy, relationship building activities, a glossary of terms, a statistical discussion of enrolment and completion of various learner groups.
We also want the resource to be fully downloadable, so that folks in areas where the internet is patchy can download and study offline. And these are ideas linked to specific personas in the set that we've created. And the persona can also be used to empower learners and support their agency. In one course, I shared the personas with my learners and in this case the persona descriptions were accompanied by suggested learning pathways through an online course.
And learners were tasked to review the personas and choose one that matched them and follow the suggested pathway. And if there was no match, learners were encouraged to draw their own persona and speak to a facilitator to build a personalized learning plan depending on their interests and goals. So the learner was always at the center, is always at the center with the persona activity.
And the second tool that's also the template is in the folder is called transition matrix. And the transition matrix is a story told by the learner persona about the learning change that they've experienced as a result of engaging in a learning experience. So the story starts with an initial state, before taking a course and then ends with a target state. And the target state is illustrated by some tangible outputs which naturally lead towards specifying learning objectives, which sometimes are difficult conversations to have when we design courses.
So if you're looking for tools to create learner-centered OER, I highly recommend using those two tools to guide your conversations and learning design decisions. Thank you, and over to Brenna.
Brenna: Thank you. Hi everybody, I'm so pleased to be here. I warned the organizers at the beginning about my kid who was home sick from school today. So he may arrive, he usually chooses when I'm in the middle of like the most genius thought to appear with some unspecified meat. So just a heads up. My name is Brenna Clark Gray, I'm Coordinator of Educational Technologies at Thompson Rivers University.
I'm an uninvited settler in Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc in the unceded traditional land of Secwépemc'ulucw. And I also like to reflect that my journey to this space has also been shaped by time spent in Algonquin Anishnabeg, in Mi’kmaq & Wolastoqiyik and in Qayqayt lands. And I like to reflect on that because we work many of us in settler colonial institutions that demand a certain lack of connection to territory.
This ability to kind of float and a lack of relationality, which is the exact opposite of what I want to talk about today. I wanted to open by asking how everybody is doing, and if you feel comfortable sharing how you're feeling today in the chat, I welcome it. I'm a bit discombobulated with a kid home and all the other competing demands on time. It's hard to center and focus on any one individual task.
And I particularly like to check in and genuinely ask how people are doing because we spend a lot of time in these very screen-y interactions, where we present information at each other. Which again, is not often as maybe relational as we might hope for particularly our educational interactions to be. So I hope that if you feel comfortable you'll genuinely share how you're feeling in the chat and reflect on a multitude of effective experiences that we bring to these sessions as actual whole human beings in whole human bodies.
Which again, I think our institutions would prefer we forget about, a lot of the time. I'm hungry, I'm also getting hungry and it's not even lunchtime in DC, it's the morning still, but I'm also hungry. Okay, so I am very interested in educational technology support which is what I do primarily faculty support. Although I do get the pleasure of working with students as well.
I'm interested in that support work as care work, thinking about it that way, and thinking about how to center care in the practice educational technologies. And we hold office hours like this at TRU. I hold four hours of office hours a week, my colleagues do as well. During the pandemic, a sort of upswing as we first transitioned to online and for that first fully online year we were holding six to eight, sometimes 10 hours of office hours every week.
And the thing that I really came to realize was that our community of faculty were very much using that as a place to vent, check in, make sure they were feeling like they were on the right track and get centered. And a faculty member said to me at the end of one session, she said, "I always feel so much better after I talk to you." And I said, "That's really nice." And then, she left and I was like, "Maybe this is why I'm burning out, because this is kind of like the whole campus' therapy session."
Thinking about my work as care work has really helped me to consider what my own priorities are in the work that I do. And so, I very much appreciate Maha Bali’s definition of care pedagogy as relational. Pedagogy that's relational and pedagogy that includes concern for the person. And I think that that's a straightforward thing to conceptualize in the classroom.
We're in the classroom and we're showing respect and consideration for the individual learners in the room. But sometimes when we're creating OER, which can feel a little bit like a one-sided thing, like I'm developing this thing that I'm then pushing out into a world as opposed to a relational project, it can maybe be a little less explicit or less clear how we center care in the work of actually just developing OER.
So I've got a couple of strategies I'm going to suggest and I'm hoping that together we can think through some strategies for centering care in OER development in the same way we might expect of ourselves in a classroom setting. So things like centering access first and foremost something can't be used by students who can't access it. And I do believe that centering access is a key component of centering care.
And these strategies don't have to be difficult, or they don't have to be complicated. Yes, learning all the nuances and ins and outs of UDL for example is a project that one undertakes as part of their professional practice. But I think there are small things, making sure videos that we include are captioned, using proper header functions instead of just straight up text so that screen readers can navigate through the documents we create.
Checking our H5P objects for accessibility, Iwona mentioned the idea of fully offline functionality for we certainly have tons of rural learners here at TRU, so thinking about if I'm going to include an H5P object because I want some interactivity in my OER, what does the offline learner experience? Can we create like a printout of the same exercise that they can do by hand? This kind of thing.
Attending to contrast and alt text, these are all really important key pieces of demonstrating care for the myriad of learners who are going to come to our texts. I think the trauma informed approaches are also useful here, particularly if your OER contains difficult or triggering content, thinking about how you orient the reader or the user to that content and doing so in a trauma informed way is really helpful.
And Karen Ray Costa has some great resources available for like thinking through trauma informed pedagogies in online spaces, which I think can be helpful here as well. I also think that centering care in our OER development can involve things like ensuring that we build in space for reflection when we're creating whether it's a textbook or an exercise. And especially reflection that encourages the learner to make connections to their own life and lived experience.
Not only does that help the content feel relevant to the learner, but it also suggests to the learner that even in this asynchronous relationship, I as the content creator am interested in you as the person and how this content applies to your life. I also think that we can demonstrate care by creating space for localization and indigenization when we share our texts into the world. So how does this text get adopted locally?
Is there space to recognize the people who live and work and breathe in the space where this text is actually going to be used? And then, finally and I think really importantly, centering care in our OER development involves building in space for feedback from learners. And I think oftentimes our OER processes are really good, we often have built in structures to do peer review, or check in with colleagues or get reflective feedback back from colleagues.
But building in the space for learners to reach out to you with feedback about an OER I think is an incredibly valuable step in a learner-centered text, that also lets learners know that their experience of OER is of value and that we want that feedback and we want to take it on board and use it. That also means though never ask a question that you don't know how to deal with the answer to.
So if you're going to ask for feedback, working into a workflow or a revision process how that feedback will be used is really important. But I think it's a central piece that sometimes is missing from the institutional processes is that learner feedback piece. I hope I didn't go over. I'm going to hand it off to Nicholas and he can share his thoughts. So thanks so much everybody.
Nicholas: Yeah, thank you so much, Brenna. And thank you for having me I appreciate this. The University of Denver and where I currently live resides on the lands of the Ute and Arapaho and Cheyenne peoples, way before I was here or my grandparents. This is a great group, I really appreciated the, acknowledge Brenna's focus on care, Iwona's focus on personas, I intended to speak to those things in practice.
So I won't do that, I'll get a little more philosophical, I guess, with you all as I approach and less practical. And I hope all of it ties together a lot of all of our thoughts, that it was a really great three little share outs there, so I really appreciate that. I guess for me, I think of maybe because in college I took a lot of humanities courses and I read a lot of Edward Said and the Occident and Orientalism and that kind of thing.
And so, otherness in our work and not othering our students and bringing belonging to our classrooms through care and a sense of belonging has been pretty, I've tried to make it as practical as possible, especially initial conversations with maybe not outcome conversations, sitting down and figuring out outcomes of a course. But maybe and even then there's some opportunity for reflection.
But I think I like to have instructors think about and almost use personas and frame it around how can we make sure that they feel like they belong? And belonging shows up in a couple of ways. A sense of belonging is defined as being accepted, valued, included and encouraged by others, teachers and peers in spaces. So a sense of belonging can be related to students' cognition, affect and behaviors.
In other words, students can think, feel and act as they belong. This sense of belonging can help them connect and engage, think and feel like they're students. Feel like they belong in the classroom. And at the same time, knowing that belonging can come and go, they can feel like they belong here in this class, reading this book, engaging with these students, and in this instructor and in other class they may not have that experience or in a larger space, the college space, the university space they may not have that sense of belonging.
So if we design with consideration of having our students see themselves whether that is through visuals that represent many students, many people in our course designs, in our pages and our chosen images and imagery. Opportunity to reflect and think about and bring their contexts and experiences into the chapter or into the page or the lesson. That's a really practical fashion, just some good really reflective essential questioning that brings them in and pulls them in.
Makes the reading less just page after page 30-pages of reading. And how did you bring this? What do you see? What were your steps? Is this the same experience that you had growing up? Or does this resonate with you? Those types of questions can help bring the students feeling and bring them into the learning and learning experience. And then, the behaviors and I work primarily as a teaching and learning specialist, I do quite a bit of course design and curriculum design.
But also a good half of my work is just with instructors while they teach. I like to tell them I'm a partner in teaching and learning but also an instructional designer on the fly. And a lot of my work is just helping them to engage students throughout the learning experience, create opportunities. Not just invite student experience and student opinion on materials but embrace it.
Let's plan to take action, let's plan to in the first quarter of the class they don't feel like the reading resonates with them or the experiences aren't super relevant. Well, how can we work to make those more relevant, bring them back into the materials? A lot of that is what a good facilitator, good instructor and instructors play facilitator and designer as they teach, in my mind.
Let's see, what else did I want to talk about? I feel like you all hit on so much. I also love to do, I just did a presentation last week where I brought in our office of disabilities and I had them share out on UDL. I didn't say a word, I love universal design for learning. But I felt like the student services needed to be the one to speak and share that opinion and it landed quite well and I've gotten emails, I have conversations coming with instructors around implementing UDL.
Because they heard it from someone who wasn't me, from the students, from the people servicing the students, and that was massively impactful in comparison to my own participation in UDL workshops in the past. So bringing them in, students into the process in this kind of belonging framing can be a very powerful thing. And centering care through Covid has Brenna mentioned has been huge as well. So I hope I tied some of this together. I really appreciate the speakers before me, they've laid some great groundwork.
Karen: Thank you, Nicholas, and thank you Iwona, Veronica and Brenna for sharing such thoughtful insights and guidance for all of us as we consider creating a sense of belonging in the student-centered experience. So this is the time when we turn to all of you to direct and guide the conversation based on your own reflections, your own lived experience or what you're trying to accomplish locally.
So please feel free to pop questions into the chat or unmute. We're, I think an intimate enough group here that should be pretty easy to have a conversation. So I see Kaitlin put something in the chat here. We spoke a lot about care work in today's session. I wonder if each of you can speak to what the biggest barriers for you have been in applying these approaches in the process.
Brenna: I'll start, if that's okay. I think that everybody is either burnt out or burning out. And care is sustaining and care is valuable and care can fill us up. But care is also a very particular form of labor that is emotionally taxing. And I went to a session on trauma informed approaches to burn out this time last year with Karen Ray Costa and she said, "How do you know when you're burning out?"
And I recognized in that session that for me it's often when my patience begins to ebb, when my capacity for care feels like it is… So there are all kinds of institutional structural issues like many of our institutions are in an austerity mode at the moment. An audacity mode too a little bit. But an austerity mode at the moment and I think many of us are experiencing extremely heavy workloads and a lack of appropriate staffing.
The demands for classroom instructors of multi-modal teaching that many people are either taking on either institutionally required or because they want to reach their students in this very complex moment. These are things that are impacting everyone's ability to care. And I think that that's going to continue to be an issue because we don't actually get over burn out very easily.
Apurva: Iwona, Nicholas, Veronica, any barriers that you see that you wanted to highlight?
Iwona: I think one of the barriers that I've encountered is time because courses usually are packed with content and with activities, with assignments. And there is not enough time to build relationships or to reflect on what's going on on what we're learning and connect with one another. And when I've spoken with some indigenous students that's what was one of their biggest concerns, that there was basically no space for relationship building and for showing that we care for one another.
So I think a very important consideration is to perhaps include a pause week, a slow week in a course, somewhere halfway through. Because face-to-face courses have reading weeks, online courses at least the ones that I've taken and I've designed with the instructors never had a reading week. But I think it would be a good practice to introduce and also give students this opportunity to slow down, to check where they are and care for themselves and for others.
Veronica: I think a barrier that I've seen in the work of creating communities of care is that historically as Brenna said, having a body hasn't been okay in the academy and institutions of higher learning. We've privileged very western, very white, very historically masculine understandings of what it means to study and engage in the work of building knowledge. And so, I think a barrier is having a body, having kids, having feelings, having emotions, having disappointment, and managing trauma.
And I think a solution to that is to acknowledge the burn out, to acknowledge the disappointment and especially in working with instructors to make it okay for them to disclose that they are also struggling alongside their students. I think a barrier to actually receiving care is to feel like I don't deserve it. I'm not worthy. There's something wrong with me, that's why I'm so tired, that's why I'm not learning.
And I think normalizing struggle right now, especially, is a collective solution. And being honest about where our institutions have failed us. Like the audacity of operating in austerity I think is a really important link because it means that students are taking on more of the burden. Instructors are taking on more of the burden and our institutions are chugging along rather than inviting pause or rather than inviting recognition.
So I think that that's huge, that's collective, no individual can address that alone. But I think speaking the truth about what we've been managing and how it's not separated from our desire to offer students what they need, our desire to offer ourselves what we need is connected to it. Yeah. And I see in the chat shamelessly sharing an essay, cool on feminist digital pedagogy, thanks, Brenna.
I will also shamelessly share in the chat we had the good fortune of hosting Maha Bali as our keynote speaker with Open Oregon Educational Resources this past Friday. And Maha's talk is recorded and openly licensed, and I invite you to review it and sit with it. One of the strengths I think Maha brings is the ability to normalize and validate where you are and what you're managing and see that as a strength connected to your work. So, share that in the chat as well.
Apurva: Veronica, and I'll drop in a link to Maha's blog because I know, Brenna, you referenced that earlier. And I'm also going to drop in a link maybe Karen Ray Costa's Twitter for those of you on Twitter, so you can learn more and continue this conversation outside of this hour. We're nearing the end of our hour, but I wanted to invite more questions to the room. And while folks are thinking, ask this one from Michelle.
Michelle appreciates the recommendation to include opportunities for reflection. I know, Nicholas, you mentioned that, I think all four of our speakers talked about different ways to encourage self-reflection from learners and incorporate those opportunities into any type of teaching design. Do you have any thoughts around how to do that well or how to do that at all?
Brenna: I don't want to jump in first every time. Good, Nicholas, you go first.
Nicholas: I'm a big fan of and have been for a very long time of journaling and having a journal as maybe not a major assessment. But I often frame it as critical thinking not for the sake of critical thinking, but for the sake of them making the learning their own and connecting it to what they're doing in their life and why they're taking the class and that kind of thing.
It worked really well a long time ago when I was teaching math in a turnaround, a dropout high school and I just kept it, I kept working with it through my teaching experience in higher ed. And I think that works, if you have the time and space, that could show up as exit surveys if it's like a hybrid in-person or a Google form if you're asynchronous or that kind of thing.
I've also used it to and gotten permission to share journals with other groups of students to help them see other people who they may feel a sense of connection to through the course. So on the front end of the course I'll share some journals exemplars or things like that and just share them upfront. And that's a bigger practice.
I think you could also incorporate questions into if you're designing some OER, you could end each chapter with some reflective questions or embed them throughout to have them really to stop and pause and take a moment. I do that in my synchronous Zoom class, I have a slide in every deck where during Covid, when we were locked up, not to say that Covid's over, when we were all locked down, I had a slide where I would stop and say, "Hey I want to take a moment and acknowledge.
And let's take some time to reflect here on how we're feeling and how we're doing and what we may need extra." So if you're teaching Zoom, I plug it into a slide deck. Yeah, I think those are some good examples.
Brenna: I have no research to support this assertion, but I think there is great value when we're creating OER of devoting actual physical space, textbook page real estate to the act of reflection. And this comes from my previous life before faculty support I spent nine years primarily as a composition instructor at a community college in New West, in the lower mainland of British Colombia.
And one of the things I realized is that in doing that work is that there is a world of difference between pull out a piece of paper, do this exercise. And here's a handout, do this exercise. Right? Those feel like very different things. And there's something about the act of devoting space or real estate and resources on our part to signal importance. And so I'm a big believer in not just a question in the OER but space to make notes.
And this is something that I've been increasingly using the H5P documentation tool to do in online resources because it very nicely and tidily creates this little journaling space for students that they can then export as a text file. But it is exclusively their own, it doesn't get logged anywhere, it doesn't come back to you. And so I find that a nice middle ground as a way to signal the significance and importance of reflective practice.
Like, look I'm devoting actual space to this thing that you can just click and type in. And not then having to mark it, if I'm the instructor and I don't also want to just get an avalanche of paper in. So that's my little plug for the documentation tool, which I think H5P is underused in writing instruction generally, but that tool in particular I find very useful.
Veronica: I wanted to share a document from the Southern Poverty Law Center, social justice standards for learning for justice anti-bias framework. This is a K through 12 document that's intended to help instructors to identify learning objectives that are related to domains that are traditionally perhaps overlooked or not centered when we think about course level objectives. So around identity, around justice, diversity and action.
And this is some rights reserved copyright and I've reached out to them to ask a little bit more about what it means for adaptation, I haven't heard back yet, but I can report back. I really, really appreciate the effort to create an intention around student reflection that's made possible when you're incorporating objectives that specifically asks students for example to recognize stereotypes and relate them and relate to people as individuals rather than representations of groups.
I think setting objectives that are set in these domains that are relational that are around identity development actually allow you to align assessments, like student reflection or connecting their lived experience to the content in really aligned ways. So that's a project that I'm really interested in as I'm working with instructors is to help them to identify unit level or chapter level or module level objectives that speak to the core of the learning they want students to do and advance the inclusion in their field.
I was in a great conversation last week in open ed week with an instructor who wasn't sure how to build an assignment around marginalized voices and the history of invention. And that's not necessarily something that comes fluently, if you haven't had that experience in your own education or you're modeling the kind of teaching that you yourself received as a student.
And so, thinking about how your course level objectives themselves could invite students to reveal and share their own expertise, their own knowledge and what they bring into the space especially as you're threading through assessments. I think that would be a fabulous best practice.
Karen: Thank you all for your thoughts, we have another question, this one's from Amy. She's wondering if any of you have successes to share about championing equity in OER at an institutional level. I will add another question as you consider that one. We've been talking a lot about how we can support students.
I wonder if in your work there are techniques or practices for demonstrating or encouraging students to support one another in the class and what that looks like. If that's a kind of behavior that can be encouraged and supported through the class experience. Thank you, Phoebe.
Veronica: I can tackle the institutional question. One thing that we've done as a team in Open Oregon Educational Resources is we've intentionally hired an equity consultant as part of the leadership team in our targeted pathway grant development. So we are investing our time and our collaboration in working with an expert who will hold us accountable to our values.
And this is not something that I think institutions can easily mobilize around because it does take funding and it does take senior leadership investment. But it is something that teams can ask and advocate for. Often the DEI unit on your campus, especially following the murder of George Floyd and worldwide protests, or at least this was the case at the University of Oregon, they were flooded with requests for collaboration and flooded with the need for guidance.
And thinking about how you can take ownership or responsibility within your unit, following the lead, or aligned with the goals that are developed by your DEI unit and share the burden of that work might be a way to approach it. And if you do have funding, if you do have the possibility of partnering with an equity consultant, leap on it.
Because having just an advocate on the search who's dedicated to thinking through equity as you're moving through your projects, having an equity consultant on a grant who is not necessarily involved in a given institution and can offer a fresh sight on the work you're doing and the processes and structures you're setting up, yeah, is definitely a gain for the project.
Karen: Thanks, Veronica. So we're getting a few farewells and appreciative notes in the chat for this conversation. We have just a couple of minutes left, and so I'll open it up and see if anyone, our guests, our attendees has any closing thoughts or things they would like to share. Or Apurva, anything you'd like to add? Brenna?
Brenna: I was going to share a link in the chat on the last question. We've had a lot of movement, I feel like success is too strong a word, we've had a lot of movement on the issue of indigenization and decolonization at our institution. And one resource that's been particularly good I think for those of us working in faculty support and instructional design has been the BCcampus pulling together a guide for curriculum developers.
And they frequently run workshop sessions, online virtual workshop sessions on this material. They do it for different, so pulling together as a series, a professional learning series, and you can take it as a leader or as an instructor. But the curriculum developer guide I think is particularly good. So I've just shared that in the chat in case it's useful to anyone's context.
Veronica: Thank you.
Apurva: Thank you, Veronica, thank you, Brenna. Iwona, Nicholas did you have any final comments or questions or thoughts you wanted to share before we wrap up?
Nicholas: I appreciate the opportunity to come speak to you all here and collaborate with you all. It's all about people and keeping our students centered and building a sense of care and belonging and not othering anyone. And centering disability, ability, centering those components as we move forward and not othering them and pushing them away. So thank you all so much for letting me be here and share with you.
Veronica: I would love to invite anyone to drop into the chat since we're just coming out of open ed week any specific session that you attended that you want everyone to attend, especially something that focuses or centers on students or equity. I want a whole stack of other opportunities that I might not yet know about.
So if you're comfortable thinking through everything that you learned the last week, it was a lot, and having a little chatterfall of opportunities to engage and learn and grow around equity and open education, I would love that personally.
Apurva: Thank you for that invitation, Veronica, and I will use that as an opportunity to note that we have a discussion space on the Rebus Community end. So if you're not able to think of an event that you attended immediately, and it comes to you at some point as this week progresses, feel free to drop in those recommendations there and we can have a public facing list to go back to when we find ourselves with a spare hour to catch up and reflect on presentations from last week.
I also wanted to use this time before I thank our guests and thank everybody here, to throw in another opportunity for reflection, just in the spirit of our discussion and conversation today. These Office Hours spaces are very much designed for community, and I would love, and I know Karen would as well, to hear from you all if there were other challenges that you've had, that you want to explore as a community.
If there's topics that you want to revisit, if there are people you want to hear from, other guests you would like. So I've dropped in a link to a very simple form, we really appreciate your suggestions. In fact our past two or three session topics have been community suggested. And I believe next month we're going to be chatting a little bit about more sharing and showing off the work, inviting guests to talk about tools for reporting impact.
But we don't have any other sessions planned for the rest of the year. So you really can take control of what these events and conversations look like. That form will be saved in the chat and shared on the forum for those who need it. We are at the hour, so I just want to ask everybody to please join me in thanking all four of our guests and thank you all as well for contributing your questions, your reflections and thoughts and resources in this conversation.
As always, I'm looking forward to continuing this discussion in the forum, but also at future Office Hours events. And I hope that everybody can get a short or perhaps longer break as we hit the hour and look after yourselves, as the week goes by. Take care and thank you so much everybody. Bye bye.
Veronica: Thank you so much for this invitation.
Brenna: Yeah, thank you, this was really fun.
END OF VIDEO
Chat Transcript
00:16:42 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey | she/her: Congratulations to the OEN's Open Textbook Library on exceeding 1,000 open textbooks!
00:17:11 Apurva Ashok: Yes, congrats! ????
00:17:43 Amy Hofer (she/her): Hooray Veronica!
00:17:57 Apurva Ashok: Please let us know where you are joining from today - we encourage you to share your territorial acknowledgement in the chat.
00:18:45 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey | she/her: The University of Arizona is on the land and territories of Indigenous peoples. Today there are 22 federally recognized tribes in Arizona, with Tucson being home to the O’odham and the Yaqui.
00:20:52 Louann Terveer: Macalester College, St Paul, MN - the ancestral homeland of the Dakota people who were forcibly exiled from the land because of aggressive and persistent settler colonialism
00:21:07 Apurva Ashok: Thank you, Veronica, for helping us feel more ready in mind and body for our conversation today.
00:23:07 Michele Behr she/her: Western Michigan University is located on lands historically occupied by the Ojibwe, Odawa and Bodewadmi nations.
00:25:52 Nicolas Pares (He,Him): The University of Denver honors and acknowledges that the land on which it(we) resides is the traditional territory of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Peoples.
00:26:36 Amy Hofer (she/her): Here’s the most recent update on the program Veronica is talking about: https://openoregon.org/open-for-everyone-equity-and-open-education-cohort-update/
00:26:45 Apurva Ashok: Thanks, Amy!
00:29:08 Jennifer Pate She/Her: Florence, Alabama is on Chikashsha Yaki (Chickasaw), S’atsoyaha (Yuchi), Shawandasse Tula (Shawanwaki/Shawnee), and ᏣᎳᎫᏪᏘᏱ Tsalaguwetiyi (Cherokee, East) land.
00:30:28 Iwona (she/ona/wiya/elle): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12jgZvYjAdzxqMgKvv5C4JScx9XiFMdEw?usp=sharing
00:34:43 Veronica Vold, Open Education Instructional Designer: Thanks, Iwona!!
00:34:48 Apurva Ashok: Thank you!!
00:35:10 Apurva Ashok: Hope he feels better soon, Brenna. ?
00:35:22 Veronica Vold, Open Education Instructional Designer: “Most genius” ?
00:35:34 Kaitlin Schilling (she/they): These are wonderful, Iwona! Really looking forward to the OER ☺️
00:36:39 Karen Lauritsen: I’m feeling well, thank you! I am getting hungry… ?
00:36:56 Apurva Ashok: I’ve been having a challenging personal week, but am finding my cup being filled as I hear you all speak!
00:37:11 Amy Hofer (she/her): I just ate first lunch.
00:38:24 Veronica Vold, Open Education Instructional Designer: I am also kid-related discombobulated! More care work
00:39:44 Tiffani Tijerina: I am feeling weirdly torn between ridiculously happy and ridiculously stressed (full-time momming and working at the same time with a 4-month-old), and my late response to your question is evidence (I was changing a diaper when you asked it ?)
00:44:01 Brenna (she/her): Tiffani, omg, I have spent the whole pandemic it seems pausing Zoom calls to attend to toddler toileting needs, so I Get In (capital G capital I).
00:44:39 Tiffani Tijerina: ^^YES
00:46:40 Michele Behr she/her: My youngest is about to move to take a job out of state and I will be transitioning to an empty nest. You all are nearly making me weepy with nostalgia
00:47:20 Veronica Vold, Open Education Instructional Designer: Oh Michele, I feel for you! My kids are in-between the diapers and the college
00:48:03 Brenna (she/her): @Michele ❤️ Ages and stages, my mum would say. We are off to kindergarten in the fall and that is an emotional enough journey!
00:48:25 Karen Lauritsen: As Nicolas wraps up our guests’ opening comments, we invite your reflections, questions and conversation in the chat, or when we transition into the larger group.
00:49:45 Brenna (she/her): I think you did well, Nicolas! Felt very cohesive.
00:49:55 Kaitlin Schilling (she/they): We spoke a lot about care work in today’s session. I wonder if each of you can speak to what the biggest barriers for you have been in applying these approaches in the process?
00:51:03 Michele Behr she/her: Also appreciate the recommendation to include opportunities for reflection. Any thoughts on best practices for that?
00:55:15 Brenna (she/her): I will shamelessly share this essay I wrote this year: https://edtechbooks.org/feminist_digital_ped/zXHDRJAq
00:55:31 Amy Hofer (she/her): Thanks Brenna!
00:56:16 Iwona (she/ona/wiya/elle): Thanks Brenna!
00:56:40 Veronica Vold, Open Education Instructional Designer: Keynote: Towards Openness that Promotes Social Justice with Maha Bali: https://openoregon.org/archived-webinar-towards-openness-that-promotes-social-justice-with-maha-bali/
00:57:08 Apurva Ashok: https://twitter.com/karenraycosta
00:57:44 Amy Hofer (she/her): Do the panelists have successes to share about championing equity in OER at an institutional level?
00:59:28 Apurva Ashok: Maha bali’s blog: https://blog.mahabali.me/
01:00:11 Karen Lauritsen: Here’s my favorite journal guidance from Lynda Barry: https://thenearsightedmonkey.tumblr.com/post/111125141634/above-variations-on-our-daily-diary-practice
01:00:52 Veronica Vold, Open Education Instructional Designer: Oooooo! Thank you!!
01:00:56 Veronica Vold, Open Education Instructional Designer: Love Lynda Barry
01:01:02 Nicolas Pares (He,Him): Thanks, Karen!
01:02:15 Apurva Ashok: Brenna talked about this H5P Documentation tool at a BCcampus webinar back in 2020: https://kitchen.opened.ca/2020/11/09/november-webinar/
01:02:31 Brenna (she/her): Thanks, Apurva!!
01:02:42 Veronica Vold, Open Education Instructional Designer: https://www.learningforjustice.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/LFJ-2111-Social-Justice-Standards-Anti-bias-framework-November-2021-11172021.pdf
01:05:30 Phoebe: I have to do something before my next meeting - I appreciate this session - thank you all for your honest, thoughtful ideas.
01:05:53 Apurva Ashok: Thank you for joining, Phoebe!
01:06:28 Mark Meagher: Thanks very much to everyone - this has been a really great and informative session!
01:07:41 Amy Hofer (she/her): I agree, we’ve had the chance to work with two terrific people in the equity consultant role
01:08:08 Brenna (she/her): https://opentextbc.ca/indigenizationcurriculumdevelopers/
01:08:23 Brianne Collins (she/her): This was great thank you so much!
01:09:00 Kaitlin Schilling (she/they): Pulling Together is such an incredible series!
01:09:06 Karen Lauritsen: Thank you for all the resources!
01:09:34 McKenzie Gentry: Thank you all!
01:09:57 Louann Terveer: Thank you Veronica, Brenna, Iwona, and Nicolas - this was like a breath of fresh air in this week ?
01:10:24 Iwona (she/ona/wiya/elle): Thank you, Louann!
01:10:29 Apurva Ashok: https://www.rebus.community/t/office-hours-oer-instructional-design-part-2-student-centered-development/6783
01:11:15 Apurva Ashok: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScaGr1NCvVnk1C6uKiwkfYWvJcK0QDfwJIZJJV-ckmGK19Wpg/viewform
01:11:29 Karen Lauritsen: We really appreciate your suggestions!
01:12:05 Louann Terveer: Just joined a learning circle with RIOS: https://qubeshub.org/community/groups/rios
01:12:11 Amy Hofer (she/her): Thank you!
01:12:15 Veronica Vold, Open Education Instructional Designer: Thanks Louann!!
01:12:20 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey | she/her: Thank you
01:12:38 Brenna (she/her): Thank you so much for the invitation! It’s been a lovely, positive break to have this chat together.
01:12:42 Kaitlin Schilling (she/they): Greatly appreciate all the focus on care work and thankful to have spent some time with you all!
01:12:47 Nicolas Pares (He,Him): Thank you all!
00:17:11 Apurva Ashok: Yes, congrats! ????
00:17:43 Amy Hofer (she/her): Hooray Veronica!
00:17:57 Apurva Ashok: Please let us know where you are joining from today - we encourage you to share your territorial acknowledgement in the chat.
00:18:45 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey | she/her: The University of Arizona is on the land and territories of Indigenous peoples. Today there are 22 federally recognized tribes in Arizona, with Tucson being home to the O’odham and the Yaqui.
00:20:52 Louann Terveer: Macalester College, St Paul, MN - the ancestral homeland of the Dakota people who were forcibly exiled from the land because of aggressive and persistent settler colonialism
00:21:07 Apurva Ashok: Thank you, Veronica, for helping us feel more ready in mind and body for our conversation today.
00:23:07 Michele Behr she/her: Western Michigan University is located on lands historically occupied by the Ojibwe, Odawa and Bodewadmi nations.
00:25:52 Nicolas Pares (He,Him): The University of Denver honors and acknowledges that the land on which it(we) resides is the traditional territory of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Peoples.
00:26:36 Amy Hofer (she/her): Here’s the most recent update on the program Veronica is talking about: https://openoregon.org/open-for-everyone-equity-and-open-education-cohort-update/
00:26:45 Apurva Ashok: Thanks, Amy!
00:29:08 Jennifer Pate She/Her: Florence, Alabama is on Chikashsha Yaki (Chickasaw), S’atsoyaha (Yuchi), Shawandasse Tula (Shawanwaki/Shawnee), and ᏣᎳᎫᏪᏘᏱ Tsalaguwetiyi (Cherokee, East) land.
00:30:28 Iwona (she/ona/wiya/elle): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12jgZvYjAdzxqMgKvv5C4JScx9XiFMdEw?usp=sharing
00:34:43 Veronica Vold, Open Education Instructional Designer: Thanks, Iwona!!
00:34:48 Apurva Ashok: Thank you!!
00:35:10 Apurva Ashok: Hope he feels better soon, Brenna. ?
00:35:22 Veronica Vold, Open Education Instructional Designer: “Most genius” ?
00:35:34 Kaitlin Schilling (she/they): These are wonderful, Iwona! Really looking forward to the OER ☺️
00:36:39 Karen Lauritsen: I’m feeling well, thank you! I am getting hungry… ?
00:36:56 Apurva Ashok: I’ve been having a challenging personal week, but am finding my cup being filled as I hear you all speak!
00:37:11 Amy Hofer (she/her): I just ate first lunch.
00:38:24 Veronica Vold, Open Education Instructional Designer: I am also kid-related discombobulated! More care work
00:39:44 Tiffani Tijerina: I am feeling weirdly torn between ridiculously happy and ridiculously stressed (full-time momming and working at the same time with a 4-month-old), and my late response to your question is evidence (I was changing a diaper when you asked it ?)
00:44:01 Brenna (she/her): Tiffani, omg, I have spent the whole pandemic it seems pausing Zoom calls to attend to toddler toileting needs, so I Get In (capital G capital I).
00:44:39 Tiffani Tijerina: ^^YES
00:46:40 Michele Behr she/her: My youngest is about to move to take a job out of state and I will be transitioning to an empty nest. You all are nearly making me weepy with nostalgia
00:47:20 Veronica Vold, Open Education Instructional Designer: Oh Michele, I feel for you! My kids are in-between the diapers and the college
00:48:03 Brenna (she/her): @Michele ❤️ Ages and stages, my mum would say. We are off to kindergarten in the fall and that is an emotional enough journey!
00:48:25 Karen Lauritsen: As Nicolas wraps up our guests’ opening comments, we invite your reflections, questions and conversation in the chat, or when we transition into the larger group.
00:49:45 Brenna (she/her): I think you did well, Nicolas! Felt very cohesive.
00:49:55 Kaitlin Schilling (she/they): We spoke a lot about care work in today’s session. I wonder if each of you can speak to what the biggest barriers for you have been in applying these approaches in the process?
00:51:03 Michele Behr she/her: Also appreciate the recommendation to include opportunities for reflection. Any thoughts on best practices for that?
00:55:15 Brenna (she/her): I will shamelessly share this essay I wrote this year: https://edtechbooks.org/feminist_digital_ped/zXHDRJAq
00:55:31 Amy Hofer (she/her): Thanks Brenna!
00:56:16 Iwona (she/ona/wiya/elle): Thanks Brenna!
00:56:40 Veronica Vold, Open Education Instructional Designer: Keynote: Towards Openness that Promotes Social Justice with Maha Bali: https://openoregon.org/archived-webinar-towards-openness-that-promotes-social-justice-with-maha-bali/
00:57:08 Apurva Ashok: https://twitter.com/karenraycosta
00:57:44 Amy Hofer (she/her): Do the panelists have successes to share about championing equity in OER at an institutional level?
00:59:28 Apurva Ashok: Maha bali’s blog: https://blog.mahabali.me/
01:00:11 Karen Lauritsen: Here’s my favorite journal guidance from Lynda Barry: https://thenearsightedmonkey.tumblr.com/post/111125141634/above-variations-on-our-daily-diary-practice
01:00:52 Veronica Vold, Open Education Instructional Designer: Oooooo! Thank you!!
01:00:56 Veronica Vold, Open Education Instructional Designer: Love Lynda Barry
01:01:02 Nicolas Pares (He,Him): Thanks, Karen!
01:02:15 Apurva Ashok: Brenna talked about this H5P Documentation tool at a BCcampus webinar back in 2020: https://kitchen.opened.ca/2020/11/09/november-webinar/
01:02:31 Brenna (she/her): Thanks, Apurva!!
01:02:42 Veronica Vold, Open Education Instructional Designer: https://www.learningforjustice.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/LFJ-2111-Social-Justice-Standards-Anti-bias-framework-November-2021-11172021.pdf
01:05:30 Phoebe: I have to do something before my next meeting - I appreciate this session - thank you all for your honest, thoughtful ideas.
01:05:53 Apurva Ashok: Thank you for joining, Phoebe!
01:06:28 Mark Meagher: Thanks very much to everyone - this has been a really great and informative session!
01:07:41 Amy Hofer (she/her): I agree, we’ve had the chance to work with two terrific people in the equity consultant role
01:08:08 Brenna (she/her): https://opentextbc.ca/indigenizationcurriculumdevelopers/
01:08:23 Brianne Collins (she/her): This was great thank you so much!
01:09:00 Kaitlin Schilling (she/they): Pulling Together is such an incredible series!
01:09:06 Karen Lauritsen: Thank you for all the resources!
01:09:34 McKenzie Gentry: Thank you all!
01:09:57 Louann Terveer: Thank you Veronica, Brenna, Iwona, and Nicolas - this was like a breath of fresh air in this week ?
01:10:24 Iwona (she/ona/wiya/elle): Thank you, Louann!
01:10:29 Apurva Ashok: https://www.rebus.community/t/office-hours-oer-instructional-design-part-2-student-centered-development/6783
01:11:15 Apurva Ashok: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScaGr1NCvVnk1C6uKiwkfYWvJcK0QDfwJIZJJV-ckmGK19Wpg/viewform
01:11:29 Karen Lauritsen: We really appreciate your suggestions!
01:12:05 Louann Terveer: Just joined a learning circle with RIOS: https://qubeshub.org/community/groups/rios
01:12:11 Amy Hofer (she/her): Thank you!
01:12:15 Veronica Vold, Open Education Instructional Designer: Thanks Louann!!
01:12:20 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey | she/her: Thank you
01:12:38 Brenna (she/her): Thank you so much for the invitation! It’s been a lovely, positive break to have this chat together.
01:12:42 Kaitlin Schilling (she/they): Greatly appreciate all the focus on care work and thankful to have spent some time with you all!
01:12:47 Nicolas Pares (He,Him): Thank you all!
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