200. Teaching for the Public Good

When designing a course, faculty and instructional designers often focus on the course as a discrete entity without considering its role in the institution and society. In this episode, Robin DeRosa joins us to discuss how our classes and institutions can help to support broader social objectives.  Robin is the Director of the Open Learning and Teaching Collaborative at Plymouth State University, Robin had long been an editor of Hybrid Pedagogy and is a co-founder of the Open Pedagogy Notebook. She has also published on a wide variety of topics related to higher education, including open pedagogy, remote learning, and value-centered instruction planning.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: When designing a course, faculty and instructional designers often focus on the course as a discrete entity without considering its role in the institution and society. In this episode, we examine how our classes and institutions can help to support broader social objectives.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

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John: Our guest today is Robin DeRosa, the Director of the Open Learning and Teaching Collaborative at Plymouth State University. Robin had long been an editor of Hybrid Pedagogy and is a co-founder of the Open Pedagogy notebook. She has also published on a wide variety of topics related to higher education, including open pedagogy, remote learning, and value-centered instruction planning. Welcome back, Robin.

Robin: Thanks, you guys. I’m so happy to be here.

Rebecca: We’re excited to talk to you again.

John: The last time it was one of our early podcasts and it was in person and that was so much nicer. But we’re happy to see you here.

Robin: It was amazing too, because you guys have really fancy equipment, headphones, microphones. And I still periodically take out those photos of myself recording that podcast because I felt like such a big cheese.

Rebecca: We had such good time.

John: We’ve used that in several presentations, because we don’t have that many pictures of people doing it and it was because you suggested “Let’s get a photo.” You mean most people aren’t like, “Oh, take a picture of me with my fancy headphones on.” And shortly after that, if you remember when we recorded it, it was next to a cafe where there was a cart moving by that sounded like a train going by. And it was a blender, and it was a coffee grinder, and it was a toilet flushing. We moved to a new location, which was an old recording studio, shortly after that, which is really confined and crowded and cramped. So it wasn’t really the most conducive place to take photos. And for some reason, since March, we haven’t actually talked to anybody in person, including each other.

Robin: I wonder why. I, just, who knows?

Rebecca: It’s a weird thing, it’s just a weird thing. But today’s teas are…

Robin: My tea is a very standard and reliable honey chamomile. So if I do doze off in the middle of the podcast, it will be because I’m so relaxed from this very sleepy tea.

Rebecca: We all need a little relaxation these days.

Robin: That’s right.

John: And I’m drinking a ginger peach green tea.

Rebecca: Oh, a standard. I’ve got golden monkey today, because I was looking forward to talking to Robin. So, brought out the fancy stuff.

John: And that is her favorite tea for some of our most favorite guests.

Rebecca: So we invited you here today to talk a little bit about your recent article, “Never forget: your course is not only yours.” And in this article, you talk about course and curriculum development, often starting with course content or course structure without really the consideration of the larger role the course plays in the institution and the larger role the institution plays in society. So, can you first start by sharing the role institutions do play in doing the work of the public good?

Robin: Yeah, that’s a nut of a question because I feel like if we could do a better job in public higher ed, of answering that question, just even internally, we would be in a much stronger position to advocate for our needs in sustaining our institutions. So I’ve really been spending time recently trying to think about not taking the definition of an institution for granted and not thinking about it, I mean, certainly not now post COVID, as a collection of buildings. But what is the work of the institution? We know maybe what the work is of a course. What is exactly the work of an institution? Is it just to graduate and credential people? I think probably not. There’s cheaper and easier ways to get a credential, that’s for sure. So I’m really thinking that the way we understand publics, it’s hard to understand publics without thinking about institutions. Because you have to, in some ways, imagine a collective. A public has to have some kind of shape or structure to it. It’s different than just a mess or swarm of people. It’s got some kind of architecture. And the only way for me to imagine that is to think about public institutions. I think that is where our public’s in here. That’s what a public is. It’s the collection of public institutions that are created to serve. So if that’s the case, I think, as a public institution, I might think about something like public health care, for example. I think, “Okay, not only what do we need to serve the individual student, who we sometimes call the consumer now.” I was in a situation earlier where I heard somebody using that name interchangeably with students. And that is because we do think of college in many ways as a consumer good. Are you going to get your value out of college? And here’s the ROI that college will deliver through the college earnings premium, you’ll make 145% more money. And that’s all true, and it’s fine. But I’m interested in that other corollary question, which is, “What value do institutions deliver to publics beyond the individual consumers or students who attend?” It was interesting to me to think about this during a public health crisis because lots of colleges were involved in vaccinations. And then lots of colleges weren’t. The question to me about, like, “Does a college play a role in public health?” So we know from some of the economic research about colleges, that public colleges, and John, you were actually just sort of, I knew the body of literature you were citing offhand as we were chatting before the show, we’re talking about folks like Philip Trostel, and others who have done studies to kind of demonstrate the value of public institutions to the public good. And that includes things like public colleges delivering longevity, happier marriages, better cognitive functioning to children, regional wage increases whether or not a person goes to college. So I started thinking, like, we can talk about the value of public institutions. But how often do faculty and instructional designers think about any of those things when they’re on the ground doing their actual work? And could we get a more powerful amplification of these contributions we’re making to the public good if we actually design intentionally for that piece of the work? So we’re not just serving our students with their particular learning outcomes. But we’re trying to think about building a course on organic chemistry that also pays attention to these larger ways that the institution is serving, whether it be the region, the state, the nation, or globally. So it’s really a question of how we shift instructional design, to ask about institutional mission and incorporate that into design practices.

Rebecca: One of the ideas that you brought up in your article was this idea of sites of practice, which I really latched on to. Because it moved away from thinking about an institution as something that’s just completely not touchable to something that we help create and participate in and help evolve. So can you talk a little bit about what you mean by sites of practice?

Robin: Yeah, and Lord knows, I often feel like my own institution is untouchable, and I direct faculty development, so to a certain degree, I have a fairly significant administrative job. But I still often feel like it doesn’t matter what I do, the institution is a behemoth that is fully disconnected from anything I do on the ground. That may actually be the case. But I’m trying to think of a new model for defining institutions that come less from some nebulous stratosphere, or some board of trustees or administrative board. And instead, to think, this actually comes from some of my work in English in the early days with critical theory, and God knows, probably even some critical race theory. So feel free to just shut me down now, just cancel me right now. But I think that it’s in the practice, it’s in the being and the doing that we actually create the shape of who we are as an institution. And sometimes you can see this because you’ll, for example, look at some web PR, or hear a tour guide for your institution and realize, like, “Gosh, that really doesn’t, doesn’t seem to be what we really are.” So you can recognize that the thing you really are is a thing and you know it and you know it because you’re working in it. And I guess the hope I have is that, if we can get faculty and staff to talk more in a meta way, or intentionally, actually, about the practices that we’re using, and how we think they set the tone for who we are as an institution, that will be the institution, like it or not. Nobody has the power to make the institution what it isn’t. And so if through the work, if you can make the work visible, and you can talk about the work in intelligent ways, I think that does have the ability to shape what the institution is actually capable of. I think one of the larger problems, though, is like, except maybe in, like, committee work. In general, we don’t have these conversations as academics, and we’re very content focused, and we’re very focused on our majors, perhaps. And then I think staff have an even harder problem, which is they are generally really required to stay in their swim lanes, they don’t enjoy the freedom to ask questions about how their daily work and their tasks could be shifted to create a different shape. They’re just sort of told, “Here’s what needs to be accomplished.” And I think we’re really kind of failing to get the impact that we could be getting out of our public institutions by not letting faculty and staff have more conversations about how their daily work could do more for how the institution serves its publics.

John: What are some specific things that individual faculty members might be able to do to help shift the institution a little bit, sort of like shifting an ocean liner, perhaps, but shifting it in a direction that may be more positive? What are some individual tasks, perhaps, or individual activities that you can think of that faculty might be able to undertake?

Robin: Well, I think first, and this is some work that is really heavily influenced by my colleague, Martha Bertus. And then our colleagues, Sean Michael Morris, and Jesse Stommel, particularly Sean Michael Morris, who’s done a lot of writing recently about what he calls critical instructional design, which comes out of the world of critical digital pedagogy. But really, where they started in asking questions about how to rethink instructional design was to ask questions, instead of a sort of classic, say, backwards design model where you’re starting with learning outcomes and mapping those two activities, and then mapping those activities to assessments, and it’s all very predetermined. There’s a lot more co-learning happening, where students are welcomed into the process of learning design, and they’re encouraged to critically notice the learning environment that they are part of, so that when you talk about, “We teach our students learn how to learn,” it gives some teeth to that, because you’re making the learning process visible, you’re engaging them in conversations about the learning process. And that design just becomes something that you can now also discuss and focus on. So I think, similarly here, I’m suggesting that we take kind of a critical stance, and sometimes that word can be a little bit intimidating, but I think it really means intentional or thoughtful in this regard. So that instead of just jumping to your content, you’re instead asking questions about, “What kind of scholar do I want my students to emerge from this class like? What are the qualities of scholarship that I hope that they’re invested with?” It’s about asking, “What role you hope the work that they do in your course will do in the wider world? And therefore, what role you think the academy is playing?” Is it just job training for the future? Which is certainly one valid possibility. But they’re also, for example, if you teach, we have a very significant number of health majors. It’s a very popular field right now, especially in regional colleges and community colleges. We’re seeing lots of people interested in healthcare, because it’s a growing field. And there’s jobs and there’s need, but also to see that during a global pandemic, there’s lots of students interested in studying health. I think part of the question is, “Okay, what do we think the role is of a public university during a global pandemic? How should it be behaving? What messaging should it be putting out? How should it be related to public health messages?” Our local hospital was putting out lots of public health messages, they did a video every week. And I wondered, why wouldn’t that be the kind of thing that a university health program or nursing program wouldn’t also be involved in? So public health, I think, is a really interesting place to start. But we can think about other things that have been in the news lately, things like housing and food insecurity with social work majors or people who are studying economics, for example, or even studying nutrition. There are some very rich things going on in the world that historians can contribute to at the moment, if you have been watching the news. So I think one of the questions I have is, I’m concerned when I see our public institutions shrinking from those responsibilities to be leaders in opening public debate and amplifying public knowledge in issues that are really important for sustainable healthy communities. And right now, in New Hampshire, we’ve got legislation, it just became law, that says educators can no longer discuss divisive concepts in the classroom. And there are a whole series of examples that come out of this fear mongering around critical race theory. It took me at least three years of graduate school to be able to really explain critical race theory, like I’m pretty sure these people do not mean critical race theory when they say critical race theory. But I’m concerned about public institutions that aren’t stepping up to explain why that legislation is so problematic. So I guess what I’m interested in is, how can faculty and staff in their daily work, start moving the institution into more public relationships on issues the public clearly needs education about? And I don’t mean explaining to uneducated people what’s right, I mean, education in its best sense, which is informed debate, civil discourse, history, science, right. Like the kinds of things that we can bring into the marketplace of ideas and share. But I see now a shrinking of public institutions from those responsibilities, fear that legislators are going to rescind even more public funding if you get perceived as partisan or ideological and those things concern me. I think there’s a, just like public healthcare and public transportation have roles in societies, so do public institutions of higher education. But my question for most people now is, “What role does the public university in your town play?” I don’t know that people could tell you beyond, “Oh, that’s where kids go to college.” That’s important. But, “What else are you there for?” is the question I would ask.

John: Would a starting point be expanding community based service learning type activities, where students directly engage with some of the problems of the community by working with community members?

Robin: I think so. I think service learning is a great example of that. Service learning, of course, is like, you know, flawed and difficult for a whole bunch of reasons as well. But really, what in general, you’re getting out there, I think, is the idea of just a more porous boundary between the public and the academy. And in its best sense, a public academy would really be interested in not just educating the public, but educating the public for the public. So I get a little bit concerned when I see all of our interest being in how to create students who are more marketable for competing against each other for jobs. Like I get that, our students need jobs. I mean, many of my students are Pell-eligible poor students, and they, especially with the debt load they’re carrying in New Hampshire, highest in the nation, they need jobs after they graduate. But on the other hand, there’s other ways to be thinking about creating economically sustainable communities, besides just, “You will be better than everybody else in this field. And so you’ll kick their asses and get the job.” I’m thinking more about, “Can public institutions in areas also be creating programs and things that ultimately, like, are the jobs that the students are going to be inhabiting?” And it’s one of the reasons I like the community college model. An example of this, I think, is, I can’t remember what state it was, but they were allowing people to register to vote at their primary care physician’s office when they went in for their yearly physicals. So one of the questions they were asked is, “Are you registered to vote? No. Would you like us to do that for you right now, like, we can do it.” This idea of, like, integrated care for the public good creating voting citizens and make sure they’re healthy and that they’re educated and they have childcare. My dream of a true community college would be a place where all those services existed together. But those aren’t just like welfare, social services, right? These are social services that give back, there’s return. So I think there’s a lot more potential if institutions could, public institutions in particular, could say, “You know what, we’re okay saying that we have a stake in the public good.” Like, “We are okay saying, it’s on us to make this region/state stronger, healthier, economically viable, equitable.” Right now, I don’t know that I’m seeing our institutions take those positions, we’re very focused on individual consumer success.

Rebecca: Seems like one of the key pieces to that puzzle is treating the local community that you’re situated in, as an expert on the local community, so that there’s some contributions to the conversations and some seeds to what those conversations should even be. Rather than making those decisions and plopping them on to a community because that tends not to work. That’s why we have institutions on hills and things, right, and there’s that divide.

Robin: College on a hill. That’s exactly right. And obviously, none of what I’m saying here is new in terms of pedagogy, and to think about in terms of somebody like Freire, a sort of talking about the revolution cannot be taught by someone external to the revolutionary community. So you are growing things from inside. And I think that’s absolutely true. And I think a piece of that, that hit me with instructional design during COVID, particularly, is as people were moving remote and moving online, you’re seeing much more outsourcing to things like edtech products to assure quality and remote delivery, for example. And there are a million problems with this, for example, like lots of people will tell you that they don’t believe in for-profit, higher education. Even middle-of-the-road people will say, “Yeah, institutions should not be for profit, and they do scam students.” But we have no problem with massive for-profit industries, right in the center of our public institutions, right? And I’m talking about things like the textbook conglomerates, I’m talking about things like edtech corporations that run Canvas or whatever, I’m talking about our dining services ancillaries that keep our public institutions running. And I think we saw in times of crisis, a real falling into the pitch, that some external thing could save us. You can hire a consultant, like Huron, and pay them $700,000 and they’ll tell you what’s wrong with your institution. And you can get an OPM to manage your new online thing and that’ll be great. But I just don’t think this is how publics get built. You cannot serve the public good, unless the public is somehow in that sustainability loop. So it really is about building an institution that’s much more integrated with the world outside. The thing is, faculty are pretty good at this, like faculty now are starting to get really interested in this kind of work. They’re doing project-based work. They’re doing open education, they’re interested in connected learning. But we don’t talk about that institutionally. And we don’t necessarily integrate it with our strategic plans. We don’t necessarily have coherence from one class or section to another. My question is, we might need to start making sure faculty have the vocabulary and education to think more intentionally about what they’re doing in their classes, and how it really is affecting what their institution could be. And if they can talk to each other and we can develop some synergies around that I think we could potentially be, I’m still fairly cynical at this point because so many things are going in the wrong direction in public higher ed, but I do think we actually have the skill in our faculty, staff, particularly staff, I’ll say, but our designers, to do this work. But coordinating it is hard. And we throw a lot of bad ideas after bad ideas that keep us away from what I think is a pure mission, which is really to focus on how we work with students in our communities.

Rebecca: One of the things that we often think about is that power sits with administration. And you’re really talking about the idea that an institution is really about the work that’s being done and who’s doing it. And so we’ve talked a bit about faculty, but I’m wondering if we can talk a little bit about both staff and students and their role in creating an institution and also steering an institution. Students are actually a key to all of this. And it certainly has been woven into our conversation here, but not maybe pulled out explicitly. But we often don’t think of that because we think of them as being consumers, or that’s how the conversation goes, rather than they are the community that we’re hoping to serve, because they’re the ones that bring the community forward. They are the ones who will be leading our community.

Robin: And we so undo ourselves by basically training students into a compliance model, which is so much of K12, and higher education. And so when you do open up learning opportunities that are really co-developed with students, or that are very learner driven, you do get pushback from students who are like, “That’s not what I’m paying you for, I’m paying for you to teach me something and I need to get a job.” And I understand that, like, what other response would there be given how we’ve set up the system? But I think that that’s not about blaming students, that’s about understanding. We get what we paid for, so to speak. We designed that. And that’s a designed response. And so it’s going to take some intentional design to create a students-as-partners model. Five years ago, or whatever, we’d say, “Oh, I’m so student-centered.” And we would mean like, “We have class discussion, right? I don’t just lecture the whole time.” I think now we’ve graduated past that where people understand running a classroom where students have agency to speak and ask critical questions and stuff. But now it’s probably time, at least in some of their classes, to say, “You really need to learn to curate materials, you can’t just study what I give you, you also have to learn to figure out what we need to study to get where we need to go.” I also believe that if I’m trying to diversify my curriculum, part of the way I need to do that is to understand that new voices and new perspectives are going to have more to offer than I can offer all on my own so I’m going to need to involve those students. So we need to start thinking about our instructional design as a way of creating the kinds of citizens/members of the knowledge commons that we hope will take our culture to its next iteration. And I think we’re, lots of teaching and learning centers are really good now at helping people figure out activities. I mean, this is kind of what we built open pedagogy.org for, it’s really a website about activities that see students as contributors to the knowledge commons, not just consumers. Staff is another question. I actually think we’re further behind on staff than we are with students because again, that kind of student-centered thing propelled us into the beginnings of some of those critical questions about students and their agency and learner-centered classrooms. But staff, I think, we do a pretty lousy job of understanding the role that staff play in academia. And I don’t just mean in, like, the university operations, but I mean in, like, building a world of knowledge, I just think we could do a lot more. So for example, in the office that I run now, and it makes it sound like such a busy center, there’s four of us, I should specify, we could easily have 40 of us, and it would be amazing. But the four people are here, we have very different jobs. And this sort of faculty development director, someone else directs the student major that lives in our program. Another person is basically a lead instructional designer, and somebody else is more of an administrative assistant and advisor. We are all cross trained on every piece of that puzzle. Every single one of us participates in teaching, like actually teaching, we all do advising, we all do some admin, we all know every aspect. And it doesn’t mean we don’t have our expertise and we definitely have our jobs. But we talked so much about treating the student holistically, but we still really insist on staff staying in their place. I know that sounds awful but I really think that’s how many staff are treated. I don’t think you can have a holistic approach to students without relaxing the boundaries between people, especially people in team-based settings. So I think faculty have contributed to kind of rarifying the academic space a little bit. And I just don’t think, as somebody who comes out of interdisciplinary studies, we’re very interested in transdisciplinarity, the outside world does not have disciplines, right, they just have things. And I think staff can really help us translate some of the academic work of the academy, because staff work often looks more like the community work that we’re doing outside of the college. So there’s some really rich opportunities there to merge teaching with staff operations, and get students partnering more with staff, and staff working more on projects, and staff helping more in classrooms, and faculty, for God’s sake, understanding more about financial aid, for example, the Bursar’s office, the Registrar, it’s just a win-win. So I think a lot of what I’m talking about when I’m trying to think about instructional design is just, let’s be more intentional about designing an integrated university, wherever you are. So if what you do is make courses, it’s time to think about how your course functions with the student life office and the diversity and equity office and the food pantry. And the same thing for staff to be invited in, I think, to those academic experiences.

Rebecca: One of the things that struck me about the subtitle of your article, “The course is not only yours,” is part of what we’ve been talking about is this bigger kind of public knowledge, which is completely tied to all our earlier work about OER’s and open pedagogy. And I was just hoping you might talk a little bit about how those ideas of access tied to this bigger idea that you’re describing here.

Robin: When I first started my work in Open, I was obviously interested in the access issues about the high cost of textbooks and the really significant social justice issue that inheres in what seems like a really stupid issue. But I moved from that to being much more interested in the pedagogy just because I was teaching English and having after 15, 20 years in the classroom, having amazing experiences once I started working with students on creating learning materials and doing non-disposable assignments, and it just really energized students to work more authentically. But I think the next phase of my development at Open was really about thinking like, “Okay, so what about this is public work?” Because there’s a difference, I think, between open and public, and I think open is kind of a neutral word in the sense that I don’t know that it’s always good. I mean, I definitely know it’s not always good. I always think, open is not the opposite of private, private things can be great. And sometimes open things can be really abusive. Tara Robertson has written about this. And it really was like an epiphany for me when I read her piece on this, but it was about a lesbian, and maybe this is, like, not good for your G-rated podcast, so you could edit me out, but a lesbian porn magazine from the whatever 70’s, I think 80’s, called On Our Backs, and it was a print magazine, very feminist magazine. For very obvious reasons, women’s studies scholars are really interested in that work, and they digitized the collection and made it open. What’s interesting, though, is a lot of those women are alive and they were taking those photographs for a very select group of subscribers in a print journal. And there’s some really interesting questions I think about power and consent and what it means. And obviously there’s scholarly value to having those resources open, I don’t dispute that. But I would not argue that it’s a particularly feminist move or a move with social justice at its core. It’s not enough to just make things free and open all the time, we have to really think about what makes our public life healthier for all of us, and I don’t mean physically healthier, but better for all of us. And when I think about better, I think I’ve kind of landed mostly on the question of equity. Because it’s not really about incredible quality of life for certain people, it’s really about, how can we get the best outcomes for the widest and most diverse group of people? And for that, you can’t just think about openly licensing materials, you have to think about the values that are pushing you and you have to think about what the role is of the institution that you’re working in. And that became my next iteration. I still think open pedagogy and OER and open licenses are really big tools for doing a lot of this work, but I think the work is bigger.

John: So it involves taking, not just creating things for public consumption, but creating things that actually are useful for society as a whole. Would that be a good way of thinking about it?

Robin: I think so. My friend, Jim Grimm is an economist, and he describes it in a way that I find very, very helpful. He’s talking about a concept that you probably know the tragedy of the commons, and the sort of debunked idea at this point that you can never have common pool resources, because the second you open the pasture for anybody to graze, it’s going to get overgrazed and destroyed by the richest guy with the biggest cows or whatever, and then you’re done. So don’t even try. But Jim’s point is that commons is not a set of resources. A commons is not a meadow, it’s not a place. The way he says it is that the commons is a verb. It’s a series of agreements that people make about decisions that they’re going to make collectively, in order to get outcomes that work for everybody. I would say that verb, the verb of commons-ing is what we should do in public institutions. That’s the place for that kind of verbing, where we don’t overgraze our meadows, just because that guy’s going to get a good job out of it. We’re thinking more broadly about preserving an ecosystem where we can continue to learn and grow and increase our quality of life. So the idea of commons being a verb has been very helpful to me in moving from the focus in OER, the artifacts, to focusing instead on the practices that, and the collaborations that, keep us working together in sync.

Rebecca: Speaking of tools, we just talked about OER and open licensing as a tool to do some of this work. You’ve also worked on the ACE framework, that also seems like a really important tool for this work. Can you talk just a little bit about that and introduce folks to that tool?

Robin: Yeah, the ACE framework was sort of the first step that Martha and I took into rethinking instructional design. And it was a COVID designed tool, but more broadly than COVID, it’s really for teaching during a time of crisis. So I’ve talked about ACE, sometimes with faculty in California who are dealing with wildfires that have displaced their whole student body from working on campus, for example, or other issues like that. So I think it’s kind of adaptable. But ACE stands for adaptability, connection, and equity. And basically, we designed it to suggest that during a highly misnamed COVID pivot, which makes it sound like it was so delicate and beautiful when we all pirouetted into remote learning…

Rebecca: …and there were definitely jazz hands involved.

Robin: Oh, yeah. Meanwhile, authentically, people were dying, and people’s families were not having enough to eat, just, really. So what we wanted to do was to say, okay, it’s not going to be about Zoom. If this is about Zoom, it is really impossible to imagine that you would not completely alienate your student body. So we designed a framework to basically say, of course, you’re going to probably use some Zoom, and we will definitely support you in learning whatever new tools and technologies you need. But before that, let’s think intentionally about the realities that our students are going to be encountering, and the realities that we are going to be encountering, as we teach.

Rebecca: Yeah!

Robin: Exactly. With our babies on our laps, and whatever else, Rebecca. So the key to the ACE is really that very idea. It has practices, lots of practices, we get very concrete and specific, you know, we’re not just like, “You should care about people,” like, they’ll tell you what to try and how to do it. And it has activities and it has examples, but it’s really saying, start with your values. Start with a framework. Don’t just jump to the tech tool as particularly one that’s sold to you by a for profit company that’s going to give it to you for free for a year, so that you will build up a dependence on it and need it later. Like, there’s nefarious stuff going on. Let’s start by asking, “What do your students need during this time of crisis? What do your courses need in order to adapt?” And then we’ll figure out that other stuff once we’ve asked using our expertise as humans and faculty, not just listening to vendors, and then we can make better decisions. And that pivot had to happen so quickly that it was an obvious pitfall that we were just going to take the first thing that was put in front of us, and that that was going to be considered a solution. The reality is there was going to be no solution to teaching and learning during COVID. So you better have a robust framework, so that you can keep coping for the 18 months that you’re going to be doing this. And let’s hope it’s not, you know, another 18 months.

Rebecca: And there will continue to be crises that follow us. It’s not the same, but we have students who have been traumatized, we have faculty and staff who have been traumatized.

Robin: And so many students who had the worst parts of COVID, especially where I was, a quarter of our students got COVID at Plymouth State. But we didn’t have a ton of illness but we had huge economic fallout, poverty immediately in much of our student body. But what I heard from my most vulnerable students was, “Yeah, this is bad, but it’s been this bad for a long time, I actually feel better, because now people are paying attention. The fact that people care now that I can’t afford my meals, the fact that people see that I don’t have Wifi at home, the fact that you’re thinking about how to loan me a laptop.” So I think the wake up call was really less for the people who are suffering the worst and it was more for the people who had been lucky enough not to be suffering all along.

John: And to be able to ignore the suffering that was going on because it was hidden on our institutions.

Robin: Exactly. And to think, “Hey, I’m an early americanist, it’s not really my gig, housing insecurity is not really my gig.” You know what? It is your gig because 10% of your class is housing insecure, or even homeless right now. So how do you expect them to care about the Haitian Revolution or whatever? So there’s no silver lining to COVID. But it was a helpful wake up call. And I think most people who use the ACE framework both at Plymouth State and in other places, by the time they really had engaged with the framework, they realized, “Oh, yeah, I mean, this is for COVID, but it’s also for anybody who might teach human beings.” Because human beings tend to have challenges and traumas, you’re not going to go through 18 years of schooling, and not have significant challenges and traumas somewhere along the way, almost everybody. So I think it’s good if we build that into how we approach our design.

Rebecca: Although there’s still a lot of challenges, I still feel very hopeful. And I think a lot of the things that you’ve been talking about Robin, although maybe come out of some frustration, I think are a hopeful look at the way that the future can be and the way that we can all contribute to that.

Robin: We had a pretty rich last three weeks in faculty development at Plymouth, we’re running a bunch of different cohorts. And, I mean, I come out of these things and I’m like, “These people are amazing!” We have a staff learning community, and then a mixed faculty and staff learning community. And we, just like you guys, we have a beautiful, beautiful campus, and our students are fantastic. So there isn’t anything here that shouldn’t be working. It’s the same thing we were talking about earlier too. The return on investment and public higher ed, like it’s a no brainer. So it makes it more frustrating, on the one hand, because you do see how much potential there is. But on the other hand, it doesn’t seem like a pipe dream. Just like it doesn’t seem like a pipe dream to vaccinate with a vaccine that’s almost 100% effective. Like, “Hey, guys, you really could make this go away if you wanted to.” So there’s a lot of political will that we’ve got to work on. But the tools are within our reach for sure.

John: So we always end with the question, what’s next?

Robin: So two things are next. The first is I’m going to take a vacation to Monhegan Island, and it’s an island off the coast of Maine and my favorite place on earth. And I had to learn how to put my vacation days requests into the online system that we have. I had never done it before. Even though I’ve had this job for two and a half years. So I was like okay, that’s a sign I need a vacation. So the next thing that’s happening is a break. And I do just want to say to all my colleagues, like, you’ve got to find some rest, because I’ve never seen people pushed to the breaking point like we all have been over the last bunch of months. I’m thankful for my dogs during the pandemic. I have one on my lap right now and she just woke up for the tail end of the podcast so what great timing. But I think after that my interest is probably in working on a new initiative with Martha, she’s calling it now is really in some ways her baby, but it’s called Design Forward. We’re working on it in relationship with John and Jesse and some of the hybrid ped folks. And we’re really interested in seeing where critical instructional design could go in terms of, I think, building a more hopeful and sustainable vision for the future of higher ed. So we’re going to be working on that, particularly internally at Plymouth State but I think maybe some of these partnerships with the hybrid ped folks will allow us to do some nice sharing more broadly as well, with those materials that we’re working on.

Rebecca: Enjoy your rest, well deserved rest.

Robin: Thank you. I definitely intend to even though I have to leave my dogs at home, which just seems terrible. But other than that, I’m really looking forward to it.

Rebecca: We’ll be looking forward to seeing your next adventure come out as it starts being shared out as well.

John: Thank you. It’s always great talking to you. And you’ve inspired a lot of us to try a lot of new things with open education, open pedagogy, and so much more.

Robin: Well, thanks for having me and a shout out to, not just you guys, but really all my SUNY friends because there’s many of your campuses that have been partners with me in a lot of the work especially in OER, so it’s great to see you guys

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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94. Open Reflection

Students can provide useful feedback on instructional practices and class design when they are asked, In this episode, three students from John’s spring economics capstone class join us to provide their reflections on the class’s experiment in developing an open pedagogy project. Our guests in today’s episode are Maria Aldrich, Victoria Heist and Charlie Tararzona.

Show Notes

Transcript

Rebecca: Students can provide useful feedback on instructional practices and class design when they are asked. In this episode, students join us to provide an open reflection on one class’s experiment in developing an open pedagogy project.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are Maria Aldrich, Victoria Heist and Charlie Tarazona, three students who participated in the creation of an open pedagogy project in one of my economics classes this spring semester. Welcome.

Victoria: Thanks for having us.

Maria: Thank you.

Charlie: Yep, excited to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are…

John: None of you are drinking tea, are you?

Maria: No.

Victoria: No tea.

Charlie: No tea today.

Rebecca: How regretful. [LAUGHTER]

John: It happens with many of our guests. I’m having ginger peach black tea.

Rebecca: And I’m drinking Lady Grey. The issue is our tea selection is no longer close to our recording studio. It’s a problem. It’s an epidemic now with our tea choices.

John: …now that we’re recording in this little closet in a building next door, where at least we don’t have toilets flushing every 30 seconds or so that we have to edit out.

Rebecca: So John, can you start first by explaining what open pedagogy is, to kind of frame our discussion?

John: Going back a step further. Last year, I saw a presentation by Robin DeRosa who presented on this at the SUNY Conference on Instruction and Technology and she made a really compelling case for some of the advantages that open pedagogy projects have. And open pedagogy just involves having students create content that is open and shared publicly with the world.

Rebecca: So what class did you do an open pedagogy project in?

John: This class is a capstone course in the economics department here. It’s taken mostly by seniors and a few juniors. And it’s a seminar course in economic theory and policy. It’s one of our smaller classes. And we had only 27 students in this capstone, this semester.

Rebecca: So why this class?

John: Because the students were ready for it. The course builds on all the courses that they’ve had up to this point and it allows them to pull together material they’ve learned in all of their prior courses, as well as the cognate classes in statistics and math and so on.

Rebecca: So what kind of project exactly did you propose to these students?

John: I originally proposed two options. One was to do something on behavioral economics, because past classes have found that to be a lot of fun, and another one I suggested was they could just pick current topics and work in small groups and create papers on that. Turned out that they really didn’t like any of those ideas and given the nature of open pedagogy, I left it up to the class to decide what their topics would be. And I think it was actually Charlie, who came up with the idea. And would you like to tell us what that was?

Charlie: I know you had mentioned in the beginning of the class the idea of open pedagogy. And I found that pretty interesting because it seemed like a good opportunity for us as seniors and juniors to really put what we had learned out there. And also, in terms of topic selection, you gave us the opportunity to really choose which topics we wanted to talk about. We ended up choosing the topic of intergenerational mobility and economic inequality. We focused more on the economic inequality aspect of it in the end. But yeah, like I said, it was just a good opportunity for everybody to really finish their college careers with something that they can show.

Rebecca: Dr. Kane is going to close his ears now and you guys are going to tell us exactly what you thought when he said, “Hey, you’re going to write a book.”

Victoria: I was hesitant at first, just because group projects are kind of daunting, especially in economics. However, a collaborative group project was exciting to do… to see all of our work put together. As economic students it isn’t something you really see, it’s usually individual work.

Maria: Oh, yeah, I would agree with Victoria. I was kind of hesitant at first, especially because it was something new for our class so I figured there are probably a lot of kinks that needed to be fixed. So I was a little worried about not having everything fully figured out at first. I thought it was something interesting. It appealed to me because I like the thought that other people could read what we had written and we could have control of what we would want to talk about.

Charlie: And the topic and the idea of a book project really intrigued me… that it just let us put out there what we had learned over these past few years and gave us something that we can show in the end of it.

Rebecca: Were any of you scared?

Victoria: Not scared. I wouldn’t use that word.

John: Were you concerned?

Victoria: A bit concerned, just because I like doing my individual work. I feel stronger in that.

Maria: Yeah, I would agree. I think group work can sometimes be difficult to have for every class because everyone has a different writing style and everyone works on their projects at different times. So I think at first, you’re a little bit worried that not everyone will be able to work well together. But I found that in my group, we were able to work very well and we’re able to meet once a week to go over what we needed to work on for the week.

Charlie: Yeah, I found something similar to that experience. Whereas my group, after the first few weeks, figured out what we wanted to do, and when we could meet, and what was the most effective way for us to put the book project together? And I think it turned out really well.

Rebecca: So you’ve all mentioned groups, can you talk a little bit about what the groups were, how they were determined, and how that worked?

Victoria: The groups were groups of three from the class, because there’s 27 people. And then we’re able to email Professor Kane and ask if we wanted to work with anyone specific, like if we had friends in the class, we could work with them. But if not, or if we didn’t want to work with someone we knew, we’re able to randomize it.

Maria: I was put into a group of two other random people that I didn’t know, but we were able to set up a group chat immediately and communicate very well through that.

Charlie: I actually emailed Professor Kane about being a group in Victoria and we also included another student in that. I think it worked out pretty well and I was happy with how it turned out.

John: Before the groups were formed, though, the class decided on what the topics would be. So we had kind of a free-form planning session where we narrowed it down to nine topics you wanted to address. And then at that point, we knew how big the groups were going to be. And it worked out nicely with three people per group.

Rebecca: How did each group get assigned a topic?

Charlie: So the way we assigned topics was, we had created a list of the nine topics, and then each individual group could choose their top three, and then we divided them that way based on everybody’s top choice. If they didn’t happen to get their top choice, they usually got their second or third, I think that only happened for maybe two groups, and they seem to be fine with what they ended up with.

John: And going back a little bit further, it was a weighted voting scheme that you didn’t just rank them… that you assigned points, if I remember was it 10 points I gave you? And so if you really wanted to chapter you could bid all 10 points on that. And if you were indifferent, you could have assigned weight to your top three preferences and so forth. And it did work out really nicely where I think most groups got their top choice, but two of them ended up with their second or third choice, but it seemed to work.

Rebecca: How did you find collaborating in the end?

Charlie: I found that it worked really well meeting every week. We also had presentations every week that we gave on specific topics that we’re talking about during that week. So that set the initial schedule for us to meet every week and talk about what we were doing and what was going on. Also with the book project at the time, in terms of organization, I found it very laid out and simple.

Rebecca: That sounds like you had a writing group that met that frequently, but it also would be more of like a study group as well?

Charlie: Yeah, I would definitely say it was a mix between a writing group… a study group. Your group members ended up being the way, if you wanted to succeed in the class, like that was the way to do it was to work cohesively with your group members.

John: And it should be noted that they had other tasks in the class as well, where they selected topics that were presented each week and each group was responsible for presenting an article or a research paper on a topic, some of which were related to the book and others were completely different. The groups were persistent across all the assignments and involved more than just writing the book.

Rebecca: How’d you get feedback to make sure whatever you’re putting out in the public was good enough?

Maria: Well, we mainly used Google Docs. At first, we tried to use hypothesis. But that wasn’t really working out well. So we ended up just going back to Google Docs. And each group would be given a couple of chapters to review each week. And they would write a couple comments in that chapter as well as some comments made by our professor and we used that and we also used each other’s feedback to make those edits.

John: How did that work? Where the comments helpful?

Victoria: No. [LAUGHTER] Just because I’m very protective over my work, which I know I should be open to criticisms. However, I got some comments sometimes I was just like questioning, like instead of “what about this article that you might want to look at” it would be “change this word,” where I know we emphasized that often in class many, many times, but still people would persistently do that.

John: I hope that wasn’t from me. Was it from me?

Victoria: Oh, no. Well, if you wanted to do that, you’re the professor. You can do that. But you also give us feedback that’s helpful. Whereas, students I feel like if they’re rushed or doing it, like 20 minutes before the class, they’re not going to look at me like, “Oh, what about this topic that might be interesting to consider.” Instead, they’re like, “Switch this word.” That just might be the students in the class too, just because we did have a lot of work in the class. And I found that because our group would meet to practice our presentation before the class, a lot of groups are doing their final work 15 minutes before the class.

John: Yes, the quality of the work did vary a little bit across the groups and across the individuals within the groups. Overall, there was some really high quality work, and all three of you did really well. But the quality of the feedback varied quite a bit.

Rebecca: So the feedback was generally done outside of class? Like not during class time?

John: Primarily, except for the presentations on the work where there was some feedback during the presentations.

Victoria: Yes, but I found that your feedback was most helpful, rather than the students.

Maria: Yeah, I would say I paid a lot more attention to Professor Kane’s feedback than some of my fellow students. Luckily, we didn’t have that experience. We had a lot of people give a sincere, really constructive feedback, but sometimes I’d be hesitant to take that feedback because I didn’t know that was the direction that I should be going in. But I definitely think our experience was a little better and our comments were more substantial, I would say.

Victoria: And I think next time maybe switching the groups that review the feedback might be helpful, because if you have one group that gives worse feedback, and you keep getting that, it’s not as helpful.

John: The way it was structured was each group reviewed and provided comments on three other groups, and we did that on three stages. And the class decided to maintain persistent groups there. I did give them the option, but I think it does make much more sense to vary it so you’re getting a wider range of feedback.

Charlie: I think the idea to keep persistent groups stem from the fact that we wanted to have somebody read the paper and then continue to read the paper throughout the weeks when we were supposed to be improving it or making it better. So then they could also see the changes we were making. And I agree with my classmates where I think we can say that it didn’t work out too well. There’s some groups just didn’t happen to give feedback that was too good.

Victoria: I also think part of it was the length of the papers because each of us had to review three full papers for the weeks that we did that, and three 20-page papers is a lot of reading to do on student written economics. And I think maybe in the beginning it was helpful to read all three, but maybe as time went on to scale that back a little bit, so we don’t get burnt out.

John: More detailed feedback on a smaller number of papers.

Victoria: Yeah because at first, I find myself doing it too. Like the first paper, I’ll take the time to read every single word and provide helpful feedback. But I can see myself not doing as much on the third.

John: I gave feedback in three different ways. The first time I gave video feedback, and while I’ve heard that that can be really efficient, I was taking about two hours or so per paper. And that was really slow and people really didn’t like the feedback that much because some of the feedback was fairly long in terms of the suggestions. So, I probably gave a little too much feedback. The second was with comments embedded in Adobe. And the third time I just basically went along with everyone else and provided the feedback directly in Google Docs. And the nice thing about that is I was able to see some other suggestions and sometimes I’d say, “Well, maybe that’s not such a good idea.” Because in many cases, the original draft actually made more sense than the feedback.

Rebecca: What way did you all like feedback better?

Charlie: I think the best feedback I received was actually in class feedback when I would go to Professor Kane and ask him, “Hey, you know, this is what’s going on with my paper. Is there something else I could look at? Is there another source I can find?” I found that to be the most effective in helping me write the paper. I was also a fan of the comments in Google Docs, they were pretty helpful.

Maria: Yeah, I think the most helpful feedback were the comments from Google Docs because, for that last draft, I was able to go through and resolve any comments that I had made the changes to and that just helped motivate me to make my draft a really good copy. And then I would say that I was really against the video feedback because I personally like to review feedback multiple times. I like to go through it and make changes to it. And I found myself just typing up his comments at the end of the doc so that other teammates could see it as well. So I was definitely against the video feedback and prefer the Google Doc comments.

Victoria: Yeah, I prefer Google Docs as well, just because I could see where exactly you wanted the changes done. It gave more specific feedback and then it also gave the students validity I guess, like this should be changed. Like I made a comment in one paper and said, “I think you mean a different word.” And they just resolved it and moved on. But then Professor Kane came through and said, “Yes, I agree.” And I think that you agreed, and they now are aware that yes, those changes need to be made.

Rebecca: I think sometimes when a faculty member responds to student comments in a way that it also helps students know how to make better comments. So it would be interesting to see how another round of that would have gone after Dr. Kane had responded to some of those right? To see if the comments were better the next time around.

John: Yeah, I think I should have done that from the beginning. And I’m sorry, I didn’t. But in the future, I’ll probably use Hypothesis. Now that we have Hypothesis in Blackboard it will be much easier. Among the problems we had is that people had some trouble making comments on Google Docs because they also had edit access to those and they couldn’t mark up specific text. And with PDFs, that was a bit of a problem given the way the browsers were set up that they had to change a program in order to make comments on PDF documents. So now that we have that in our learning management system, it’s going to be much easier to do that and the comments will be a little more persistent, because one of the issues was people were, as you mentioned, resolving comments sometimes before anyone else had a chance to see them. And the strategy was to have the draft documents with the comments copied over to another folder, and they were only supposed to make changes in their working document, not in the documents used for comments. But there were three or four people who through three drafts, just didn’t quite get that notion and I’d see the email saying that comments were resolved, and I would go back in and unresolve them. But in any case, there were some problems with those. That’s an issue that I think has to be worked out a little bit more efficiently.

Rebecca: Beside some of the technical issues that we mentioned, what were some of the biggest challenges of working on a project like this?

Charlie: I think one of the bigger challenges was keeping the cohesive idea behind the whole book where the topic we had chose was income inequality and we also had talked about intergenerational mobility. But as the book progressed, we kind of saw that portion of the book fall off a little bit where chapters were really focusing on the income and economic inequality topic.

Rebecca: So is that something you discussed in class to keep everybody on track?

Charlie: I think we mentioned it at one point towards the end, we’re just like, “Okay, are we going to keep this? Are we going to not keep this?” And I think we agreed, we could talk about it but we won’t make it a major portion of the book.

John: There was also some scaffolding on the project… that it didn’t just start with people starting to write, groups were first asked to put together a bibliography, and then an annotated bibliography, and then an outline of the chapter, and then the actual writing started after they had feedback on each of those steps.

Maria: I would agree with Charlie, I was definitely worried about the cohesiveness of the entire book. But for my group, specifically, we did a very broad topic, the global trends of economic inequality, and for myself, it was really hard to find relevant subjects to talk about because it was just such a broad topic. It was really hard for each of us to find something that we could spend a large amount of time writing about. So I’m not sure how the other groups felt. But for us, it was definitely hard narrowing down what we specifically wanted to talk about, and then to find resources that were recent enough to include.

Victoria: Yeah, I agree with you on that. I think one change I would make after we figure out the specific topics, you can go deeper in that because it’s hard as a group to form a thesis statement or very cohesive argument because we ended up doing more of a timeline than like an argumentative paper because you have to split it up.

John: Your topic specifically was on what?

Victoria: Tax-structure and income inequality. So basically, we looked at early 20th century, later 20th century, and the 21st century, and how the changing tax structures led to increasing income inequality over time. So that’s kind of how we split it up. But I think if I was to do it again, I would take a different approach to it, because I did the first section and finding information on World War One income inequality is much harder than it seems. So I struggled a lot with that too.

Charlie: Yeah, in terms of how we wrote our chapter of the book, I’m usually a fan of writing papers that follow a timeline as an explanation but that’s just a personal preference. It doesn’t work for everybody. So I can definitely see how making the cohesive argument along with following that timeline can be pretty difficult.

John: In your chapter, I think the timeline made a bit of sense. We were talking about the evolution of it and the transitions in your chapter were pretty smooth. I don’t think that worked as well in all the chapters, quite often it looked like they were three essays…

Victoria: Yes.

John: …chopped and pasted together.

Victoria: There was this one paper with a bunch of sub topics, but it wasn’t cohesive. And I was reading it and it just did not make any sense to me how it was organized. So that was one of the suggestions I made… maybe taking a step further in class and presenting maybe our papers a little earlier.

John: In more stages…

VICTORIA. I was just trying to read it and I just could not make sense of the organization of it, where maybe if we caught that earlier we maybe could have made better paper.

John: I was giving them feedback in several groups… that sort of feedback… that they need to smooth out the transitions and have a more logical structure. But some groups responded really well and did a nice job with that, other groups were a little more reluctant to do that.

Rebecca: Perhaps some groups will respond really well to some peer pressure. [LAUGHTER]

John: And having the presentations in class would have helped do that. When people in the class were saying, “This is just too disorganized.” And most of them got better by the end, but it was a stretch getting there.

Rebecca: So you’ve talked a little bit about some of the challenges, but what was really rewarding about working on this project?

Victoria: I found it really helpful to work with the group. I had Charlie and then another student, Junweii, in my group and we all read each other’s parts. I know I went through the document and made comments for my own group too. And we were all able to bring it together, make comments for each other, ask each other questions about like what sources to use especially too. And it was easier in that regard than an individual paper. Because if you make a mistake and you don’t realize it, no one’s there to help you, it’s just you. But here we have people to help each other.

Charlie: Yeah, I always find it beneficial to complete a task with other students also trying to complete the same task as you. It just makes the learning more interesting. And you’re more willing to go and spend the extra hour looking at the document to just make sure you understand what you’re writing, but also that it fits with whomever else you’re working with. I found it really beneficial or satisfying just the fact that we, like I said, could create something that any ordinary person could probably read and understand what was happening.

Maria: Yeah, I think the most rewarding part for me was just seeing that finished product and getting you know, positive feedback from Professor Kane and from my other group members. I think working in that group setting helps to motivate me to do the best of my ability. And I think it was just rewarding at the end to see everything come together well.

Victoria: I think it gave us all a deeper understanding of the material too because, instead of writing it yourself… because you can write something and not understand it. I’ve done it many times. [LAUGHTER] But when you’re sitting in a group, getting a presentation ready, you each need to understand the material. So you’re explaining what you learn to each other. And that’s something you don’t get by yourself. I found that really rewarding.

John: What about the public nature of the project? The fact that this will be out there, it will have your names on it, and it could be out there indefinitely.

Charlie: I found that portion of the project pretty intriguing and exciting. Just like I said, you can go out there, and obviously we’re college students, we’re looking for employment after this. So just showing an employer, “Hey, I’ve written something that’s been published. It’s out there, you can go read it for yourself and see what you think.” It gives something for the students to show.

Victoria: Yeah, it made it exciting because we knew what was at the end of the project. Rather than just a finished paper, we actually had something to like prove ourselves, like we did this.

Maria: I think for me, it was cool to know because at the end of the semester, I’m able to go to my family and say, “Oh, here you go. This is something that I worked on all semester long. Here’s something that you can read and you can better understand what I’ve studied for the past four years.” So I think it was helpful that I was able to show my family I’ve worked hard on this. This is something that is to show for that.

Charlie: I would definitely concur with that. Economics as a topic isn’t really discussed when you’re talking just with family members, so many of them don’t understand what you’re talking about. And you’ll try, but it’s hard sometimes. So to put something together that they’d be able to read and understand, I found that pretty satisfying.

John: And how did the class select the audience for this? What level was it written for?

Victoria: Students with a background in economics I think we decided on. But we came together as a class and decided on that. But you need economic background to understand some of the things we wrote.

John: But at an introductory level, so it wasn’t written at an advanced level. It was written for people who’ve had an economics course somewhere along the way.

Victoria: Or just no background. You don’t have to go to college to read the book.

Rebecca: How would you change this project in the future? We touched on a couple of things here and there, but do you have any other key things that, if the same exact project were presented to another group of students, how would you change the structure? Or the way it’s organized? Or the way that it’s presented the first day?

Victoria: Thinking about the class as a whole rather than just the book project, we did weekly presentations which was a lot of work in itself. So I would probably minimize those and focus on the book. Because we were sitting there reading 20+ page economic journals every week and making a presentation on it and doing the book project. So I think having more time dedicated to the book project and presenting on that material, rather than just economic journals that people have written, like it gives background, which is helpful, but maybe a little less, or maybe shorter ones, or ones that are just easier to understand. Because I know a lot of times you would say, like, “I know you guys don’t understand this, it’s challenging. But we still need to know it.” Like you would explain it in class, which would be helpful, but reading something you don’t understand is really difficult for students… in economics specifically. That’s challenging.

Maria: Yeah, I would agree. I think, at the beginning of the semester, it was a lot of work to have to juggle both the presentations and the book at the same time. So I kind of like the idea, I’m not sure if it was you Victoria, who mentioned it in class, of doing the presentation one week and then the next week working on the book and having class time devoted to the book in the week after. I think that would have been very helpful too because we did meet as groups, but if we were able to meet in a class setting than I think other classmates will be able to make comments on your chapter and offer advice. I think it would just help overall with the workload that we have.

Charlie: I also agree with that. I think the improvement can be made where we’d work on maybe a random topic every other week, and do a presentation on that, and then also incorporate the book project into that. I think it would help with the cohesiveness of the book along with just feedback and all the other problems that we had discussed.

John: One of the things I had suggested at the very beginning, you may recall, is I suggested one option is to spend the whole class focused on this. Another option is just to do it the way it was done in the past, or something else. And the class actually voted for the something else. Now having had the experience, the something else didn’t work quite as well, and that more class time should have been devoted, I think, to this and I saw that too.

Victoria: I think we’re just looking for something exciting. Like yeah, it’s a book project like we know what we’re going to do with that. But the presentations just added something else, but if I went back to a book project because then we could have taken the steps at a slower pace too, like the annotated bibliography, like the topics, we could have taken way more time with that than we did. Because once we did that very quickly, and then went into presentations, and then we just had due dates instead of meetings in class.

Maria: Yeah, I think for us, what appealed to us with this combination of the book and the presentations was that the presentations offered structure for us when we knew what we were getting with those presentations. We knew each week that we’d come in with the presentation. And I think with the book, we were excited because it was something new and different and I think we were a little too hesitant to go fully and choose the book, because we weren’t sure what we would be doing in class. We weren’t sure how we would be tested on that. So I think the combination of fields lost because we were able to have that structure, but we were also able to try something new.

Charlie: I know for some of the students in the class they had mentioned to me… they were hesitant to get rid of the presentations weekly because they were a fan of learning something new every week and learning a different topic, not just focusing on the book project. They really wanted to increase their knowledge base by just learning about multiple fields of economics. So I think that’s why we ended up going with what we went with in the end. But I think we all could all agree that if we had done that every other week, it would have been more efficient.

John: I agree. And I think some combination might be good for the reason you mentioned, but more class time devoted to it would be helpful.

Victoria: Maybe at first too, do a presentation. Like the first presentation, I don’t know what week that was, but maybe keep that one because when our group really met each other, we worked together, and then we planned a time every week where we would meet.

John: And if this is done again, and that will be if the class wants to do this in the future, perhaps that first topic for the readings could be related to whatever they choose to do so they’re actually doing some scaffolding with the presentations then.

Rebecca: I had something similar in my classes before where a team formed early on. We did something small, low stakes, to figure out how to work with each other and what doesn’t go well. So that when we did something a little more high stakes, you already knew what the wrinkles were going to be so that you could plan for that moving on. So it sounds like your presentations served that purpose, whether or not you intended that to happen or not.

John: But it became a lot of work when it was done every week, in addition to writing a book.

Victoria: That was difficult.

Maria: Yeah, I think it just helped to make us all more comfortable with each other and more comfortable speaking in front of the class.

Rebecca: So the big question is, of course, should other faculty do this?

Victoria: Yes, I’m working on my honors thesis right now, which is kind of what you would do in a traditional seminar. And it’s very difficult. So just having people there… write it with you… know what you’re talking about… You can ask them questions. In our group chat, we often ask, “What would you recommend for this part of the paper? Or what articles do you think are appropriate for this?” If you’re doing it by yourself, it’s very difficult. And the overarching topic… I feel like in a lot of seminars, they have that. It’s a topic for the seminar, but it doesn’t really filter through as well as the book project does, because we are all cohesive, all of us together working as a class of 27 people, which you never see. So, I found it really helpful and I liked it a lot. And it wasn’t like a crazy amount of work. You did the work, and you study, you did the presentations, and you wrote a paper, but it didn’t take you hours every day to work on. I feel like I learned more in this class than I have in other classes that I write individual papers for.

Maria: Well, I think I would partially agree and partially disagree with that. I think as a class, we all appreciated that Professor Kane was willing to change like the class structure and was willing to try something new. And I think that was definitely intriguing for us and provided something different as our last economic course. But I think if I had done my own topic paper, I think I probably would have learned a little bit more, I think just I would preferred that. But I think it was still important to get this experience and try something new.

Charlie: I think I would definitely suggest it to some other faculty members to maybe try this out. Like Victoria was saying, working with a group is pretty beneficial. And I feel like, from a personal standpoint, I learn more when I’m working with other people who I can ask questions to, get feedback from. Really, it helps your understanding of the class. In terms of incentive, I find that I wanted to work on the book project because you had that end goal of, “This is something that I can put out there and show to somebody.”

Victoria: Yeah, but at the same time, group work can sometimes be the worst thing that ever happens to you. Like we got really, really lucky because I know Charlie, we’re friends so we were like, “Okay, let’s work together. We’ll just get one random person.” Junwei was like such a blessing. We just work together so beautifully, but I feel like if we had someone that didn’t want to do the work… wasn’t willing to put in the work… didn’t show up to meetings… that would ruin the project for us. So I don’t know how you could fix that. But just if there’s a good group, it works. If there isn’t, I feel like it wouldn’t work as well.

Rebecca: So good to write one book during your time here, but maybe not many books. [LAUGHTER]

John: But there could be other things. For example, they could have been podcasts that were created. They could be collections of essays.They could be video projects that are put together by groups. So there’s a lot of different things that could be done.

VICTORIAL: Yeah, I would throw that out there. If you did this again with another book, like, yeah, you can write a book, but you can also do that… a different kind of form of the same kind of structure. That would be interesting.

Maria: I would be interested in doing some type of podcast because I know some of my friends in their classes have been required to do podcasts. And I feel like you have to prepare really well for that. So I think maybe that would have forced your teammates, if they weren’t doing the work, to do the work so that they wouldn’t get to the studio and not have anything to say. So I think that would have been another really cool option.

Charlie: I think it would be a good option for capstone classes, just because I know for a lot of majors, you hear what the capstone is about for the three years before you even get there. And I know personally for me, I’m also trying to get a political science degree, my capstone is next semester, like I’m already dreading the 25-page paper I’m gonna have to write. So to switch it up and have the students maybe not know exactly what they’re in for, I think it gives a little bit of an intrigue and like, “Okay, this isn’t just the I’m going to go and write a paper all year. It’s something else that I’m going to do.”

Victoria: Yeah, it’s more fun. I’m more willing to write a paper that my group members are in. Like we can all see each other too in the Google doc and talk to each other in the chat… be like, “What do you think about this part?” Or like Charlie can watch me while I’m writing my part of the paper and say, “This is good. Maybe change this. Or bring this sentence up.” You don’t do that in individual papers and even if you write an individual paper and have peer feedback, it’s not the same as having it right there, real time, or just people caring more because it’s theirs too.

John: We did have some issues with that early on though, in the first draft or two, because there were some people who really didn’t want to try using Google docs for writing. And were any of you involved in that?

Charlie: So, I’m not opposed to Google Docs. [LAUGHTER] I had just always used Word documents before. So it took a little bit of getting used to but once you commit to it, it’s a really nice thing to have in your repertoire. Google Docs, I feel like, is used by countless numbers of people, companies, places, businesses, the college. So honestly, as a student, you should just take the incentive to try to get to learn it. And once you learn it, it’s really beneficial to you.

John: One of the problems was that some people were writing in Word and then uploading it to the drive and that made it really hard for other people to edit. And eventually everyone switched over, but it did take a few iterations with some people.

Maria: So yeah, I think there were a couple of challenges with having different drafts because people made comments on separate drafts. So I think just sending out a reminder email would be helpful and letting people know because I know I think I made my changes on the wrong draft the first time and we had to send an email right away to have him fix that. So I think just having it set up all before the due dates like before you mention it in class would be really helpful too.

John: Yeah, there were some rough spots. This was new for me too.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up our podcast by asking what’s next for each of you?

Charlie: This December, I’m looking to graduate from Oswego, which is exciting for me. And after that, I’m not really sure what’s going to go on. We’ll see.

Maria: Well, I’m graduating this Saturday, and I’m going to be moving down to Florida for a little bit and doing an internship there.

Victoria: I’m also graduating Saturday and I’ll be working at HSBC this July in their graduate development program.

Rebecca: Sounds like exciting futures for each of you.

John: What are you doing in Florida? An internship where?

Maria: I’m doing the college program, the Disney College Program.

John: Oh, wonderful. Maybe I’ll see you there at the OLC conference. Well, thank you. It’s been a pleasure working with you all semester. And thank you for joining us.

Charlie: Thank you for having us.

Victoria: Thank you.

Maria: Thank you.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

67. Iterative OER Development

Imagine course materials that are always up to date and evolve continually to become better at supporting student learning. In this, Dr. Steven Greenlaw joins us to discuss how some publishers of open educational resources are trying to set up sustainable practices to achieve these goals. Steve is a Professor of Economics at the University of Mary Washington and the author of the OpenStax Economics textbooks. He has also developed the materials for Lumen Learning’s Waymaker Introductory Economics texts.

Show Notes

Additional Resources

Transcript

John: Imagine course materials that are always up to date and evolve continually to become better at supporting student learning. In this episode, we discuss how some publishers of open educational resources are trying to set up sustainable practices to achieve these goals.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

[MUSIC]

John: Today our guest is Steven Greenlaw, a Professor of Economics at the University of Mary Washington and the author of the OpenStax OER Economics textbooks. He has also developed the materials for Lumen Learning’s Waymaker Introductory Economics texts. Welcome, Steve.

Steve: Thank you.

Rebecca: Today teas are:

Steve: I’m drinking coffee. Thank you.

John: …and I have Enchanted Forest Fruits black tea from Epcot which I picked up while I was out there for the OLC conference where I last saw you, Steve.

Rebecca: You’ll never guess what I’m drinking.

John: English afternoon?

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s my favorite.

Steve: Well, honestly, I switched to tea in the afternoon.

Rebecca: See…

Steve: But in the mornings, I tend to drink coffee.

Rebecca: Yeah, you and many other people.

John: What prompted your interest in using and developing OER materials?

Steve: I have to say the developing came first. For a long time, I’ve experimented with textbooks going back into the 1980s, which at least John can remember. And I came to the conclusion that that it didn’t really seem to matter what principles book you used. Students needed a book, particularly for the analytical parts of the course: the models and things like that. But whichever book I used, they seem to learn just as well. And more recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that intro textbooks are commodities, that where companies are going to make their money is in the aftermarket products. But we’re not there yet. At least, the majority of the textbook industry is not there yet. So I had that and I didn’t really pay much attention in the 2000s about what textbook I was using, because I didn’t really think it mattered. But I did notice how high textbook prices were going and it was around that point that I became aware of and interested in OER. Again, this is dating myself, but when I was in college during the mid-1970s, I remember a teacher in my intermediate macro class—John, that’s for you—saying he would never assign texts for a course that collectively cost more than $10. [LAUGHTER] And so that’s sort of my base year. So, I sort of had this in the back of my head, I basically tried to choose around the least expensive textbook that I thought would work. And then out of the blue, OpenStax contacted me and said they had funding to create a principles of micro-macro text, and would I be interested in helping them out. I actually jumped at the opportunity, it sounded like a lot of fun. At that point I had already published one textbook commercially for an upper level course and I knew something about the commercial publishing process. I knew that I didn’t really want to go through that again, but I did want to get my ideas out there. One of the things about commercial publishing is they ask you, “What are all the innovative things you want to do?” and then once they have you on contract, they say, “Oh, but you have to do it like everybody else’s.” So that was the start. A year after the OpenStax book got published, I got contacted by Lumen Learning who said essentially the same thing. They said, “We’re building this digital platform, and we wondered if you would like to be the principals subject matter expert.” That’s the term of art that I become a SME.

John: So could you tell us a little bit about Lumen Learning’s project and the Waymaker version of this?

Steve: Sure.

John: What does it add?

Steve: It adds a lot. So, just to be clear, I wrote the OpenStax principles book. And we can talk about that process later if you want to, especially about peer review and things like that. And then I wrote the Lumen Learning Waymaker version, which was essentially an improved version. When we did the OpenStax principles book, we did it in an incredibly short period of time, I think it was nine months. So, when I did Waymaker for the first time, it allowed me to flesh out some of the things that weren’t ideal in the OpenStax book. And then OpenStax came back to me maybe three years ago and said, “We have funding for a new edition. Would you like to do that?” so I wrote a second formal edition for the OpenStax principles book. And then right after that, I did the same thing for Lumen. So, in my mind, I’ve gone through four versions of this now. And it’s not done and that’s part of the beauty of OER… at least the OER business. So to get back to your question, the OpenStax principles book is a textbook, it’s available in print and a variety of online options. My particular favorite is the phone app. So if I’m in class and a student asked me a question about something, I could literally look it up on my phone. Waymaker is a very different animal. It’s digital courseware so it’s a more immersive, interactive experience for students. And it’s not available in print. For example, how would you show a video or do a simulation in a print textbook? You can’t. The most you could do was provide a URL or something and have the student go out to that. In Waymaker, it’s all in one. So Waymaker, aside from text, it includes video, it includes animations, it includes simulations. Just to give you a specific example, instead of students looking at a graph of supply and demand, they actually get to climb in and take it for a test drive. Students really liked that. Many students seem to get it in a way that’s just looking at a two-dimensional graph, or reading text it is much harder for them.

John: I saw you present on this at the OLC conference…

Steve: Yep.

John: …And you demonstrate this. What software did you use to create those interactive graphs?

Steve: Those little interactives are H5C… maybe… it’s called? [It is H5P]

John: Okay.

Steve: It’s a European company, and it’s open source, and it’s really easy to do. I can say that even though I didn’t create the interactives. That’s the joy of working with a company… they actually have people to do the stuff that you don’t know how to do… unlike my earlier career, when I was the programmer, I was the graphic designer and all of those other things. Talking a little more about Waymaker, it’s more than a source of course content. It’s designed to teach students to study more deeply and more effectively. I don’t know about your students, but my students don’t seem to have learned how to study well. They’re very good at the game of school, but they’re not so good at learning. And I don’t mean that as a criticism. It’s just sort of a fact. They think study means read, highlight, read again, highlight again. When we know a lot from cognitive science now, that learning comes from working with the material. As I like to say, “the best way for students to learn economics is to do economics.” So Waymaker emphasizes mastery learning and personalized tutoring. The tutoring comes both from the software and also from the instructor. It’s designed to give students actionable feedback so that they can make their own decisions about how to allocate their study time. This is a really different way of learning, so I’m going to say it again a little bit differently. Assessment is integral to the learning process, it’s not just or even primarily about the grades. Rather, the assessment is designed to make students interact more deeply with the content and interact in a more intelligent meta-cognitive way. I can go into more detail about what it looks like from the students perspective, if you want.

John: Sure. Could you talk a little bit more about that? It’s a great approach. I tried to do that myself, but it’s always an add-on. Having it integrated is a nice feature, and one of the reasons why I’m planning to adopt your package in the fall.

Steve: This is really different for students, but also for the instructor. I’ve been working on this product for three years. When it finally came out in beta, I thought I knew what was going on, and I was really surprised at how little I knew about how it actually worked. Waymaker is organized into modules, which are analogous to chapters in the text. Students begin each module with the “show what you know,” which is basically a formative assessment. The purpose of that is to identify what content they already know. So, it gives them feedback on how they can efficiently use their study time. So, if there’s stuff that they absolutely already know, they don’t need to read about it again, they can just go into the stuff that they don’t know.

John: And even if they don’t, it activates prior knowledge. And it helps them make connections so that they can learn more effectively…

Steve: …Yes.

John: So there’s a lot of benefits, even for the areas they don’t know.

Steve: Yes. And I’m actually adding a little exercise for my first day of class next week, where I put my students in small groups. Some of whom who’ve had the first semester, and some of them who have not. And I’m going to give them a basically a problem to work with, knowing that some of them won’t really know what to do with it. But I want the groups to start working together. But anyway, I digress. So, as students progress through the content, there are a series of learning activities. The original one is called a “self-check.” It’s basically a short formative quiz. The purpose of the quizzes is not summative assessment. But as I said before, it’s to help students think more about their learning. Think about the idea of a Socratic tutor. The tutor doesn’t ask questions to assess the students’ knowledge, but rather to help them work through the content, help them really understand it. So what happens in Waymaker is: the student reads a page a text, or watches a video, or plays a simulation. And then they’re posed a very short quiz, like one or two questions. If they pass the quiz, the “gate” opens and they move to the next section. If they don’t pass the quiz—and on a one-question quiz, either you get it or you don’t—Waymaker suggests that they review the content before attempting the quiz again. They can take those quizzes as many times as they want to. So they can really build some expertise. There are other sorts of learning activities, but I want to focus on the quizzes today. At the end of the modules, students take a module quiz—essentially a chapter test—which is summative. Again, if they fail to achieve mastery—and the default mastery level is 80%, so it’s pretty high level. As an instructor, you can change that to whatever you want. But I like 80%. So if they don’t achieve 80%, they’re encouraged to study again and they’re given information about what areas to study. And then they can take the module quiz one more time. They’re only allowed to take the module quizzes twice. Now, here’s where it starts to get really interesting from the teacher’s point-of-view. The instructor receives reports from the module quizzes whenever a student fails. So for me, the first really good thing about Waymaker was that I don’t have to go to some website and look at some spreadsheet and see which students are struggling. Rather, anytime a student fails, I get pinged from the software. So it says, “so and so…” Well it’s a little boilerplate language… but basically it says they worked through the module, and they scored a 46 on the module quiz. You might want to reach out to them at that point. So the software is flexible. So you can get these things in real time, you can get them once a day, you can get them once a week, if you want to. I get them once a day. That seems reasonably quick for me. If the students taken the quiz at three in the morning, I’m not up anyway, so it hardly matters. It’s not like I’m going to give them that fast feedback. But what happens is I get that information, and then I get to decide, “What am I going to do about it?” If someone gets a 76 on their first attempt, I generally figure, “Okay, they’re gonna figure this out.” And so I don’t worry about it. If someone gets a 46, then I immediately want to reach out to them and say, “Hey, I see that you’re struggling with this. You know you can take it again. Go back and review the material. And if you’re not sure that you understand it, let me know and I will work with you on this. Because the goal here is mastery. It’s not anything else. Anyway, Waymaker helps me, the instructor, make better, more efficient use of my time. In any given week, Waymaker allows me to know two important things. It allows me to reach out only to those students that need my help. And it lets me know what topics the class is struggling with, so that I can tailor my in-class time to the material where the students need help and not spend it on material where they already know this stuff. Basically, it gives me a better feel for the effectiveness of my teaching and student learning. And that’s really, really important I think as a teacher. I’m embarrassed to think of my early years and teaching, when if I got all the way through the 50 minutes, I counted that as a successful day.

[LAUGHTER]

John: I think many of us started like that.

Rebecca: It ties really nicely to your blog post series that you’ve just recently published. The first one being the critical importance of instructional design…

Steve:Yup…

Rebecca: …where you talk a lot about the instructor’s role is designing the experiences, rather than delivering content. Can you talk a little bit more about how Waymaker helps you do that as an instructor?

Steve: There’s a “just-in-time teaching” element to this. I have a course outline, I know what I’m supposed to be doing on a week-to-week basis. But what happens on any given day depends on the stuff that came before it. I’m absolutely not wedded to the calendar. If the students haven’t figured out what we did on Monday, I’m going to start by spending a little more time on that. But also because of the feedback that I’m getting from Waymaker, there are times when I spend 90% of the class on 10% of the material. Because that’s what I know students are having trouble with. I know that if it’s something analytical, probably what I’m going to want to do is instead of talking to them about it—I mean, certainly I’m going to talk to them about it—I put together some group activities. I do a lot of group activities, small groups, generally two to three people. And then I essentially turn the classroom into a lab experience for that day. They seem to enjoy it more, they seem to get more out of it than me just lecturing over the content. After all the content is in the book. I don’t need to just repeat that stuff. So I guess that’s my short answer to your question.

Rebecca: Can you give an example of the kinds of activities that you’re doing with your students?

Steve: Oh, sure. Supply and demand is the first real model that the students work with. And so one of my learning goals is that they ought to be able to take a scenario… something happens… use supply and demand to analyze the effect on the market for x, gasoline or something like that. Typically what happens is, hopefully they will have read the material in Waymaker. Typically, I spend a day talking about “here’s how you would do it” and then generally what’s going to happen is, I spend a day where I have a couple of problems, like three is all that we’re going to have time to do. And I say, “Get in groups of two or three.” Basically, I count the number of students that showed up that day, because my classes are pretty small. And if it’s divisible by three, I put them in groups of three, if it’s divisible by two, I put them in groups of two. And then I say, “Okay, here’s a problem,” I show them the problem. And I say, “Take 10-minutes to work through this, draw the graphs.” And then they know that I’m going to call some of the groups up to present the results to everyone else. So there’s a little bit of competition. It’s not very stressful. It’s a little stressful for people that don’t like to speak in class, but you’re not there by yourself. You’re there with your group, so it works better that way. So I do a couple of those problems until I’m convinced that most people know what they’re doing. So that would be an example.

John: You also mentioned—when I saw you present at the Online Learning Consortium—how you use some of that feedback to improve the text in your current edition. Could you talk a little bit about that process of revision and creation of the text?

Steve: Sure. While I can’t take all the credit. From the beginning of Waymaker, at least from when I began to get involved… once I realized how integral the assessment process was to Waymaker, I pressed Lumen to make sure that the assessment questions were good. One of the things that I’ve noticed over the years is, test banks seem to be the lowest priority of textbook publishers. Because after all, they’re selling the text but they’re giving away the test bank. So what I want, I guess what we all want, is that the questions in the test bank that Waymaker uses, are discriminating correctly. And that’s harder than you might imagine. To their credit, Lumens put a tremendous amount of effort into this. And more generally, into the design the courseware. This has resulted in a process of continuous improvement. Now, continuous improvement is not a term that excites most faculty. I think that’s a fair statement John? [LAUGHTER]

John: Yes.

Steve: But what it really means is that, Lumen has an ongoing process for improving OER, making it more effective every single semester. And they’ve done this, and we’re now in your five and a half. So how does it work? I have a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is, after every semester Lumen downloads the data from every student who’s given them permission at every school using Waymaker across the country. And then they analyze the data. The analysis identifies where the students are having problems. At that point, we go in and either revise the content to make it clearer, or add some learning activities. Or else we revise the assessments to better capture student learning. We do this a little bit in a panicky way over the winter break, because we only have a month. But we do it intensely every summer. Here’s the longer answer. Over time, we’ve gotten better at doing this more efficiently. Lumen has developed something called “RISE Analysis.” RISE is an acronym. I don’t remember what the letters mean. [LAUGHTER] But basically it asked the question, “Which course materials would benefit the most from improvement?” Or to put it differently, “Which changes would have the greatest impact on learning?” So what we’ve done—and this is all programmed now. So Lumen has dozens of Waymaker courses, not just an economics. Though, I like to think that some of the most interesting stuff is started in the econ Waymaker platform. I’m not just making that up, it’s actually true. [LAUGHTER] So, instead of just doing the aggregate sweep on the data, we particularly look at student learning outcomes. And everything in Waymaker is driven by the student learning outcomes. This is out of order, but let me just throw this in for a minute. The way that Waymaker started is they brought together—I want to say 50 principles instructors from everything from community colleges up to R1s. And we spent four days together. And we asked the question, “What do you have to have in your principles courses?’ And so from that we created a list of primary learning outcomes. And then we drilled down and we now have secondary and tertiary outcomes. So the assessment questions in the test banks are coded down to the third level. So everything is really granular, if you want to think about it in those terms. What we look at is not just which student learning outcomes are students struggling with. But rather, which student learning outcomes where students are doing relatively poorly, are they putting a lot of time and effort into. Because that’s where we’re going to get the biggest bang for the buck in terms of fixing things. So what we do is we look at three things. We look at, “Are the questions badly worded?” We’re mostly done with that at this point. “Are the questions testing what they’re supposed to be testing?” There are some psychometric tests that allow you to do that. And then finally, what we do is—after we’ve exhausted all those—we look at the content and we create new content, or different types of learning activities, and we integrate those into the course. So, the interactives that you saw at OLC John, they were the big new innovation from last summer. So we do this, and then we teach the courses again, and then we start the cycle all over again. So, the process just goes on. It’s not continuous, as in every day, but it’s continuous, as in regular. I’ve used the courseware since the first year, and the courseware has gotten noticeably better. Fewer students are failing to achieve mastery on the module quizzes. And fewer of them are crashing and burning. More of them are in the 60 to 70% range when they fail. But what’s really cool is Lumen has shown no sign that they’re ready to quit, that they’re done with this. As long as they’re willing to do this, I think I’m willing to do this.

Rebecca: I like the iterative process.

Steve: Yeah.

Rebecca: That’s something that, as a designer, I’m very comfortable with… that I do all the time, especially designing online. But one of the things that’s really interesting about this model is that, as the author of the textbook, you don’t just have this finished thing. It’s an ongoing…

Steve: …It is.

Rebecca: … thing. So that’s a really different model of authorship.

Steve: Yes, it is. I think it’s fair to say that we make small changes all the time. And then every summer, we make larger changes. And that’s pretty interesting. Because as a user—as you pointed out—I can see that this is helping.

Rebecca: Yeah, that’s really exciting.

Steve: Right now, the hardest part is getting students to trust the process. Because it’s a very different model of learning. And so one of the things that I’m going to do this semester is, build in opportunities for me to remind them that this is a different process, and that they need to trust the process. One of the things that I did last year, which seemed to help with that was I started using exam wrappers after the midterm exams. And ask them to think about how they were studying, and what they would do differently, and what I could do to help them. It’s real easy to see in 30 seconds, I can tell if they’re taking it seriously or not. And if they’re taking it seriously, I learn a whole lot from what they say. So, anyway, just another little wrinkle.

Rebecca: So we’ve talked a lot about the students and the different learning process for students. You talked a little bit about the different processes being the expert, or the writer of the book. And you also mentioned earlier about the peer-review process for an OER being a bit different. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Steve: Sure, and that’s really important. First of all, people have a wrong idea about how OER is produced. The OER that I have experience with is working with OER publishers. It’s not the loan faculty member working in their spare time in their basement, or something like that. Both the OpenStax and the Lumen experience for me, have been very much a team effort. There have been a lot of people involved. So this is really important because one of the concerns about OER textbooks is their presumed lack of quality. There was an article in The Chronicle about that, today in fact. I have to tell you that the peer-review process that I went through with OpenStax was extensive. The way we did this is, OpenStax purchased a manuscript from Tim Taylor—a prominent economist—as the basis for the first edition. They sent copies of the manuscript out to about two-dozen reviewers all over the country, asking them to identify strengths and weaknesses. Based on those review comments, I rewrote each chapter. Each chapter was then sent out to half a dozen new reviewers. And again, the reviewers were from a range of schools, from community colleges through research universities. I took that feedback and I revised each chapter again before it went through the editorial review and production process. I have to say, this was much more detailed and extensive then when I worked with a commercial publisher. The review process for Lumen was similar, there was a lot of peer review involved. And as I said before, I’ve now written two formal editions of both texts. We’ve gotten lots of feedback from users. I’m pretty happy with that.

Rebecca: Do you find that the difference between OER and a commercial publisher is that you keep getting this feedback from users? And that you’re able to revise based on the use of other faculty, rather than working in a silo?

Steve: If I’d written the principles book for a commercial publisher, I would be better able to answer that. I got no formal feedback on my commercial book. I got a lot of comments from people at conferences and things like that. But we have gotten tons of feedback on the OER books, and that is interesting. You can’t satisfy everybody. Somebody says, “This chapter is too long.” Somebody says the same chapter is too short. But, in general, the feedback has been really, really helpful. And we’ve tried to incorporate it as soon as possible. And with these digital text, it’s really easy to do. I can literally go in and edit if I have five-minutes on the fly. And then it’s out there.

John: While with regular publishers, there’s usually a three-year cycle on intro textbooks.

Steve: Yes. And that’s the other thing that—now I’m not a typical user, but I know that if I want to make a change, it’s going to be done by the next semester. The same thing is generally true of other people who give us feedback. Though, they don’t necessarily know that. W e take that feedback very seriously. And there is no three-year review process. So that’s wonderful.

Rebecca: I love the user-centered design process, like that’s clearly what’s being used.

Steve: Yep, we try.

John: And that iterative process is what we should all be doing with our courses, all the time…

Steve: …Yes.

John: …But the fact that you’re doing it makes it easier for instructors who perhaps, don’t have to do as much of that.

Steve: Yeah. But again, let me just say one thing; Waymaker is not my course, Waymaker is my text. So there’s whole levels to my course that go beyond Waymaker. That’s just one element of it. Not that I’m disagreeing with what you said.

John: I’ve seen you present at conferences on teaching principles, for decades now. And I know you’re constantly changing how you’re teaching your courses and trying new things there. And you’ve been doing a lot of great work for quite a while.

Steve: Thank you.

John: Going back a little bit though, to the question of mastery quizzing. When students take the quizzes at the end of a block, you said there’s one or two questions. When they do it a second time, do they get the same question or different questions?

Steve: No. We are adding questions fairly regularly, and so the test banks are getting larger. From the beginning, I think we started with 2000 questions. But again, that’s across the whole book. The questions are randomly chosen, so the odds are that students would get different questions at the self-check level, at the section level. There’s a different test bank for the self checks than there is for the module quizzes. But there are similar questions. In fact, we wrote two at a time basically when we did that.

John: This is a question more generally about Waymaker. Does it do any type of interleaved practice, where later in the course, does it call back earlier sections? Or is it just based on the current module?

Steve: No, it’s just based on the current module. But my more nuanced response to that is, economics is sort of cumulative. But I have thought about that, we just haven’t thought of a way to build it in yet.

John: In my classes, I’ve been adding that the last couple years where I just randomly pull in questions and the module quizzes from earlier modules. Maybe 10 to 15%, building up to about 20% at the end, just to help do a little bit more spaced practice as well.

Steve: I think I know how you could do that pretty easily. Because instructors have access to the test bank that their students are using, so that you can edit your own questions. But what that also means is that you could move questions from earlier into the course to later in the course. So I think there’s a way to do that.

John: Excellent.

Steve: So John, we learned all this in our graduate training, right?

John: [LAUGHTER] You know, it’s getting a little bit better. Some people are learning these things. We have someone in my department who actually came out of Kentucky where he had a lot of training and teaching and learning. But it’s still pretty uncommon.

Steve: Yep.

John: You mentioned two ways in which, OER materials are developed. Some by primary developers, such as the OpenStax and Lumen. And others, with people working in their basements…

Steve: …Yes.

John: …or working in a dark room somewhere. Which is how I often do a lot of my work. Is that process sustainable? And what role do for-profit publishers such as Lumen play in providing these services, or in continuing the development of OER materials?

Steve: There are a couple questions here. One is, is the development process for published OER materials, or OER materials created by publishers. Is that sustainable? And then the second one is, is the individual scholar model sustainable? And those are very different questions. The individual scholar model, I don’t know if sustainable is the right word. I have a colleague who did this, she did it all on her own. I’m so impressed. She didn’t have any support from the school other than a small summer grant. And she did it without any sort of extrinsic motivators. I think that over time, at least at schools like yours and mine, faculty are going to get credit in tenure and promotion, for creating OER, especially open textbooks. I think that’s really important. I think that people will eventually be able to get sabbatical leaves to create these materials. And I think that’s really important to keep that side of the OER creation process going. As far as revision, I don’t know enough about that to really answer that. But I’m curious. I may have to go talk to my colleague Katie now. As far as the publishers go, and I don’t mean the traditional publishers, every publisher has a plan for how they’re going to do this. Some work better than others. I know something about OpenStax and I know a lot about Lumen, about what their sustainability plan is. OpenStax have develop partnerships with a variety of ancillary publishers like Sapling Learning or Knewton. These people provide aftermarket functionality for the OpenStax books, and in return, they get kickbacks from these ancillary publishers. And by kickbacks, I don’t mean anything pejorative about that. I just mean that they contribute financially. I don’t know any more about how sustainable that model is. I know that that’s what OpenStax has been using. Lumen from the beginning, has been a commercial publisher. It took me two years to figure out how a commercial publisher could make money giving their content away. Maybe others haven’t thought about that, but I sure did. So, the short answer is, Lumen gives the content away, but charges a very modest amount, $25, for the intelligent backend. All the feedback that goes both to the students, and the instructors. Today, you personally, either of you, could go and get a copy of the Lumen Principles and Micro book, or the Principles of Macro book, and it’s yours forever, you can do with it what you want. But if you want to take the full Waymaker course, they charge $25. The idea is, that amount of money is both affordable to students, but also enough to maintain revisions and corrections, and keep the servers running and all of those things. So that’s the answer to that question. And I will say that every semester, I try to be completely transparent, and say, “If you don’t want to pay the $25, you can get all the content for free. But here’s what you lose.” In five years, I’ve never had a student who didn’t pay the $25, because they thought it was like beer money for the weekend, or something. Compared to spending 300 bucks on a traditional text that was nothing to them.

John: What are some of the barriers that you see to faculty adopting OER? You mentioned that people may have this perception of lower quality…

Steve: …Yes .

John: …but there’s quite a bit of evidence that the quality is not weaker in any way. And I think you had done some studies on that a while back, didn’t you?

STEVE. Yes. The number one problem I think is misinformation. The majority of faculty today don’t know what’s available in their discipline. Many of my colleagues have told me, “Yeah, OER sounds like a great idea, but there’s nothing available in my field.” Now, that’s flat out wrong. For your listeners, there is OER available for nearly every Gen-Ed course taught today. So that’s number one, is lack of knowledge of what’s available. Number two is, as you mentioned before, the belief that OER is inferior, that there’s no peer review. And that’s just not true. There’s a couple things here. One is that OER publishers don’t have a sales force, and so it’s going to take longer to get the word out. There’s been a lot of progress over the last few years. But at my school, we’re only in the second-year of our formal OER initiative. So we’ll see how it goes. The other thing that I think gets in the way of adoption of OER is path dependence, and the unwillingness of many faculty to change their textbooks because of the fixed costs involved. “I’m going to have to go through my lecture notes and make sure that I’m using all the same terms as the textbook does,” and that sort of thing. I don’t know the answer to that question. I know that some schools have used financial incentives, fairly modest financial incentives, to get faculty to try to make the switch. As far as my own assessment goes, every summer, I do statistical analysis of the effectiveness of the texts that I’m using. I looked at both the OpenStax Principles book, and also most recently, the Waymaker package. What I’ve looked at is, textbook alone, textbook with ancillary website, digital courseware, and because I used to teach a writing intensive version of the principles courses, I also looked at writing intensive. And what I found is pretty predictable, at least from somebody who has done this for a while. What I found is that there is no significant difference between student learning using OER, with commercial textbooks. I found that using either courseware or an ancillary website improves student learning outcomes, regardless of what the text is that you’re using. And I’ve also found that writing intensive courses seem to work better than non-writing intensive courses, because the students are getting into it in more detail. Over the last two years, I’ve been doing a randomized control trial, where I can really drill down and see what’s going on. And what I found is that using the full Waymaker package seems to have a statistically significant positive impact on student learning. So I’m going to rerun the analysis using last semester data, which I haven’t had a chance to get yet, but I’m anxious to see how that goes too. I believe this stuff works. And so I think sooner or later, more and more publishers—the commercial publishers too—are going to move towards digital courseware type products.

John: I think most of them have started to at least.

Steve: Yes, but it’s like turning the Titanic. Their base is so large that it’s going to take a while before even all of those people get on-board with this.

John: One thing I was wondering is whether you see more collaboration or competition in OER textbooks?

Steve: Initially, there was more collaboration in the early years. And the reason why is because anybody who was doing OER, was increasing the interest in users for everybody’s OER. Now, I think we’re going to see more competition between the users. Especially as more publishers are going to adaptive and personalized learning type courseware. I think that’s a way that publishers are going to be able to say, “Well, yeah, we’re doing that. But we’re doing better in our own particular way.” So I think there’s going to be a fair amount of product differentiation. And it will be harder for faculty, it’s going to take more work to dig in and see exactly what’s going on. I would love to see more published assessment of efficacy on the part of the commercial publishers. They’re only now starting to do that, and the studies that they publish are heavily controlled by them. So it’s not clear that they’re telling us about all of their things, just the ones that work. But at least it’s a start.

John: One of the things I see in most of those studies is comment to the effect that, “Students who use our adaptive learning platform have letter grades on average, one letter grade higher or point eight points higher.”

Steve: Yes, that’s right.

John: And there’s no evidence that they’ve done any control for the students who chose to use it versus those who didn’t.

Steve: That’s right.

John: But it would be nice if we could see more research on that.

Steve: And I think we will. At least I’m hopeful.

John: Earlier you told us a little bit about how your course is structured with some “just-in-time teaching,” and some activities there where you have students work on problems. Could you tell us a little bit more about how you structure your course so that it’s not duplicating the textbook?

Steve: The first thing that I would say is that, my intro course looks like almost anyone else’s Principles of Micro or Macro course. If you look at the course outline, it has all the normal topics in it. A very slight difference is, instead of assigning students chapters to read and problem sets to do, students have modules with content and learning activities to complete. There is some difference between my face-to-face sections and my online sections, because I teach both. My face-to-face sections are pretty much the way I described them to you earlier. My general approach is to do Socratic lecturing with a lot of in-class activities, like the supply and demand problems that I mentioned. I also like to have formal in-class discussions on interesting questions that don’t have a right answer. In the macro class, I spend a day talking about what is money. And I spend the day talking about what is government. And those are things that aren’t done in the same way and the same degree with a textbook, whether it’s Waymaker or something else. My online course is roughly similar. But what I do is I add group and individual activities to the online course to mimic what I do in class. I also have a weekly Google Hangout, a synchronous Google Hangout, where I can give students guidance about what I think they should be doing. And I can give little mini lectures on things that I know students have trouble with. But it also gives them a chance to ask me individual questions in a real time basis, one on one. Not a lot of students come to those Hangouts. I usually have between five and ten, and my classes are about 35. But more than 90% of the students watch the recordings. Google Hangouts are automatically recorded and archived in YouTube. So the students seem to like that a lot.

John: You mentioned that a number of people at Mary Washington have switched over, what proportion, would you say, of the faculty at Mary Washington has moved to using OER?

Steve: Single digits, a handful, probably less than ten at this point. But this semester, I have two new people. So I’m excited about that. And we haven’t yet given them any money or anything to do this. I’ve just been talking to people. I was invited to the College of Business’s summer retreat, and I gave a little talk about OER. And I got two people who expressed an interest in following up. One of whom has already done it. So I think we’re getting there. We just have to be patient.

Rebecca: So we normally wrap up by asking, well, what’s next?

Steve: What’s next for me is I’m continuing to iterate to improve Waymaker. I’m going to continue doing my own statistical analysis. So I get access to the aggregate analysis that Lumen does, but I also have my own analysis. So I can tailor that to my particular students. I also want to do something this semester that I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but have never done it. And that is to write a new non-traditional chapter for the micro book, which is relatively easy to do. It’s just really a question of me sitting down and doing it. So I know it’s doable, but I do want to actually make my version of Waymaker different from the standard version. In part, because it’ll better match the way I teach. But also because I want to see that it’s relatively easy to do so that I can talk about that to faculty.

John: Very good.

Steve: I’m going to the CTREE conference this summer to talk about Waymaker. And this is the first time we’ve actually reached out to a disciplinary conference. So I think that’ll be fun.

John: You know, I always want to go to the CTREE conference, but I teach at Duke in the summer and it runs right into that. So I haven’t been able to go. And we should note that the CTREE conference is a Conference on Teaching and Research and Economic Education.

Steve: I love to talk about this stuff, because I believe it.

Rebecca: Yeah, it was really interesting.

John: Thank you.

Steve: Oh, you’re very welcome. Thanks for the opportunity.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing assistance provided by Kelly Knight, Kim Fischer, and Jacob Alverson.

[MUSIC]

60. Inclusive Teaching

Are your class conversations dominated by a small number of voices? In this episode, Dr. Danica Savonick joins us to discuss a variety of class activities that support an inclusive learning environment and promote equity in participation while increasing student learning. Danica is an Assistant Professor of Multi-Ethnic Literature at SUNY Cortland, and a recipient of the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders award, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in Women’s Studies, and a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

Show Notes

Studies of bias in the classroom:

Transcript

John: Are your class conversations dominated by a small number of voices? In this episode, we explore a variety of class activities that support an inclusive learning environment and promote equity in participation while increasing student learning.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

Rebecca: Today our guest is Danica Savonick, an Assistant Professor of Multi-Ethnic Literature at SUNY Cortland. Danica is the recipient of the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders award, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in Women’s Studies and a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Welcome, Danica.

John: Welcome.

Danica: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

John: Our tea’s today are…

Danica: I’m drinking a coconut lime seltzer.

Rebecca: That sounds pretty good.

Danica: It is.

Rebecca: It’s a good alternative to tea, I suppose.

Danica: I think I’m pretending that I’m on a tropical island or something.

Rebecca: Yeah, the weather around here would make me want to do that, so perhaps it’s the same there.

Danica: How far away are we from from each other? I’m here in Cortland, you’re…

John: About an hour and 45 minutes, I think, by car.

Danica: Okay.

Rebecca: Very rainy today.

Danica: Yeah, and I hear we have some snow coming up in the next 24 hours or so, so should be interesting.

Rebecca: I have the Prince of Wales tea.

John: …and I have a holiday tea from Twinings that I picked up in the tropics in Orlando at the Online Learning Consortium a few weeks back.

Danica: Sounds yummy.

John: It is good.

You’ve written quite a bit on creating a supportive environment for discussing issues of race, class, gender and sexuality. Let’s first talk a little bit about the context in which you address these issues. What courses do you normally teach?

Danica: I generally teach American literature courses. Sometimes those are general education courses, sometimes they are within the English major. I’ve also taught a number of writing classes that are a little bit more interdisciplinary in nature, and regardless of whichever course I’m teaching I like to give them a theme or put my own little twist on them. For instance, if I’m teaching a writing course, this semester the topic is the purpose of education and so we’re drawing from a wide different disciplines… people who’ve been writing about different learning methods and then when I teach English courses, some of the topics I like to do are the arts of dissent and we’ll look at the theme of dissent in American literature. This semester I’m currently teaching Intro to Multicultural Literature, which has been super fun and then next semester I’ll be teaching a graduate course on feminist world-making, which I’m really excited about.

Rebecca: Well that sounds really exciting.

John: What are some of the challenges you face in discussing some of these issues in your classroom and trying to have productive conversations?

Danica: Well, some of the problems that I’ve noticed are consistent regardless of what classroom or what school I’ve been teaching in, but some of them vary according to the student population. But one of the most common problems that I see is just a lack of student participation, or if there is participation it’ll be the same two or three students who dominate the conversation… and actually just this weekend when I was home for the holidays I was talking to my family about this—my aunt is auditing a course at SUNY Purchase—and she was saying that the same one or two students speak every single class period and she’s curious about what the other students have to say and what they’re thinking… and even my grandmother who was at Brooklyn College in the 1950s… she said she remembers feeling too scared to talk in most of her classes… and so it was only one or two of the… I guess… the brightest and most vocal students who would talk in the classes. And then, of course, as I started teaching I started to notice this as well and I think it’s every new instructor’s nightmare probably that “What if nobody talks? What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do with all that silence?” And so, I guess the main problems I’ve been trying to address are not having the same one or two students dominate the conversation but having really every voice be heard in the classroom… and the more I’ve thought about it and the more I’ve come to study classroom dynamics the more I’ve realized it’s not entirely the fault of the students in those situations, and actually quite often it is the shared responsibility of both the professor and the students to create a kind of environment where everyone feels like their voice matters and that they have something that they can say… that they won’t get shot down by the professor… that they’re not intimidated by their peers and whatnot. So a lot of my work has been trying to increase participation in classrooms and also because my focus is often on race and class and gender and sexuality in literature, we have to figure out how to have productive conversations around those really difficult issues. And for a lot of students, it’s their first time talking about these issues and so we’ve had to establish ways that we feel comfortable talking about those important questions and issues.

Rebecca: I was actually just gonna follow up to what you were saying… really curious about the emphasis on the first time students have talked about some of these things, and I think that that’s really important. We’ve been having a reading group on our campus with a book called Race Talk and that’s something that we’ve mentioned pretty frequently: that a lot of these students have never been in a context to have a conversation about race… a lot of the faculty have never been in a situation to have a good conversation about race… So, when it’s someone’s first time, how do you help that be productive and feel safe? Because you have to be vulnerable to be in those situations.

Danica: Definitely. One of the most effective things that I think I’ve done is tell students that we’re inevitably going to mess up in these conversations because our educations have not provided us with the language and the grammar and the vocabulary for talking about conditions of structural inequality… and so I make that the baseline or the premise. We know we’re gonna say the wrong thing and we are likely going to accidentally offend someone and so as a class what we do is establish protocols or ways that we want to collectively address how to handle those situations and we come up with a set of community guidelines and principles and ideas that we agree upon for how to behave when we realize that, “Oh no, I could have said that better. I wish I hadn’t said that…” or if one student feels offended by something and so I think that has really helped, especially for students who are having these conversations for the first time; they know that it’s okay to say the wrong thing and we have an established procedure in place for how to deal with those moments.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how you set those guidelines up and how students participate in that process?

Danica: Yeah, definitely. This is one of my favorite things to do every semester is have students co-author a set of community guidelines in order to foster inclusive discussions of difference. Because I want every student to understand that their voice matters and I know one of the reactions that you can get is students can start feeling alienated if they say the wrong thing. They can disengage. They can start thinking that I don’t have a place in this conversation. …and so one of the ways that we create that environment is we’ll co-author this set of community guidelines. Rather than having students write them from scratch… I think that can be really difficult… so, instead what I’ll do—it takes about I would say half of a class period to maybe half an hour, could be 40 minutes, it depends on the size of the class—I’ll print out some really basic guidelines, four or five things that I think might work well in the class as principles that we might want to agree to abide by. So things like we won’t make assumptions about anyone in the class’s race, gender, ethnicity, things like that, and we read over them as a class. I usually project them at the front of the class and they also have them in front of them on a piece of paper and we’ll read through them as a class. They can ask questions… they can ask me to define a word they don’t understand, and then I give them about ten minutes to read through them quietly on their own with pen and paper and cross off and edit and add and remove anything that they don’t like about the guidelines… to add additional guidelines… to change the wording of certain guidelines… and then rather than calling on students individually and having to put them on the spot, I have them work in pairs of two to go over some of the amendments and edits and adjustments that they would like to make and then after five minutes or so we go around the class and each pair presents one or two amendments that they would like to make and so it really ranges from adding different adjectives and verbs to adding whole new amendments or saying that they didn’t like one of the ones that I put up, which is totally fine with me. The idea behind not having to ask them to do it from scratch is just that they have something to work with—it’s not that I’m wedded to those particular principles, I just wanted to give them some kind of language and some kind of grammar for how they might formulate the different community guidelines.

Rebecca: It seems like the pair scenario would help to mitigate any issues that might arise from a dominant group dominating the rules.

Danica: Yeah.

Rebecca: That was gonna be my question but then I realized as you were talking that that might actually be how you solve some of that issue.

Danica: Yeah, and it’s pretty egalitarian. We go around the room and each group says something, even if it’s by the time we get to the end sometimes the groups are like, “Well, everyone already said what we were gonna say, so we just wanted to agree that we really liked the amendment that this other group made.” And so that way each pair gets two or three minutes to add something, to say something, and then we move on, and so it’s not like one pair gets to really dominate. The other thing I forgot to mention is students go home, they have at least one or two evenings to think about the guidelines that we came up with. They have access to them. They can open them up at home and it’s not until the beginning of the following class that we ratify them, and often when we come back together at the beginning of the next class they’ll have thought of one or two things that they want to adjust and once we make the final edits and adjustments then we as a class decide that we agree to abide by them.

John: Another nice thing about doing it in pairs is when people are speaking it’s a little safer because they’re representing their group; they don’t have to take a stand and it makes it a little more comfortable perhaps for those who might have been reticent.

Danica: Exactly.

Rebecca: I like that you have the ability to review over a couple of days as well because that also gives students who don’t want to speak up the opportunity to email you or communicate with you separately too, right?

Danica: Yeah, definitely.

John: How well have the guidelines worked? Have students responded well? Do you get more buy-in to the guidelines since they created them?

Danica: Yes, absolutely. I was really surprised the first time I did this. I was like, “This is one of those wacky pedagogical experiments; I might fall flat on my face, they might think that I’m an alien from another planet.” But, they were so enthusiastic and I’ve actually had students from former classes say “That was one of the most meaningful things that we did that semester. I think about that a lot. I wish more teachers did that…” and so I’ve gotten really positive feedback on it and it’s also fun. It’s always one of the best conversations that we have throughout the semester. And you know it turns out that they have a lot to say about the issue. Actually, I often do this assignment when we’re teaching a work of literature called Citizen by author Claudia Rankine, which talks a lot about microaggressions… and students have witnessed and they’ve experienced these microaggressions in the classroom and so they’re eager to have a chance to participate in crafting a classroom that isn’t going to have these kinds of uncomfortable and awkward moments. I also should say that when we do this I share with students beforehand several of the studies that have been done recently on classroom participation and who feels most empowered to speak in the classroom. So, there’s been a lot of studies done on gender and the experiences of students of color and what a lot of these studies have found is that those voices that are most empowered to speak in mainstream media and culture are also the students who feel empowered to take up time in the classroom. And so I share this with students before we begin the community guidelines activity and they’re always really interested. I have the sense that some of them have witnessed or experienced or might have some sense that these things go on, but to actually see the research and to see the findings and to see these massive studies that have been done, they’re just interested in it, and especially because my classes are about race and class and gender and structural inequality, I think it’s fascinating for them to see the way that what we often think of as huge systemic issues can come to influence who speaks and who participates in the classroom as well.

Rebecca: Maybe we could share those citations in our show notes?

Danica: Certainly.

Danica: You’ve used something called Commons in a Box. Could you tell us a little bit about what that is for people who are not familiar with that?

Danica: Sure, it’s a free open-source learning and writing platform. It came out of the CUNY Graduate Center. It’s a combination of WordPress and BuddyPress, and so it’s this easy to install package that allows you to create digital learning spaces, and so different universities have taken it up to do different things. Often I’ll see institutions using it as a space for their professors to host course websites. They might want to have some kind of blog that features student writing. They could use it for digital humanities projects… and it’s free and it’s open source and so all you really need is server space. As often as possible, I’ve tried to host my courses on either Commons in a Box, or currently I’m using an installation of wordpress.org as an alternative to using Blackboard or Canvas and I could talk a little bit about why if you’re interested.

John: Yeah, could you tell us a little bit about what the advantages of this is compared to say one of the common course management systems?

Danica: Sure. I see the primary benefit of these platforms as they help students to develop transferable skills that are going to aid them in the world beyond the classroom, and so I’ll talk a little bit about what I mean by that. WordPress is one of the most common platforms on which the websites in the world are built .The latest statistic that I saw was something like 30% of the world’s websites are built on the WordPress content management system, and so I like to organize my courses on WordPress so that I can familiarize students with how websites are put together… how you can build them… how they think… how they organize information… and so what I try to do throughout the semester is scaffold students’ interaction with the platform. At the beginning it’s pretty user friendly: they create an account, they are able to log in to our site and then gradually they start going into the backend (which WordPress calls the dashboard) and they start creating their own content. So, they get to experience the process of going back and forth between the backend and then the front-end and seeing what that process is like and how information is organized on the WordPress platform. So, they start creating blogs and then what I like to do towards the end of the semester is deconstruct our class website and take it apart and break it and redesign it with students so that they can see, first of all, how easy it is to build a website. A lot of my students are new to this. They’re not necessarily computer science majors. They haven’t taken computer science courses, and so they’ve interacted with a lot of websites but they haven’t really gone in and thought about how they might build their own and so I show them how our course website is built and we redesign it we do all kinds of things and then often for students’ final projects they will have the option of designing a website related to something that we have done in the course and they often choose that option. They like it… they like getting to experiment with WordPress. For most of them it’s their first taste of the platform and several of them have said that they’ve gone on to learn more about WordPress because they’ve become really interested in it and I see this as a really great opportunity for students first to think a little bit more critically about how the internet works and how these pages that we’re constantly interacting with… how they’re constructed… and also to develop a transferable skill that could become a really valuable part of their resume and the skills that they will bring to the work world. Being able to build websites on WordPress is huge and so I find that starting that process early can be really helpful. It also creates an opportunity for us to have conversations like why is our course built on WordPress when all of your other courses are on Blackboard and we get to talk a little bit about what Blackboard is and the different ways that content management systems, especially in higher education, work to structure certain kinds of relationships of teaching and learning.

John: Does the institution host WordPress, or are you hosting your own instance of it?

Danica: Ideally, the university will host it. When I was at CUNY they have a really strong culture around open educational resources and free writing platforms and there’s a big community around that. It might exist at my new institution—I have to do a little bit more work to find it. As far as I know there’s a lot of people that are using Blackboard at my institution. Ideally… best-case scenario… the university would provide server space and then you could have an installation of WordPress or Commons in a Box, but currently I’m using Reclaim Hosting and Domain of One’s Own in order to have a classroom commons installation that I’m using across the three different classes I’m teaching.

John: Do you use the open aspect of that? Is the students’ work public or are you keeping it closed to the classroom, or is that something decided on a case-by-case or class-by-class basis?

Danica: Yeah, that’s a great point, thanks for bringing that up. It varies. Parts of the class web sites are public, parts of it are private… and another benefit of working in a quasi-public, quasi-private space is that it allows us to have conversations about what information students are putting on the Internet and what they want visible. What do they want to become part of their professional digital identity? What do they want to show up in search results versus what do they not want to show up in search results? So, we have a lot of these conversations early on in the semester when they’re establishing their accounts. We talk about the risks and the repercussions versus the benefits of using their real name to do the blogging that they’ll be doing on the site, and then for their final projects… often, but not always, I would encourage them to use their real name because they put a lot of time and effort there carefully revising these projects and they are deliberately constructing them with the idea that they’re going to be writing for a public audience. But, of course, in this climate of anti-immigration that we’re living in, you have to be super careful about what you’re encouraging students to put their name on and so I always have conversations around that. There’s always an option never to use your real name. You can always use a pseudonym for the blogging and for the final projects. You can always submit solely to me instead of publishing to a public audience, because I understand there are severe risks and in some cases they will outweigh the benefits of creating something publicly.

John: And we should note that you have an article in the describing your work here and we’ll include a link to that in the show notes as well.

Rebecca: You mentioned student blogging. Can you talk a little bit about how the student blogging is used in your classes and how that augments student learning and how that might facilitate some of these conversations that might be tricky to have?

Danica: Sure. I love student blogging—I don’t know how I would teach these courses without it. My courses are structured around the blog—it’s one of their major assignments, and so for every single class two or three students are assigned to blog about the assigned reading—I think the requirement is something like 800 words or so—and that they have to do a small close reading… so an analysis of the excerpt of whatever literary text we’re reading and it has to end with two discussion questions, and for every student who isn’t blogging. So, the majority of the class they have to leave a comment on those blogs before our class period starts, and so the blogs are due at noon the day before class and then students have from noon until our class period to leave their comments and then the way the course is structured the same day that those three students are blogging… so they’re each writing a blog… they are also facilitating a class discussion… a ten-minute activity… or it can be a presentation… it can just be more of a conversation. They have ten minutes at the beginning of the next class to do whatever they want, and I encourage them to make it the best lesson plan that they have ever seen or the way that they want their ideal course to be structured, and so I encourage them to try things like think-pair-share or to do interactive activities and it’s really exciting to see, first of all, the things that students choose to blog about, because with the readings that we’re discussing there’s so much that you could talk about. I have certain things I want to talk about but those might not necessarily align with what students are interested in within the text, and so having these open-ended blogs allows students to identify what it is they’re most interested in; it allows them to get feedback on their writing from their peers prior to our class session. One way that I’ve come to think about the blog… that I talk to students about it… is as a rough draft for a paper. They’re putting out a thesis… they’re putting out an interpretation… they’re providing some evidence from the text to support it… and then they have this tremendous opportunity to get feedback from all of their peers… and so in the comments the other students will be like, “I really like this point…” “I have another example that can help you support your point…” They might raise objections; they might raise counter points: “Well, have you thought of this other thing?” And so it’s a really great way for them to increase the quality of their writing and their ideas by getting feedback from their peers. Actually, this happened just in our previous class, a student was using a term “devaluing” to talk about sexuality in one of the books that we were reading and a lot of his fellow classmates were saying that word wasn’t working the way that he thought that it was working. So, in his facilitation he kind of talked through the feedback that he got and as a class we came up with a better word that would more precisely name the kind of relationship that he saw developing in the literary text, and so with the class facilitations it provides students with an opportunity to practice their public speaking and to practice standing up in front of a classroom. A lot of the students say that they’re really nervous at first, but that they’re glad in the end that they did it and they always get through it and we always manage… and so this kind of pairing of the blog with the in-class facilitation really teaches students that they are active knowledge producers and that they have something to contribute to the class and that their voice matters. They know that they’re not allowed to just disappear and sink into the background—they’re actually the ones up there in front of the class leading the lesson and it’s interesting to see actually the ways that it increases their performance once they’re back in the chair of the student, because they know what it feels like to be up at the front and so they’ll put out a question and they then get to experience what it’s like to have no one raise their hand and so they become much better as students and much more engaged once they return to their seats and resume that more traditional role of being a student. I never know what students are gonna do for their facilitation. They don’t have to run it by beforehand, so it’s always exciting. I don’t know what they’re gonna do in class today and it’s really made my role as an educator different and I’ve had to learn to listen really carefully to the things that students are saying when they’re up there presenting and my job becomes connecting what they’re saying to the main ideas and the main skills and the main topics of the class. So, for instance, if a student is giving a presentation I might interject and say that’s a thesis statement,… what you just said… you just made a thesis statement and then they start to recognize learning how to make an argument, how to make a thesis statement is one of the skills of the course, but it takes a long time or they’re not quite sure what I mean by that, but when they’re talking they’ll just do it naturally and so my job becomes pointing out to them that they are already doing the things that we’re learning about and just helping them recognize better the ways that their facilitations are connecting to the themes and the skills of the course.

Rebecca: I wanted to circle back to the leaving comments for other students—so they do the close reading, they post about that and then students comment on it. When they’re commenting, how do you help students learn what a good comment is?

Danica: Yeah, that actually becomes a topic of discussion early on in the semester. They’re given a few guidelines: it should be, I don’t know, a hundred and fifty words or so; it needs to make a contribution to the post; it can’t just be “I liked your post” or “I didn’t like your post,” and then what I’ve tried this semester is we implemented—kind of halfway through the semester—this rule that each comment needs to provide a quote from the text so that the commenter is either supporting providing further evidence that will support the author of the blog’s claim, or providing a counter example. One of my students last class, he said “Conversation makes the best interpretation” and I really loved that because they’re starting to learn through the commenting the ways that all academic writing is a conversation among various viewpoints and that when they’re writing a scholarly paper… when they’re writing a research essay… they are inserting their voices into larger conversations; they’re in dialogue with people. It’s not like you write a paper in a vacuum; it’s actually a synthesis of all these different viewpoints and ideas and so I see the commenting as kind of a rehearsal for class discussion. So when we show up in class, say, for instance, students aren’t being particularly talkative, I can say, well, you said this in your comment, and so I know that they’ve already engaged with the ideas and it allows often our class conversation to reach a higher level because they already know what several of their peers’ interpretations of the text are; they’ve already thought about them; they’ve already thought about the pros and the cons and how we might need to complicate some of these analyses; and so it just takes our class discussions to the next step.

John: Do you do anything to ensure that everyone responds to a certain number of posts to make sure that you don’t see everyone replying just to one other post to make sure you get some balance there? Do you have a mechanism for doing that?

Danica: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, for every class students have to comment on at least one post; they’re welcome to comment on more than one, but the requirement is one comment prior to class. I don’t have a mechanism for ensuring that. The class is 25 students, if we have three bloggers, one blog might get ten comments and the others might get four or five, and one way to kind of address that in the classes is encouraging students to think about their blogs, think about the title of the blog, think about the content of the blog, think about how they’re competing for the attention of their peers. I encourage them to say, “Okay, your peers have three blogs to choose from, how are you gonna get them to read yours?” It’s a way of getting them to think a little bit about audience and what is the function of a title. What is the work that a title can do? …and from that introductory paragraph how can they give their reader a sense of what their blogs gonna be about? How can they convince their reader that there’s gonna be a good payoff that their blog is worth reading? And so it’s interesting to see the different ways that they try to attract the attention of their peers. Because they do want those comments and I find they get excited about the different feedback—they’re not required to respond to the comments, but they do often… which, yeah, it’s always exciting to witness. I try to linger, I lurk a little bit on the blogs and I’m often not interjecting in the conversations, but just kind of reading through them and that’s actually the other benefit is that it ends up serving as a mode of formative assessment because I can see what they have understood from the readings and what might be missing… what might be the things that I need to address in the time that I have—what’s not quite getting through to them, either in terms of aspects of the reading that they overlooked or in terms of the skills. So, if I tell them that your blog needs to have a main point; it needs to have a thesis, and I’m seeing that they’re not quite doing that I can then adjust my lesson plans so that that becomes the focus of the next class and I can use their blogs, their own words as an example to say, “Okay, how could we give this blog a stronger thesis?” …and so it’s quite common that we’ll end up editing or revising some of the blog posts. They get projected up on the screen and students, because we’ve created a culture that they’re constantly giving feedback on each other’s ideas, students feel a lot less embarrassed or they understand that we’re all trying to become better writers and so they’re okay with it if I project their blog post and we talk through “What are some of the pros? What are some of the cons? How could we strengthen this?”

John: And it’s a much more authentic learning experience having them focus on audience and trying to build a strong thesis statement.

Rebecca: It seems like the blog post assignment really primes students well for the final projects that you had mentioned earlier that have a public audience because they’re already practicing writing for a specific audience and it’s another writing for a more general audience, I would assume. Can you talk us through that a little bit?

Danica: The final projects for my class often vary, but they’re usually collaborative… they’re usually digital… they’re usually public… they’re usually some kind of creative student-driven element. It’s usually students identifying the topic and then running with it, whether that’s a research blog or whether that’s currently my students in Intro to Multicultural Literature are co-authoring a glossary of key terms for literary studies—I have never done this before. It is a total experiment—I don’t know if they know that this is my first time doing this, so it’ll be interesting. I don’t know if they’ll hear in this podcast, but whatever, it’s fine. So I’ve done different versions of these collaborative public final projects. They vary sometimes based on the content of the course, students’ level of preparation, what are the aims and objectives of the different courses. It’s a little bit different for a basic writing composition course versus a more advanced literature course… and so one of the format’s I’ve done is have students co-author scholarly articles that they would submit to an actual journal, and so I did this in one of my freshman writing classes. We spent the entire semester talking about contemporary issues in education… so related to technology in the classroom… active learning versus lecturing… conditions of educational equality in segregated schools… and about halfway through the semester they were put into groups and they had to identify a research question. They did an annotated bibliography, they developed a whole research project, and then they made it into an article, a short article that they submitted to the scholarly academic peer-reviewed journal Hybrid Pedagogy to see if they could get it published or not, and I had been in contact with the journal’s editors since the summer before the class, so they knew this was coming. It would not have been possible if I hadn’t been working with them because they knew there was gonna be a really quick turnaround time where the students needed to know if they got revise and resubmit, if they got rejected, or if they got accepted… and I knew that this was a wildly fanciful or an unrealistic expectation to ask students to get a scholarly journal article published—these are basic writing students at Queens College—a lot of them are first-generation students… they work jobs… they are English language learners… and so in addition to reviewing of the conventions of English grammar and how to write a paragraph… how to write an academic paper… all things that were new or needed to be reviewed… they were also trying to get their writing published in a major publication… and so what ended up happening with that is that several students got revise and resubmit. But by the time they did it was the end of the semester and finals were happening and so I tailored the assignment a little bit towards the end. I tweaked it, because all semester I’d been telling them “these blogs are important, these things that you’re writing your research, everything, all of this matters because people are actually going to be reading this and you want them to take it seriously and you want them to listen to you. You don’t want to lose their attention halfway through.” … and so we needed to come up with a way that they would still get published even if they chose not to endure the editorial feedback loop of revise and resubmit, or the accept with minor revisions, and so what we had them do is they took the feedback that they got from the editors and several of the groups chose to post to HASTAC.org, which is a tremendous resource. It is an academic scholarly network of 15,000 plus members of scholars and students and academics and artists and activists and so there’s a special group within HASTAC that showcases and features and highlights the writing of undergraduates. So many of my students ended up submitting their final blogs there, but one group did continue—they kept revising their submission and going through the queries that they were getting from the editors and then the copy editors and just all of these stages of the writing process that were very new to them. This is a required writing course… no one showed up at that course eager to do all these drafts and revision and the skills that we teach in a basic writing course… but they continued in that editorial feedback loop for about a year after our class ended and then in August of 2017 their article was published in Hybrid Pedagogy, which was very exciting and so that is now something that they can put on their resumes and I was just so impressed with them for sticking through it because we know everything that goes into writing a journal article but for them they didn’t even know at the beginning of semester what a peer-reviewed journal article was… and so it was like a huge learning process. So, that’s one of the formats of these collaborative public final projects: submitting something to an established publication, which required a lot of willingness on the part of the journal editors to work within a really quick timeframe and the managing editor Skyped into my class several times and talked to students about the journal, helped them with their submissions, they got to pitch their ideas to him, it was great. Some of the other formats I’ve used that have also been good—I’ve had students write explicitly for HASTAC and that’s an opportunity for them to tailor their writing for a very specific community. So that’s something that we did this semester in the writing class that I’m teaching. We read so much about HASTAC… we read about its history. There was an article in Inside Higher Ed calling it the ethical social network and talking about their commitment to protecting their users’ data; we learned about who is a member of HASTAC, who are the different people who are reading it; how does the website organize information—by topic, by tags, by categories and so they were reading and analyzing the site itself before they even started writing their research blogs. So it was a similar process where they identified a research question and they authored blogs that were specifically going to be then tailored for the HASTAC audience, and so one of the big aims of that assignment was this skill of kairos and figuring out how to tailor your writing for a specific community of readers and figuring out what are the conventions? what are the affordances of this specific writing space? and how can I best get my point across to this very specific audience? So, that was useful in helping us have conversations about audience awareness and tone and how you make an argument; how do you convince someone that your point is right without alienating them. So that’s one example of having students write for HASTAC. …and the nice thing about HASTAC is that it comes with a built-in user community. You have sixteen thousand people who are visiting the site and reading things. The other kind of format for these public projects is what we’re doing now with the keywords. Students are co-authoring these individual keywords, they’ve identified specific words that have emerged that they’re interested in throughout all the readings that we’ve done this semester and through our discussions and through the blogs and the final product for that will be something that is hosted on our course WordPress site… so it’ll be a page or an offshoot—I’m hoping to write some kind of table of contents that will link to each of the student’s posts—hopefully there will be media, and so this will be something that they can then share. They can decide that they want to make it part of their professional identity, part of their portfolio, or they can decide not to—it’s really up to them. …and so one of the things that I’m constantly thinking about in developing these assignments is like how to actually connect students to audiences of readers and people who could actually benefit from a keyword entry on memoir or on ghosts… that’s another keyword, apparently we talk a lot about ghosts in my class… and this is coming out of the research that I’ve done on activist pedagogy and really thinking about the role of the teachers connecting students to audiences and people that could potentially benefit from the writing that they’ve been doing. So, thinking about these projects as both a benefit to the students in the class and also to larger publics and communities.

Rebecca: How have students responded to this sort of work? You know, you mentioned that, you know, some of the classes are required courses—students are not necessarily marching in excited to do these sorts of things… so it sounds like you’ve hooked them a little bit. What is their final response to these?

Danica: In general it’s been really positive. The jury’s still out for the semester. We’re gonna do course evaluations I think next week, so I’ll learn more. But in the past, I do a lot of framing around what we’re doing in part because I was always a very willful student and I did not like being told what to do. But if I understood why I was being told to do that thing then I would get really into it and really excited and so with these student-centered assignments and activities I’m always super explicit: this is why we’re doing this; these are what I see as the benefits of this; this is why we’re authoring a set of Community Guidelines; this is why you’re doing a presentation; you’re doing a presentation because public speaking is one of the most valuable skills that employers look for and so when I’m writing your recommendation letters I want to be able to tell them what a great public speaker you are and that’s why I’m asking you to stand in front of the classroom and facilitate this. Also, I should mention this semester and at SUNY Cortland a lot of the students are going on to become teachers and so it’s important to have these experiences at the front of the classroom. I think that being explicit really helps students, and the other thing I’ll say is that I often am explicit about how frustrating student-centered learning can be, and we talked about how it can feel difficult and how sometimes we just wish that the teacher would give us the answers rather than making us figure it out ourselves or making us work in small groups and so I try to create spaces for students to express those kind of emotions and reactions to things. I also try really hard in designing these student-centered assignments… to design… to create the conditions where for instance, we’re doing a collaborative writing project… I try to give them an assignment that actually requires multiple minds and that if they had tried to do that exact same assignment on their own the final product would not be as good as if they were doing it as a group. So I put a lot of thought into kind of carefully constructing these in a way that they will be oriented to succeed in them. Recently I wrote a blog on collaborative close reading, which is a really, really difficult skill to teach—it takes years, you know, for most of us to learn how to do close reading, but I’ve tried to create this assignment that had students work on it in groups, and so rather than having to notice all of a million different things that are going on in a passage of literature, they had a bunch of different minds put to the task and they were all looking at the same paragraph for 20 minutes and dissecting it and they were all contributing their different insights and so rather than having to go at it alone they were able to learn from the different perspectives that the other students brought to the text, and so I think just being really explicit about why behind everything has helped to ensure that the reactions have generally been positive.

John: How have other faculty responded? Have other people started working on building more productive conversations? Have other people in your department started working more on open pedagogy projects?

Danica: Well, I would hesitate to say anything explicitly about my department because I’m so brand-new. It’s my first semester in the department. But one thing that’s been super exciting for me has been to see people… especially with this recent blog that I wrote on collaborative close reading… it went viral on academic Twitter and people have been reporting back, because that’s one of the things that I asked them to do is let me know how it works… let me know if, you know, you have any suggestions for how to make it better… and almost every day I’m getting tweets from people at universities across the country saying, “I tried collaborative close reading and this is what my students did…” and they’ll post pictures of the passages that their students highlighted and so that makes me feel like I’m part of a community that is bigger than my own institution. So, when I’m running these, of course I hope that they will be helpful to my colleagues, but I’m also… I really feel like I’m part of a bigger academic community and part of that is because I post these blogs to HASTAC, and so it really is, people are a community of 16,000, however many users, but then it can get tweeted out. So, even if you don’t have a HASTAC account you can still read the blogs and there’s so many ideas about scholarship being really isolating, but things like that… and getting to talk to people and discuss pedagogy with people at different institutions makes it feel a lot less isolating. But in terms of your question about reactions of colleagues, I have been super lucky both at CUNY and now at SUNY in terms of support for the kinds of things that I’m interested in doing. These are schools with very strong commitments to education, where people are already interested in and talking about student-centered methods and curious and wanting to learn more. The other day I have my students write found poems—which is the genre of poetry where you take some kind of existing document—often it’s a bureaucratic document—and you make it into a poem by cutting it up and whiting it out and mangling it and turning it into poetry and my students created these awesome, awesome found poems; they were beautiful. So, we spent a day in class, I gave them whiteout… I gave them scissors… I gave them tape… They started as banal documents; they made them into stunning poems. They would bring in their tuition bills or song lyrics with offensive stereotypes in them—one of them brought in the transcript from the Brett Kavanaugh hearing and they took these documents and as a way of thinking about language and power they made them into these gorgeous found poems and so I went to the chair of my department and I said, ”Hey, you know, my students created these poems and I would love to have someplace to display them ‘cause I think they’re really awesome” …and not only did she give me permission to tear down what was on the bulletin board, she helped me do it. We tore down these old flyers that had been up there for decades and we put my students’ found poems on and so now we have this beautiful display in our hallway of student work and several of my colleagues have reported seeing students stop and read the poems and take pictures of it and so they’re excited to see their work has become part of this gallery. In general I’ve just been really lucky and fortunate to work with colleagues who are similarly invested in helping students. I did think of a few ideas for people who might not be so fortunate on ways that they could start doing student centered things. The first would be, and I’ve already mentioned this, creating a free profile on HASTAC.org because there are so many people out there doing really creative and exciting things in their classrooms… and connecting their classrooms to larger movements for social justice… and thinking about how do you engage students in really important discussions about contemporary social issues… and so HASTAC has been a phenomenal place for me to connect with other people who are doing that kind of work. I try to start small, and so something like think-pair-share is so easy… it’s taking an index card, giving students 90 seconds to respond to some kind of open-ended prompt, then they turn to the student sitting next to them, they share their responses and then we go around the classroom and I transcribe each group’s answer to the question on the board… and so their ideas become the material that I then get to teach the course through, and we crowdsource responses to some question related to whatever the topic of discussion is that day and something like that is so easy, it’s so simple—we have gone through… I would say we’re in the thousands of index cards in terms of my courses this semester. Because the students like it and they recognize that that changes the classroom dynamic. They recognize that suddenly it’s not just one or two students dominating the conversations. So, when they get up to the front of the class and they get to facilitate something I would say, I don’t know, 65, 70 percent of them choose to do think-pair-share because they recognize that it really lowers the barriers of anxiety about participating in class—everyone has 90 seconds to scribble something on their index card and it’s only an index card,— it’s tiny—there’s not any kind of pressure to write something beautiful and then that becomes just such an easy way to really transform the dynamics of the classroom… low cost… low time investment… and even when I’m thinking at the bigger scale of assignments and rethinking the research paper so that it’s not just being submitted to the professor, but it’s for a public audience, I try not to overhaul everything at once. So it’s like each semester I’ll try one new assignment. Not throwing everything away and starting from scratch each time, because it takes a lot of energy to do these things. And so thinking about how we can make small changes and experiments but not overwhelm ourselves or our students… and the other thing that I would suggest if somebody finds themself in a situation where they want to start trying these things but might not have the kinds of tremendous support that I’ve been lucky to have is… there’s just so much research out there on the effectiveness of student-centered pedagogy. We’ve read a lot of it in my course this semester on writing and education. We read a lot of the studies that have shown how positive of an impact it can have on students to discover ideas for themselves and to work in small groups and solve problems and arrive at answers rather than sitting and listening to a lecture. Just kind of having some of those studies in my back pocket—I’ve always felt that if I was called upon… you know, “Why did you do that? I can’t believe you let the students help assess each other’s papers.” I would have some things that I can cite, that I could go back to to say “Well, actually, it’s been shown that asking students to metacognitively reflect on the implications of their writing is a great strategy.” So that kind of thing has been really helpful for me in terms of thinking about relationships to colleagues and different reactions to this kind of pedagogy.

Rebecca: We normally wrap up by asking, what next?

Danica: Well, at the small scale, I guess, we have this digital glossary of keywords that will be coming out from my multicultural literature students… going to learn all about ghosts and power and assimilation and why these words are important for how we think about and analyze literature… so really excited to see what they do with that… and then I guess at the bigger scale I’m working on a book on the activist pedagogy of teacher poets from the 1960s and 1970s, and I’m hoping that some of that work will help us really understand the ways that a lot of contemporary student-centered practices… things that we’ve talked about today… a lot of them emerged in the 60s and 70s and especially in relation to the critiques of power emerging from the social movements of that era from the women’s movement and the civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam War… and so I’ve been thinking a lot about how those critiques of power necessitated new relationships of teaching and learning and this was especially happening in the work of poets who I’m interested in and so that book is also considering the ways that interactions with students shaped American literature in ways that we rarely consider and also the tremendous role that poets and authors and especially feminist poets have played in creating a lot of the contemporary student-centered pedagogy that we know today to be so effective.

Rebecca: That sounds really exciting.

Danica: Yeah, it’s really fun to work on.

John: In some of your posts you’ve listed a large variety of techniques that people can try and we’ll include links to those in the show notes as well. Thank you, this has been a fascinating discussion and we look forward to hearing more about what you’re doing.

Danica: Thank you so much for having me, this has been really fun.

Rebecca: Yeah, thanks for joining us. [Music]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing assistance provided by Kim Fischer, Brittany Jones, Gabriella Perez, Joseph Santarelli-Hansen and Dante Perez.

57. Scalar

Imagine an online environment that makes the thought processes of a writer visible, including the loops they get stuck in, the relevant tangents they pursue, and the non-linear way in which their ideas evolve.  Now imagine that all of these features are easy to use and implement in the classroom. In this episode, Fiona Coll, an Assistant Professor of Technology and Literature at SUNY-Oswego, joins us to discuss how Scalar, a free open-source publishing platform, can help achieve these goals.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Imagine an online environment that makes the thought processes of a writer visible, including the loops they get stuck in, the relevant tangents they pursue, and the non-linear way in which their ideas evolve. Now imagine that all of these features are easy to use and implement in the classroom. In this episode, we examine how Scalar, a free open-source publishing platform, can help achieve these goals.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

Rebecca: Today our guest is Fiona Coll, an assistant professor of Literature and Technology at SUNY Oswego. Welcome, Fiona.

Fiona: I am very happy to be here, Rebecca.

John: We’re very happy to have you here. Our teas today are…

Fiona: Today I am drinking Cranberry Blood Orange Endless Sunshine tea, which is a very, very ambitious kind of tea by the Republic of Tea, and I just have to note that on the side, it proclaims that drinking this tea will “create social balance one sip at a time.”

Rebecca: So maybe that’s what we should all be drinking right now. [LAUGHTER] I’m drinking English Breakfast.

John: I’m drinking Bing Cherry Green tea.
We invited you here to talk about your work with Scalar. What is Scalar?

Fiona: Scalar is an online publishing platform designed for long-form, media-rich writing. In the words of Scalar’s creators, this means media-rich digital scholarship. It’s an open source platform created by a group called the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, and the whole idea behind this platform is that it was built to serve scholars who were working on non-traditional, long-form academic writing, specifically projects that might involve visual culture or media culture. There are particular features of Scalar that have been geared towards this use case, but I would like to argue that Scalar is actually a fantastic tool for teaching because of some of its unusual features. Can I tell you about them?

John: Sure.

Rebecca: Yeah, please. [LAUGHTER]

John: We’d be asking anyway. [LAUGHTER]

Fiona: The best way to approach these unusual features is, I think, to describe how you use Scalar, and so I will. The basic unit of content in Scalar is called a page, and it seems fairly unremarkable when I begin talking about it in this way. When you’re creating a Scalar page there’s a text box where you enter a title, there’s a text box where you enter a description, and then a large text entry field where you can put in text and format it. You can choose from a few layout options. You can integrate media into that page. You can enter metadata. You can annotate. You can add comments. So far, so WordPress… fairly straightforward. However, things now get interesting once you create a Scalar page. Once you’ve created a series of Scalar pages, you can start building routes through that content. There are two ways to organize the pages that you create in Scalar: the first is to use tags, which create nonlinear clusters of organized content, or you can use the path feature in Scalar, which is, as it sounds like, a path—a linear, step-by-step progression through a sequence of Scalar pages that you determine. You can get very creative with this path structure; you can create branching paths or very complex forking paths; you can create recursive or looping paths that come back to steps you’ve already been through; you can create rabbit-hole paths that lead people away from the main branch of your content into an unretrievable nether place, but the point is Scalar does not impose any sort of order on the content that you created and indeed that’s why the platform is called Scalar—it comes from this reference to two ways we think of quantifying movement in the world, I suppose: Scalar versus vectors. Vectors are quantities that have both magnitude and direction to them and a scalar quantity is one that has only magnitude and so Scalar, the publishing platform Scalar, does not force you to do any sort of particular relationship between the things that you create. Again… doesn’t sound especially revolutionary, but remember how I mentioned you could add tags and comments and annotations to a piece of Scalar content? When you do that, when you create things like tags and annotations and comments, those all become Scalar pages themselves, and they can participate in this larger set of relationships. So a tag, which is also a page, can be tagged with something else, it can be a path of its own, a comment can be a tag, an annotation can also be a comment, can also be a tag, a path can be a tag on something. So, any piece of content in Scalar can be given any sort of relationship to any other piece of content, and what this means is that there’s a sort of radical, non-hierarchical organization to the way Scalar allows you to approach the products of your own creative work. So this becomes really, really interesting if you imagine what this means for creating something like an essay. We have a long tradition of thinking of an essay as an extraordinarily linear thing that begins at the beginning, that moves through a sequence, and that ends. But Scalar allows us to reimagine what an essay might be, not just what it might contain, so not just moving beyond text but moving beyond that linear structure, and when I first understood just how radically Scalar allowed the breaking down of this old-school essay model, I became very excited to imagine its possibilities in the classroom. So, I learned about Scalar and immediately thought that this would be a fantastic way to defamiliarize the writing process for students, and by “defamiliarize the writing process for students,” what I mean is I thought that this would be a fantastic tool to get students to reimagine the way that their thoughts unfold in writing. I wanted them to reimagine writing as actual making, as actual construction, and not just as a sort of tragic endpoint for a thinking process.

Rebecca: It’s active, basically.

Fiona: It’s active. It is a process; writing is a process and I always say writing is thinking, and students I don’t think quite understand what I mean by that, but what Scalar might allow me to do, I imagined upon first encountering the platform, would be to get students to think about how sections of their thoughts work; how ideas might connect to other ideas… not in linear ways… but in roundabout ways that might meander through other references or images or clips they came across on the internet or things from other classes… that thought is not linear no matter how much we try to get them to package it into straightforward, well-behaved writing.

Rebecca: So this is really exciting, I can imagine writing something like “I have this thought and now I’m in a loop and I can’t get out; I’m cycling through ideas and trying to get myself out and I just can’t, but sometimes that happens when you’re writing and it’s like, oh, this isn’t gonna work; I don’t have a conclusion.

Fiona: This is how the process of writing works; you do get in loops. It is a reiterative experience where you try something out and you might end up back where you started; you try it again, you come back where you started, but perhaps the loop needs to be there for a particular reason but there’s a little exit ramp you might find to some other form of thought and Scalar doesn’t force you to try and pretend that that is not happening, that that complexity is not happening. It allows you to in fact mark the way that your thought is moving and branching in non-linear ways and allows you to capitalize on those threads and those directions. One of the things that Scalar does that very useful in getting students to think about their writing process is that it timestamps every iteration of a particular page and it saves every iteration of a page. So there’s a sense in which students are free to revise or rethink. There’s a sense in which Scalar holds safe and secure all of the versions of their thought, so it works well in terms of allowing them the space to experiment and the space to make mistakes while also giving them a time-stamped chronology of the work that they’ve done. So, there are multiple ways in which Scalar allows for the thinking process to be represented.

Rebecca: It also seems like it’s a good model for students to know how long they’ve spent writing because their idea or conception of how much time they may have spent doing something might be really inaccurate.

Fiona: That’s a fantastic point because I think students do have a strange dislocation from the actual effort it takes, the actual labor that goes into producing something like a polished text. So, on the one hand there’s just an awareness of the sheer time that goes into that, but there’s also a sense in which Scalar allows students to really, really dig into the revision and the editing process, which often is hard. So, students sort of do the standard essay writing and I often find it difficult to convince them to let go of certain aspects of what they’ve written or to radically or drastically revise…

Rebecca: But it’s still there.

Fiona: But it’s still there; they don’t have to worry about losing it—they can try something completely different and perhaps see what happens when they release their hold on that idea that writing is just something you open up a word processor and do… start at the beginning and go until you’ve hit the word limit.

Rebecca: You’ve got pathway one like normal way, then it’s like here’s my cycle weird way, here’s my figure eight way.

Fiona: Yes!

John: When you have students work with this are they working individually or in groups?

Fiona: This is the next thing I wanted to mention, which is that Scalar allows for both. It is extraordinarily flexible in terms of this exact question. I usually begin by having students create content, create Scalar pages on an individual basis, but all of the students are creating within what I call one great big bag of Scalar content. Scalar uses the term “book” to describe one project in this way. So, the students can create their own content, tag it as their own content, organize it according to their own methods, but then I get students to interact with each other’s content, so they read each other’s content, they start to make tendrils of connections between their content and other students’ content, and then eventually I build up to students generating content collaboratively. So it works really well in allowing a wide range of writing collaboration, and the point I make as these networks of connection get more and more elaborate is that this is how knowledge works, this is how knowledge is created; it’s a collective, collaborative enterprise and nobody does best working in isolation.

John: When they do this is it something that’s shared just within a class or is it shared publicly?

Fiona: Again, Scalar has both options available. I discuss this issue of public versus private writing with the students and we usually make a decision together as to whether or not the students want to make their material, their writing, public or private. I’ve also had a class in which one student was very happy to make her Scalar project public, but all the rest of the students wanted to keep theirs private, so she was able to easily take her content, make a whole new Scalar book and proudly display it for everyone to see, so it is remarkably flexible in terms of what it allows you to do with what you create.

Rebecca: What about the converse, though, when it’s a one or two students that have a reason that it needs to be private?

Fiona: And there’s absolutely no problem in keeping a Scalar book entirely private. I also give students the opportunity to erase what they’ve done… so to remove it entirely. We do talk a lot about privacy, public writing, and issues of copyright is another angle that seems important to talk about in terms of the Scalar ecosystem. The group who has built Scalar is deeply invested in promoting open access and fair use of cultural resources as part of their commitment to generating very dynamic and free intellectual exchange, so they created something called the Critical Commons—it has a relation conceptually or figuratively to Creative Commons—but their Critical Commons is a place where copyrighted media is taken and transformed critically and then posted for fair use purposes. So you’ll see people who have taken clips of movies, for example, or a television shows but transform those clips through a critical apparatus that Critical Commons enables, and this allows students to really think about what they’re doing when they reference a piece of culture, whether that’s a photograph or a song or a video, that by adding their critical commentary to it, they are transforming it, they are generating ideas that are making that piece of content new, and Scalar’s link to Critical Commons allows them to really think about issues of copyright, issues of intellectual openness, what happens when something is locked down and is unavailable for access to them to write about, so it becomes a much, much broader discussion about the nature of knowledge, the nature of information in our 21st century.

Rebecca: It sounds like the emphasis then with this Critical Commons is the idea of fair use and understanding fair use and describing fair use and putting in a structure in place that embodies and enforces fair use.

Fiona: And that embodying and enforcing of fair use that you describe then becomes part of how the students think of themselves as creators, so what does it mean to take something that another student has written and to use it in some way in your own thinking? Where do the bounds of fair use lie? It’s often something students haven’t thought about and this actually relates to the labor-related facet of Scalar that I find really useful in terms of student learning. I often feel that students see the Internet as this place where disembodied text has just appeared and exists, but by generating it themselves they have to confront the fact that a lot of work or a lot of effort went into generating the things that they don’t think very much about, and so Scalar allows students to think about the writing process in new and interesting and productive ways, but it also allows students to think about the nature of information that they engage with on a daily basis.

Rebecca: It’s really funny that we’re talking about fair use today because I was talking to my students about fair use this morning. We had a visiting artist who uses fair use in her work and then there was like a thousand questions when she was here. I said, you know, “We’ll talk about fair use, I promise, on Monday, when we all get back and she’s not here and we’re not taking up her time to dig into it.” But, it’s funny because they have this commercial point of view and then also the cultural maker point of view and they conflate it as if it’s all the same and that is really different. Context matters… and that you need to be thinking about these things, so we tried to untangle that today, but you’re right, students don’t think about that at all; in fact, scholars don’t think about it very often either.

Fiona: It’s true, and I first used Scalar in a class that was comparing and contrasting 19th-century book technologies with 21st-century digital writing and publishing technologies and part of the reason that worked the way it did is that 19th century literature is, of course, out of copyright—it’s public domain—and so we were able to play very freely with the literature from that period, and then students had to stop and think and realize that the 21st century, again, literature in various interesting forms, was different, was fundamentally different because of this legal category that we use to distinguish between what is public domain and what isn’t, and students are fascinated by it, while also not understanding it or understanding its logic, necessarily. So, Scalar’s making visible of something that students just hadn’t thought about before is one of its many, many strengths or one of the many valuable ways in which it operates in a classroom.

Rebecca: Can you take us on an adventure through one of your classes to get us a better sense of how you’re actually putting it into play in a specific class with a specific group of students?

John: In terms of maybe the type of assignment that they might be working on?

Fiona: For sure. I first used Scalar in a class that contrasted 19th-century material book production with 21st-century digital publication technologies and I asked the class to really consider the ways in which genre, in particular, is affected by the shape of publishing possibilities. So students are used to thinking about genre as something that is an intellectual idea or an abstract idea informed by author influence or cultural anxieties, but they rarely think about genre as something that is shaped by the actual material affordances of publication, so we read 19th-century texts, we read 21st-century texts and then I asked the students to produce their own creative or critical response to the material in our classes, and what that meant was that some students wrote relatively traditional research essays that incorporated media, sound, video. It meant that some students created choose-your-own-adventure type creative stories that played with the notion of genre as Scalar allowed them to unpack conventions that were and were not possible in that electronic form. Students also used other sorts of technologies to play with the way that technology shaped the kinds of stories they could generate, but that’s a broad overview of how Scalar worked in one particular class. I am using Scalar currently in a class about digital literary studies and the students are making digital editions of 19th-century texts. So, students are in groups, they’ve each been assigned a story by an obscure local Oswego author and they are in groups deciding how they want to present these stories to the world… new and refreshed by their 21st century perspectives on the stories, so some of them are emphasizing maps and timelines. Some of them are emphasizing illustrating the stories. Some of them want to actually remix some of the stories and generate alternate routes through the stories. So, they’re able through Scalar to invent and create these approaches to literary interpretation—they’re making arguments about the text through their use of Scalar, and I should mention that one of Scalar’s appeals is that it’s possible to do a lot with minimal technical knowledge. It’s also possible to do a lot if you have maximal technical knowledge. There’s a lot of room for customization if you are fluent with CSS and that sort of business. It accommodates a really wide range of technical skill.

John: Could you tell us a little bit more about how the choose-your-own-adventure type things work? Is that difficult for the students to program the branches?

Fiona: The great news is the students don’t really have to program the branches. The student I’m thinking of in particular wanted to write a choose your own adventure story that turned into a different genre of story depending on which path you took through her story…

Rebecca: I love that idea.

Fiona: It was a fantastic idea and it really showed just how well she grasped the possibilities that Scalar offered. So she began—there was an introductory page that set up a scenario—it was a mystery, perhaps a murder mystery story at the beginning, and then she had a couple of options: you could choose to follow one character or one event; and as each choice branched a little bit further and a little bit further, so there were many, many iterations of the story, and again each arm of the story took on a slightly different generic set of conventions. It was relatively straightforward; literally in Scalar you simply mark, using a little sort of dialog box that you check or uncheck. you mark what pieces of content you want to attach to a page. So, there’s no encoding, there’s no high-level function that students need to worry about; they can simply imagine what they want to connect and they can make those connections relatively easily. I will say that one of the other things I love about Scalar is that it generates productive difficulty for the students, it generates a lot of intellectual uncertainty which is something that I find… [LAUGHTER] I enjoy producing in students in a constructive way, obviously. Because Scalar is this enormous bag into which students just throw pieces of content, it can get overwhelming really quickly—there can just be this amorphous, chaotic mass that they struggle to make sense of—but that’s part of the advantage, I would argue: it really, really makes them think about high order levels of structure and organization. So even though they can do multiple kinds of organization… even though they can be very creative about how they organize, they do have to really think about how they want their content to relate to one another. So Scalar has this ability to get students thinking at that high level of structure while also allowing students to pay very, very close attention on the level of annotation and close reading—it combines those two levels and sort of everything in between in a way that I find very, very useful for students to be doing. I haven’t even talked about the kind of media annotation that’s possible. But, you can annotate, on a pixel level, images. You can annotate in various time stamps on a video or a piece of audio. There’s an extraordinary level of very, very specific detail that you can attend to as well as dealing with these large high order or large-structure levels of organization.

Rebecca: How did you learn how to use Scalar and then also how do you help students learn how to use the platform?

Fiona: This is a fantastic question. I learned to use Scalar in a very short, informal lunchtime demonstration given by Cathy Kroll—who I believe is at Sonoma State University—at the 2015 Digital Humanities Summer Institute in beautiful Victoria, B.C. and Cathy Kroll simply went through the process of making a Scalar page and she simply explained—and there are all sorts of interesting, cool things you can do with this organizational system—and that was enough; that was enough to allow me to at least discover its possibilities. So, the barrier to entry is low, but then you can ramp up things an awful lot, and I do find that I’m learning more and more as I go. I first imagined using Scalar in my own scholarly work—I am working on this, again, obscure local Oswego author—and I was trying to imagine ways to experiment with bringing these stories back to digital life, but I found that I was almost more excited by the possibilities I was seeing in students and so I thought I would take the exact same approach. I tend to give students a very, very basic introduction to what Scalar can do and then just let them loose, so allow them [LAUGHTER]—again, productive frustration—they make mistakes, they lose pages, they can’t figure out if they’re tagging a page or if they’re making a page a tag. I allow this brief sort of beginning phase of crazy-making exploration and then I ramp up the features, so I introduce more and more features. I begin by, I suppose it’s the carrot versus the stick analogy, so I begin by showing some of the very cool things Scalar can do, so with a basic knowledge of how metadata works students can produce these very gorgeous timelines or maps; I show them how they can use iframes to pull in content from various places on the web and enliven their writing. But, I also then ask them to think very hard about how they’re engaging with other students’ work, and so it feels as though I start with one page and then just allow them to explore on their own while giving them pushes in certain directions to make sure that they are exploring as fully as possible.

John: Maintaining those desirable difficulties as they develop more skills.

Fiona: Maintaining the desirable difficulties, exactly. I’m still trying to figure out how much I should push them, so how much I should demand of the students. I know that other people have used Scalar simply as a writing tool, so just dealing with text and organization. I know that others have encouraged students to make use of the multimedia affordances of Scalar and I’m still figuring out what the balance is for my students who are mostly students of literature.

Rebecca: The first thing that comes to mind to me is how the heck do you grade that? [LAUGHTER] There’s a lot to keep track of and map and pay attention to, so how are you evaluating students in like what criteria and and how do you actually just sort through all of that content?

Fiona: This is a fantastic question and one I am still figuring out… [LAUGHTER] the answer to. As I’m introducing students to Scalar and as I’m letting them make a mess and generate multiple versions of a single page and get confused themselves, I do encourage them to keep in mind that ultimately they want to be imagining not just their own thought process and writing process but what it might feel like for a reader to come across their material, specifically a reader that is me; [LAUGHTER] specifically a reader that will be assigning them a grade. [LAUGHTER] At the very same time, I do try and emphasize process over product, and because students come with such a range of technical capabilities, I build into my rubrics how hard a student has worked to correct a deficiency or to overcome a limitation in their ability to understand Scalar. Ultimately I am interested in the argument that they’re making, but I do reward and encourage what I call bravery—willingness to try new things; willingness to fail; willingness to get things wrong but then to turn that failure into something useful or to meditate or reflect on it in a conscious way. So, there’s a metacognitive aspect to all of this, and essentially in every assignment I’m still trying to figure out what the balance between rigorous analysis and explorative risk-taking might be. I tend to err on the side of appreciating the risk-taking, I will say that.

Rebecca: So do they submit like a URL to you?

Fiona: No, what happens is they tell me where they want me to enter their work. I usually create an index page and I ask them to put their starting point on that index page, so they’re all contributing to one page that serves as my starting point and that’s the easiest way to wander through things. I can go hunting if I need to. I encourage the students to tag what they’re doing with their own names. If there’s a good search function, for example, if I’m looking for something that’s been lost. It definitely feels like hunting in a barn full of hay sometimes. That’s not quite the same as hunting in a haystack but it’s not quite not the same either. [LAUGHTER]

John: Have any other faculty in your department or on campus adopted Scalar yet?

Fiona: I don’t think anyone else in my department has adopted Scalar. I do think as my classes perhaps turn more towards public facing projects that might change, because I do think there are a number of faculty and approaches that could do very cool things with Scalar, but so far I have had to pull my examples from elsewhere… from other campuses. But hopefully soon there will be some robust Oswego examples.

John: Have you ever had students build upon the work of earlier classes?

Fiona: I have not, and that is something that I’m trying to figure out how to do successfully, for a couple of reasons. So it would be easy to do if I just kept one giant Scalar project and had students continually reiterate upon the work that had come before; I haven’t actually repeated a course yet that I’ve used Scalar in, so that in fact might be a next step for my work with Scalar—it would involve, of course, getting permission from the students to do this or to allow them to anonymize their work, but those are things we could work out—but I have not yet done so. I could imagine the Digital Archiving Project as being one that would lend itself towards that sort of semester after semester continuation.

John: How have students responded to this compared to more traditional writing classes?

Fiona: The great news is that students seem very, very excited by what feels like them to be freedom. They respond really well to the autonomy that Scalar offers them. They tend to respond in a slightly opposite direction when they realize that freedom comes at a price and that price is an awful lot of work and figuring out technical details, and some students truly do flounder—some students just find it absolutely maddening to try and understand what’s happening. But some students absolutely thrive and really run with the creative remixing possibilities and really embrace the radically democratic approach that Scalar allows them to take to their own writing and writing in groups. So, I would say that there’s a now predictable sort of curve: initial excitement as students think about the possibilities, then there’s an inevitable drop in enthusiasm as the students realize just how much work this involves and how much new thinking they have to do to wrap their minds around the defamiliarization that Scalar offers, and then perhaps two tails after that: one very enthusiastic skyrocketing of competence and then one more medium flavored… just sort of making peace with what I’ve asked them to do, and I do always offer students options, and if someone just feels absolutely unable to grapple with Scalar there’s always the possibility of doing a different sort of project, but I haven’t yet had a student who has completely resisted.

John: This is a nice follow-up to our earlier podcast with Robin DeRosa where she talked about open pedagogy and it seems like this would be a nice tool for students to create materials that can be widely shared, if they choose to.

Fiona: If they choose to, and I do think I’m gonna bring the concept of open pedagogy or open ed more and more explicitly into classes in which I use Scalar to make that a part of my justification, or something else to get students thinking about. It’s a growing and very exciting movement—the open pedagogy and open education movement—and I’m excited to see how Scalar can continue to be a part of that.

Rebecca: Does Scalar offer, by default, a way to license individual pieces of content using Creative Commons or is it more how you would traditionally license a website by copying and pasting the code from Creative Commons, for example, on an individual page?

John: Or is it just a Critical Commons option?

Fiona: That is a fantastic question. I think you would need to attach your own Creative Commons licensing; I don’t know that there’s a built-in feature. However, I should say that that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist; it just means I don’t know about it at the moment, but I do think you, again, get to choose your own approach to that very issue. but I’m gonna look into it and see if I can figure out if there’s a built-in tool or aspect of Scalar.

Rebecca: We can make a note of that in our show notes, too, afterwards.

Fiona: I will follow up. [LAUGHTER]

John: And if we find any links we’ll include them.

Rebecca: ..[If] people wanted to get started, do you have a couple of examples that you might recommend for people to look at?

Fiona: I definitely have a few examples that I can recommend. I can add those to the show links, perhaps, and there are examples that range from student projects through elaborate library-based projects to very beautiful, customized versions of Scalar projects. I’d be very, very happy to share them and encourage people to try out the platform.

John: We always end our podcast with a question, what are you going to do next?

Fiona: To this point I have used Scalar in upper division literature courses where students come to the course already equipped with a certain set of writing and thinking skills that I can leverage and encouraging the curiosity and bravery I mentioned. So, next semester I’m gonna try using Scalar with a first-year composition course, and so I’m in the planning stages right now to see how that particular experiment might unfold.

Rebecca: That sounds really exciting.

Fiona: I’m super excited about it. As you might be able to tell, I really, really, am fascinated by the ways in which Scalar seems to activate student curiosity and student agency in their own intellectual work.

John: And if you reach freshmen with this they might perhaps suggest it to some other faculty as something they may wish to try.

Fiona: I like it, I like it as a plan.

Rebecca: Sounds like we’ll have to do a follow-up.

Fiona: I am here for it. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well thank you. This has been fascinating.

Rebecca: You’ve piqued my curiosity; I’m gonna go explore, so I can’t wait for those extra links so I can find a way in.

Fiona: If I’ve piqued your curiosity, I believe I have done my job.

John: And I did create an account a couple years ago when you gave a workshop and I kept meaning to go back, but now I’m more likely to. [LAUGHTER]

Fiona: Well let me know how you find it; let me know what you discover.

John: Thank you.

Rebecca: Yeah, thank you very much.

Fiona: Thank you so much; it was wonderful to talk with you.
[Music]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing assistance provided by Kim Fischer, Brittany Jones, Gabriella Perez, Joseph Santarelli-Hansen and Dante Perez.

56. Love’s labor not lost

Who knows and understands the needs of your students better than your own students? In this episode, Mya Brown, an Assistant Professor of Theatre at SUNY-Oswego, joins us to discuss how our students can build open educational resources that take advantage of the unique insights our students have about what novices need to learn to be successful in our courses and disciplines.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Who knows and understands the needs of your students better than your own students? In this episode, we’ll discuss how our students can build open educational resources that take advantage of the unique insights our students have about what novices need to learn to be successful in our courses and disciplines.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for tea for teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

Rebecca: Our guest today is Maya Brown, an assistant professor of theater at SUNY Oswego. Welcome, Maya!

Mya: Thanks for having me.

John: We’re glad to have you here. Our teas today are…

Mya: I have a peppermint tea with honey.

Rebecca: That sounds yummy. I have Prince Edward’s tea.

John: What kind?

Rebecca: I think it’s Prince? Prince… The one that’s Prince.The gray one.

John: Prince of Wales?

Rebecca: Yeah, that one, the Prince of Wales tea.

John: And I have black raspberry green tea.

Mya: Sounds good.

John: We invited you here to talk about your use of open educational resources and open pedagogy. For those who may not be familiar with open educational resources, what is an open educational resource?

Mya: The way I understand it is that it is freely accessible materials. They don’t have like a publisher behind them, so they’re typically copyrighted through like Creative Commons and they’re free for the user.

Rebecca: Can you tell us a little bit about the courses in which you use OER?

Mya: Yes, I taught Theater 110 which is Introduction to Theatre; it’s a lecture style course with 49 students. The section was full. In that course, typically when I taught it at West Virginia University prior to coming here to SUNY Oswego, the textbook that we used was an electronic textbook, but it was copyrighted by a publisher and the cost was a little over a hundred dollars. There also was an accessibility fee, the total cost came up to around 125 dollars per student. That just seems a lot to me for a textbook. I really thought it was important to make this information more accessible to the students and also free. As soon as I heard about OER opportunities, I like jumped on it.

Rebecca: How did your students respond the first time you used an OER in your class?

Mya: They loved it. [LAUGHTER] First day of class I introduced the textbook to them that we use. We used a textbook called Theatrical Worlds—it’s a very thorough textbook, I really like it. As soon as I said, we have a free textbook and this is how you access it and I brought it up for them on the overhead, they were super excited about it—they’re like, “Yeah, we don’t have to pay for a textbook…” Because, you know, they spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars per semester on these books just so that they can get access to the information, but lots of them can’t really afford it. They honestly can barely afford their tuition typically and some of them are having to decide whether they’re going to buy textbooks or they’re going to buy food. To take that pressure off of them, relieve them of that responsibility, it seems to really be a good thing.

John: …and many students either postpone buying a text or don’t buy it at all and OER they have it from the very first day of the course so we don’t have to worry about students who are struggling already perhaps with financial issues to also have to struggle by falling behind at the start of the semester. It offers a lot of benefits besides just the cost: it gives everyone equal access.

Mya: Yes, that’s so important. The thing that I found really nice is that instead of having to wait to address readings till like the second week of classes, we could start immediately because they had access immediately to the textbook. I like to send emails out to my students prior to the first day of class and I included a link to the book. I encourage them to look at it prior to coming to that first day of class; not many of them did, but some did and it was really nice that we could just jump right into the content.

Rebecca: Can you talk about some of the other benefits that you found for both you as a faculty member and for students by using the OERs?

Mya: I think that there’s more flexibility with how we are presenting the material; also, because we can remix them depending on the licensing agreement, we can update the materials. A lot of—and theater especially—they’re referring to specific performances, productions, different plays or musicals, and I can insert newer productions that have happened, so we’re using more current information and referring to more current information; that we can’t do with a hardbound textbook that does have copyright associated with it that will not allow you to change anything about it, so I really like this idea of being able to remix the resource and make it more personal for your class.

Rebecca: I know that the same textbook is used in other sections as well with other faculty; have you worked with them and the updates that you’ve done or have you shared that task so that you’re all presenting the same thing, or are you all remixing it so that it’s unique to you?

Mya: I think we all are remixing it so that it’s unique unto us. We all have different areas that are our areas of specialty or passion and where Toby is really heavy on the Shakespeare, I am as well ‘cause I love Shakespeare. Maybe Henry is…

John: That’s so uncommon in theater.

Mya: Right. [LAUGHTER] Henry Shikongo might more focus on things like physical theater, Comedia—I know he studied directly with Dell’A rte, so that’s more his emphasis. I think that is another strength of using an OER, that we can make it more personal and we can highlight our passions, because when we’re talking about our passions in the classroom, that energy that we have for that subject it… just transfers to the students—I think that they absorb more of it and they engage more when we are so passionate about it.

John: Is the class mostly for majors or is it non-majors or a mix?

Mya: It’s a mix because it does satisfy the general education so it’s considered a GEC. We will get actually lots of non-majors in there, but it is required in the core for the major program as well, which is really helpful because the majors and their passion for it also bleeds out to the rest of the classroom; all of those people who are maybe zoologists or engineers and they’re like, “Eh, I just took it for an easy ‘A,’ I don’t really care about theater.” [LAUGHTER] But when they have their colleagues care about it as much as they do it really, I think, helps to inspire them

Rebecca: Were you the first faculty member in your area to adopt in an OER as part of your classes?

Mya: Toby Malone and I did it together. It was interesting because I was communicating with him via email over the summer prior to his coming to the university because we both were teaching a section of 110 and I told him about the opportunity for this grant that I was applying for to incorporate OER in the classroom and I thought for theater 110 I thought that would be a perfect classroom to experiment with OER. Toby Malone was also teaching a section of that course—I told him that I was interested in the grant that they were offering here at SUNY—I think it was a SUNY wide grant, actually. I was looking into that grant and I really wanted to adopt a textbook for that purpose. We went back and forth on a couple different options; Theatrical Worlds is actually an option that he brought to me. I really just loved it and he said, “I like it too, so let’s use it.” So we both ended up using it at the same time and now Henry has gotten on board now that he’s teaching 110 and hopefully every instructor that teaches that section will use that book because it’s a really great book.

Rebecca: Sometimes it’s better together, right? [LAUGHTER]

Mya: Yeah, definitely. We really try to maintain the integrity of the course and make sure that we are all teaching the same subject matter and it’s just easy if we’re all teaching from the same book. There will be variations, obviously, but majority of the content it’s all the same information that we’re delivering. I think that’s important because we’re setting a foundation for the next level for these students. For some of them, like non-majors, we’re introducing them to this whole new world. A lot of times that 110 course is kind of gateway course and we get to pull in minors or maybe some even change to the major. It’s important, I think, that we’re all on the same page.

John: …and a nice thing is with those who do go on they still have access to the book…

Mya: Yes.

John: …because with traditional textbooks, even if they buy the book, students will often sell them back at the end and then when they go to upper-level classes they no longer have access… …

Mya: Right.

John: …since the books are out there and publicly available they get to keep them and that’s a really nice feature for classes that build on earlier ones.

Mya: Yes.

Rebecca: Yeah, when you buy a book and it’s the difference between cashing it in to get more cash for another book that you might need at a higher level versus hanging on to it that’s always a decision that students have to make that I know that we experience in my department sometimes as well.

John: When I teach upper-level classes students will often say, “What can I do? I’m having trouble with this material; where can I find more information on this?” And I say, “Well, this builds on our earlier intro class; you can go back and review your textbook,” and the response is almost always, “I don’t have that anymore.”

Mya: Right.

Rebecca: Powell says OER is spreading in your department.

Mya: It’s not spread too much; it’s mostly just being used in the 110 course, but maybe that’s a good segue into the other course that I’m using it in, which is Acting Shakespeare. We’re actually creating an OER in that class; it’s called The Shakespearean Monologue Database. It’s still in construction right now. It’s a resource for acting students and we really want to open it up nationwide; anybody can have access to it, where they can find monologues and all of the information necessary in order to understand the text fully so that they can then perform it to the best of their ability.

Rebecca: So context.

Mya: Yes. [LAUGHTER]

John: And the students are actually creating some of that, right?

Mya: Yes, they create actually all of the content; all I do is tailor it a little bit, you know, sculpt it a little bit, mold it a little bit. All of the monologue choices on there were our choices that the students made. Any of the words that they thought they needed to look up so that they could get full meaning, so we have like a glossary associated with each monologue; those are all terms that they wanted to investigate. I like it to come from them because I feel like it might be more relatable to other students when they look at it if it’s coming more from a student perspective versus the professor’s perspective, but I do give a little note about what I think about this monologue choice as well, whether it would be a good one for auditions or a good one for just exploring a new character type or for a classroom assignment.

Rebecca: Is it clear to the reader who made what comments that accompany the monologue?

Mya: That’s actually something I think we’re continuing to work on because it’s not clear right now. There is information on the home page stating that all content was created by the students, but if you’re just going right to the monologue and you’re skipping that or—you know how it is when people search; they don’t necessarily read everything, right? So, we’re trying to figure out is there a way that we can make it obvious that this stuff came from the students versus what came from me, and we would really love in the future for it to be a resource that can be remixed as well by other universities and other professors and other students. We want to keep that licensing open so that they can contribute monologues on their own, they can create their own glossaries, synopsis, and character breakdowns and add those to the website as well, so how then do we identify those and give credit to those authors of that content versus ours, something we’re still working on.

Rebecca: Sounds like your role has largely been editing and curating…

Mya: Yes.

Rebecca: …the process.

Mya: Yes, definitely. Laura Harris, she’s been helping me a lot with that.

Rebecca: She’s one of our librarians.

Mya: Yes, we’re actually using LibGuides.

John: What led to that choice?

Mya: Laura Harris, who’s our online learning librarian, she has a connection at SpringShare from her having experience with LibGuides she thought that it would be a great platform for this kind of site, this database. She reached out to some people that she knows and they were like, “Yes, let’s do it.” They created a page for us and then she walked me through how to add all of the content and she’s helping me to edit it some more and make it look all fancy and nice. Laura is the one who brought up the idea of using LibGuides as a resource.

John: And are the students inputting it directly into that or is she…

Mya: No.

John: …doing that or are you doing that?

Mya: I’m doing that. Yeah, the students, they turn in all of their work to me and then I’m curating it and adding it to the pages.

Rebecca: How do those students responded as being authors and putting their work out into the public?

Mya: It actually is really great. They are doing exactly what I thought they would do, which is taking ownership of the resource because they’re contributing to it because their names are attached to it; they have this greater sense of responsibility to complete the work, complete it accurately and to make fun and exciting choices in their monologue choices, like the characters that they’re selecting. It actually has really been helpful in the classroom because it has increased their level of engagement on these assignments because they know that it’s going out there on this resource.

Rebecca: Are you finding that they’re reading more Shakespeare on their own as a result so that they can find the perfect thing?

Mya: I don’t know about that… [LAUGHTER]

John: But they’re more enthused about what they do.

Rebecca: Wishful thinking.

Mya: Yeah, I think that is wishful thinking, but they definitely are more enthusiastic and they are more engaged in the classroom. Whenever I’ve taught Shakespeare before it feels like I’m pulling teeth the majority of the time. And a lot of students said, this is not what I expected it to be; I thought we would just read a bunch of Shakespeare and was going to be boring and I wasn’t going to understand that I wouldn’t relate to any of these characters, but because of the amount of in-depth textual work that we’re doing they actually are relating on a very deep level and they’re finding similarities to these characters and they’re relating to these characters in a way that I have not seen before, which is really exciting

Rebecca: Were you doing similar assignments before, but it was the audience of Mya?

Mya: Yes, yes, exactly. I kind of amped up the amount of work that they’re doing so that we could have enough content to create the website but it is a similar assignment. However, as you so eloquently point out, there’s a much larger audience now.

John: If you continue this will they be editing the existing work or will they be adding new monologues to it?

Mya: Yes, they will be adding new content. I actually am teaching Acting Shakespeare in the spring of 2019—I definitely will keep this assignment and we will continue to add to the database. I think it’s important that we are constantly adding new material to it; there’s so many unique perspectives and points of view that it’s essential to continue creating and contributing to the database.

Rebecca: Will the students in this spring be using the content the students this fall have created as part of reading and being a user of the resource before being a creator of the resource?

M

Mya: Yes, it will definitely be a part of their prep work for their contributions. My last class they were a bit of guinea pigs and now I think we have the right formula for the assignment in order to get the content that we want. Yeah, I will definitely use it as an example so that they’re aware of what exactly they should be looking for and how to complete the assignment.

Rebecca: Sounds really exciting.

John: It does.

Rebecca: Are students working together on the things that they’re creating or are they individually creating sections or the information around individual monologues?

Mya: It is more of an individual assignment; however, they do share their work when they present the monologue, so they have to act it out in class and we do feedback from the entire class—they are getting feedback from their classmates on the performances of the monologues, but they’re not on the actual content that they’re contributing to the database. That might be a good idea, though. You might have made me think about changing the way I approach that and maybe we could add that element, especially when it comes to the glossary and the character descriptions, that could be helpful because there are some things that might stand out to one student that didn’t even occur to another. If they’re assisting each other that might be a useful component to add to this assignment. Thank you for that, Rebecca. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: One of the things that I was thinking when you were describing it is if students who are going to add to the database had to use one of the resources and do a performance with it then they would know what content was missing?

Mya: Yeah.

Rebecca: So that they would know what to do in their own next time, so it’s like they could add to someone else’s or augment it and then try their own?

Mya: I love that idea. Thank you.

John: In creating these are they embedding other open content, recordings, or performances, or some other things?

Mya: Yeah, no recordings yet—I have been considering that, especially because with us using Shakespeare and it’s already open source…

John: RIght.

Mya: We wouldn’t have to worry about copyright infringement or anything. I have been considering that but we don’t have the capabilities right now to do that; I’m just one person and I can only do so much, but I have been considering that, definitely. We do, though, refer to the glossaries; there’s a link for each of the words that takes them to Perseus—that’s an OER as well—that has text as well as dictionaries. It’s a good way for them to be able to get that information out there in a free way and link up to another OER. I’ve always used the OED—the Oxford—in my classes prior to because it has the truest definition when we’re referring back to Elizabethan text or, however…

John: …or practically anything. [LAUGHTER]

Mya: Right, but especially Elizabethan; I mean, you know, they’ll look up some of these words on places like dictionary.com and the definition that they’re getting in no way relates to how the text was being used at the time, so it’s not helpful at all. So, I always would insist that they use the OED, but it is not a free resource, so we can’t actually link to it on the website. So, we had to find something that was free but also maintained that integrity of those glossary terms so that people are getting the correct information and the most useful information there. Right, that’s the thing—I’m continuing to look because there are so many definitions that we found that are not there and so there’s a couple holes, but it’s been the best resource that we’ve found that’s free.

John: Where can people find this?

Mya: So, it actually is not published yet because it’s still under construction, but it will have a title something like, Shakespearean Monologue Database and again it’s a LibGuide—the platform is SpringShare —so once it is published we’ll get it out there as much as we can.

Rebecca: Great.

John: …and we’ll put a link in the show notes which will update once the link is publicly available.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up Mya by asking, “what’s next?”

Mya: Yes, what is next? Well I think what’s next is figuring out how to get these videos incorporated because I think that that would be a really great thing. I did some interviews with the students from our previous semester and just asked them a couple questions: How did you feel about Shakespeare prior to coming to this class? And the unanimous comment that came up was, “I didn’t understand it,” and then I asked, how do you feel about Shakespeare now and unanimously everyone’s like, “I love it. I can understand it now,” and I think this database is going to be a useful tool for other people to be able to understand it as well, so I think the more people can actually see these students and see their reactions and hear their reactions versus just seeing the content that they’ve created, the better they might feel about the actual resource and how it’s reaching students.

Rebecca: Sounds like you have the basis of a nice scholarship of teaching and learning research paper.

Mya: Oh, yeah. [LAUGHTER]

John: …and one other thing that you are doing this semester, which ties into an earlier podcast, is you’re one of the people teaching those first-year courses…

Mya: Yes.

John: …and what is that like? We’ll probably have you back on to talk about that.

Mya: Oh, okay.

John: …in the future.

Mya: Yeah, so the course is called Blackish Mirror; it’s a study of black characters on television and we started with Ethel Waters and her performance as one of the first African Americans with a lead role on television in 1939. Her show’s called the Ethel Waters Show and we started there and we’re moving all forward to the current time. It’s really great; I love the class, the students are really engaged, they’re loving the subject matter and they’re articulating and finding their own personal perspectives on these social issues of oppression and representation and stereotypes and the dangers of the images that we see and how they can perpetuate negative stereotypes and they can kind of feed into social thinking about a specific type of person and the importance then and the responsibility of people who create this content in the media to be careful about how they are representing people and make sure that they try their best to not perpetuate the stereotype or feed into mass hysteria. It’s really exciting that these students are standing up in the classroom and saying, this is not right and what do we do about it. So, their final project—I’m actually really excited for—they’re going to create a PSA based off of one of the social issues that we’ve identified in class and I’m just really excited to see what they latch on to and how they try to address that thing and, you know, they really are inspired to make society better and that gives me hope for the future.

Rebecca: It sounds like a really nice note to end on. [LAUGHTER]

John: And a nice note in these times in general; other people are not always as positive about the future.

Rebecca: It also makes me want to go to all your classes.

John: Yes.

Mya: Yeah, it’s fun; come drop in. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Sign up quick and make sure I get a seat.

John: Thank you, this has been wonderful.

Mya: Thank you.

Rebecca: Yeah, thank you so much.

[Music]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing assistance provided by Kim Fischer, Brittany Jones, Gabriella Perez, Joseph Santarelli-Hansen and Dante Perez.

55. Open pedagogy

Imagine an academy that values a public knowledge commons and supports and recognizes the academic labor required to develop, maintain, build and evolve that commons. Imagine your students actively contributing to that commons. In this episode, Robin DeRosa joins us to discuss open pedagogy, free textbooks, and the building of such  a commons.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Imagine an academy that values a public knowledge commons and supports and recognizes the academic labor required to develop, maintain, build, and evolve that commons. Imagine your students actively contributing to that commons. In this episode, we discuss open pedagogy, free textbooks, and the building of such a commons.

[MUSIC]

Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Robin DeRosa…

Robin: That’s me.

John: …Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at Plymouth State University. Robin is an editor of Hybrid Pedagogy and is a co-founder of the Open Pedagogy Notebook. She has also published on a wide variety of topics, including the Salem witch trials. Welcome, Robin.

Robin: Thank you.

Rebecca: Today our teas are…

Robin: Oh, I thought we were talking about teasing people for a second and I was like, I don’t have a tease. [LAUGHING] What am I teasing?

Robin: No, I actually have two cups of tea in front of me, which is how I like it. One is a ginger tea and one is a sunny orange because I have to stay away from the caffeine at a certain hour of the day, so I’m all herbal.

Rebecca: Sounds like a nice combination.

Robin: I know, I’m just taking one and then the other; it’s perfect.

John: And I have a Tea Forte Black Currant Tea.

Rebecca: I have a Jasmine Earl Grey, that wasn’t there before, so I gave it a try.

John: It’s been there for a year.

Rebecca: Wow, it’s been hiding under the big pile of tea that we have.

John: In exactly the same tray…

Rebecca: No…

John: I just refilled it today.

Rebecca: Oh, you know what, it was the box sitting on top that you didn’t take back after we refilled the tray.

John: Okay. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: That’s where I got it from.

Robin: But your listeners are probably like, how could you not see a box, but if they saw this table, my jaw was on the ground; it is a really quite an impressive tea table that you’ve assembled here. You should be very proud.

Rebecca: We don’t mess around.

Robin: You do not mess around. I would use even other words but I know… public… this is some serious hardcore tea happening here. [LAUGHTER]

John: We invited you here to talk about your work with Open Pedagogy. For those that are unfamiliar, can you explain what is meant by Open Pedagogy?

Robin: Sure, which is such a funny question really because if there is a thing—and I could just say it—because there’s a lot of productive disagreement in the community about what Open Ped is; it’s one of the reasons that my colleague Rajiv Jhangiani and I started the Open Pedagogy Notebook because it’s more of a collage approach to defining Open Ped by people doing and practicing in different ways and then sharing that, but if I had to boil it down I would say it’s really about access, both to knowledge and to knowledge creation… so, the idea that we remove barriers to sharing resources and helping people access conversations and find pathways into education, but then we also try to find ways to amplify student voices to make them contributors to the Knowledge Commons and not just consumers, and I think it’s pretty salient right now as students are really in some ways maybe being pushed into these kind of training and competency models that are really about kind of downloading information and instead Open Ped suggests that we really want students to interact with knowledge and shape the world that they’re going to graduate into, not just train for it.

John: So they’re more actively engaged in the academic conversation?

Robin: That’s the idea. Right. In some ways there’s a lot of kinship, I think, with connected learning and with the idea of involving students in their academic and professional networks. Right from the beginning, because even as people who are new to our particular field, they have so much to offer and as an interdisciplinarian, we talk about that all the time that the outsider’s perspective is beneficial—it’s part of the reason you assemble an interdisciplinary team to tackle a problem and newcomers to a field ask sometimes questions that really can illuminate the challenges that a field is facing in new ways, so I have found that even the most beginning introductory students in a particular area have something to contribute both to the field itself and also in terms of helping their peers in terms of, for example, making educational materials. Students are really well positioned to make great educational materials ‘cause they understand better than anybody what’s hard to understand about a certain area.

John: They’re not subject to the curse of knowledge…

Robin: The curse of knowledge. [LAUGHTER] I have that curse, John.

John: We all do to some extent.

Robin: But it is true like when especially when I was teaching Early American Lit and you just finished your PhD and you start teaching and then you teach something for 15 years and no matter how gifted of a teacher you are, sometimes you’re like, “I don’t understand how they don’t understand this,” like “what’s hard about this?” and of course they really understand what’s hard about it, so when we did student projects where students were working on a textbook that we were crafting together, they really made some great materials for each other that I think were far better than some of the lectures I would have prepared or had prepared over the years.

John: So tell us a little bit about how you got involved in that first project you had?

Robin: I was at, ya know, one of those faculty development events that you guys might be aware of and they had brought in, ya know, a keynote speaker, and I don’t want to say I wasn’t prepared to be impressed, but it was a technology oriented conference and I was definitely one of those curmudgeons that was highly skeptical about how useful… or actually more skeptical about the ways technology was being deployed, so I was prepared to be mad, that was how I came in the room, and I actually still think that’s generally my positionality with technology is like, I’m pretty prepared to be skeptical at all times. But the keynote speaker happened to be Cable Green from Creative Commons and I had this really just pivotal “aha” moment when he was talking about the Creative Commons licenses where I realized that my students were paying 90 bucks every semester, each student, for access to public domain Early American Literature and my heart just sort of fell on the floor. It’s like why are we paying commercial publishers when all of this stuff is out of copyright. So, some students and I spent that summer before the next fall’s class rebuilding the Heath Anthology of American Literature out of public domain texts that we found online and we did not build a hearty replacement for the Heath, but we built a sufficient replacement and when we got into the class the students were super psyched that I had saved them 90 dollars, which is totally real money to my students and makes a big difference. They were grateful but they did not like the book, because it had nothing except public domain literature, so there were no introductions, no maps, no footnotes, no glossaries, no “Don’t worry, I know this doesn’t make sense to you, but let me walk you through it” kind of ancillary scaffolds. So, of course, it seems obvious now but at the time we thought we were rock star smart when we figured out like, hey, the students can make this stuff for the book, and so the students worked ahead, different pods of students would work ahead a week or two and build wrap around materials for that chapter and we got there the rest of the students would use it and, of course, it just ended up being 500 times better than the Heath Anthology of American Literature, partially because they were excited that their classmates were reading their work instead of putting it in Moodle or Canvas or Blackboard, where things go to die. So, they got excited about doing what David Wiley and others have called these non-disposable assignments and then they start getting creative, they start making little videos. Ee’d drop those in… two-minute intro to the Haitian Revolution or whatever. I put a little app in the sidebar called Hypothesis where students can annotate and so they liked that and then at the end of the semester people are like, “The best part of this class was the textbook,” which…

Rebecca: Which they made.

Robin: … they made… and they never said about the Heath anthology. So, that transformed my pedagogy partially because I was excited about making all sorts of access oriented changes in our program; we opened a food pantry at the same time as we did this, so we were thinking about lots of things in terms of accessibility of resources for students. But, in terms of thinking about not dumping my student’s work down the digital toilet every semester, it gave me stomach cramps when I first thought about what I had been doing. Every time I taught the course it was the same course, the student’s contributions weren’t transforming anything—it was no wonder that some of it felt dry to them. There was a lot of hoop jumping, and I still think I was a good teacher, that wasn’t like I was bad, but this idea of really empowering students to really, truly engage with the fields and the materials and shaping how the course runs has really changed everything for me.

Rebecca: There’s something that you’re talking about… the idea of building the textbook together, but then the course material is sort of the same from semester to semester and the materials are created by the students, so how does that continue to transform semester to semester so it doesn’t feel like it’s a one-off project… that it continues to evolve and it continues to be a value and that students continue to learn new things?

Robin: Such a great question and I get it a lot because people—I think in some ways mistakenly assume—that that first build was the exciting build, but totally that first build was the annoying build, right, because we got to do a lot of legwork tracking down these texts. We had to do a lot of copyright discovery, like “Can we use this version of Thomas Jefferson or not” and it wasn’t all that exciting, and that’s still ongoing. So Rebus community, who’s working on that textbook now, they took our version and they’re building it out; they’re still doing that kind of discovery in that initial work, and to be frank, that will never end. Even with Early American Literature you’re constantly discovering, changing excerpts, building things out, but to me what’s even more exciting is, for example, there’s a whole unit at the beginning of Native American Oral Tradition and asking critical questions about what’s the genesis of American literature. So, at the same time as I was teaching that that semester we had the Dakota Pipeline stuff happening and lots of stuff about water protectors and about native history so you can relate things to current events that way, but also think about when I finished the course, my colleague Abby Goode, who teaches Early American Literature, but very much from an environmental and sustainability perspective, she kind of remixed the whole book so that now it was about the environment in Early American Lit; they chose some different texts, they reframed the introductions. Her book, in my opinion, is quite a bit more coherent than ours was, which was more of just a collage of things. So, there’s all sorts of opportunities for how you shape and reshape, and, of course, what students are learning there, which is really the point of those survey classes in English is that there is no American literature; there is only the canon that you intentionally assemble. There’s a lot of politics and a lot of editorial choices and each semester it could look different and that’s an important lesson because the Heath anthology was not a neutral objective collection either and I think that’s been a helpful way for them to encounter the building of canon.

Rebecca: I think it’s really easy for people to imagine how this works in the humanities. Can you provide some examples or ways of thinking about being open in the same way in STEM or in business or other disciplines that might not latch on quite as quickly?

Robin: Yeah, and my colleague at Keene State, which is one of our sister institutions, Karen Cangialosi, published a wonderful article recently called “You Can’t Do That in a STEM Class,” which is basically the answer to your questions. We should just stop answering questions and you should go read that article now. But really, the open dcience movement is a huge movement, in some ways dwarfs open education and I think climate change is a really good example of this, but also just open access publishing, the idea that in order to have scientific breakthroughs we need to have the public sharing of scientific knowledge and collaboration in science and so bringing our students into that early as opposed to saying, “Here when you’re a student you’ll be confined to this one class and stuck in this one book, but then when you become a scientist we assume you’ll just understand how to become part of this larger, more public scientific community.” That makes really little sense. So, what you’ll see in classes by people who work this way in STEM, and Karen’s a good example, is that their students are working on issues that are of critical importance and they’re putting their research and ideas into the commons and asking mentor scientists to engage with them. So, we understand that our students are not always going to be doing top-level research; the next breakthrough in diabetes research is not necessarily gonna come from a sophomore. Although occasionally you hear those stories, right, but really what they’re gonna do is they’re gonna ask for guidance, they’re gonna ask for help, they’re going to amplify other scientists’ work and translate them for their communities so that a new generation of scientists can get access to the issues and that’s how we’re going to assure that our scientists are working for what I might call the public goods. So, we’re seeing lots of people using blogs for this purpose instead of just doing their labs in a vacuum or whatever, sharing some of that work and creating sites together, or working in experiential ways through internships. This is why I sometimes bristle about OER being kind of like a cheap or free textbook movement. It’s really very much about a public knowledge commons and how we bring students authentically into that, so when my students are out in the field… and I teach interdisciplinary studies now, so my students are pretty much not in the humanities, to be honest. I have lots of business students, lots of students working in marketing, lots of students in allied health, physical therapy; they’re all in my program, and the work that they do in our open textbook and with OERs is one thing and we do create all of our own materials for the program, but beyond that they’re also creating capstone projects that are generally online, often openly licensed; of course they hold the autonomy to make those decisions for themselves. At that point they’re pretty educated about how open they want to be and then they’re also working on applied projects out in their fields and I see all that stuff as part of the same way that we engage our students in the public world of knowledge.

John: And science is often taught, or at least it’s perceived by students, as this body of knowledge they have to memorize rather than this ongoing dialogue and a series of active research projects, and when they are more engaged in the process of making those connections it’s likely they’ll learn it better and they’re likely to become much more interested in the subject, because one of the main problems in the STEM fields is that students give up early on. But if they can see the relevance, I would think they’d be much more likely to continue onward.

Robin: Yeah, I think it’s a great point. I’m also the mom of a teenager right now who—is this gonna make my whole family sound bizarre? I’m not sure… but she’s got an obsession with taxidermy, so if you go into her room it’s all—I’m not joking; we’ve got boars, we’ve got bison, we’ve got deer, we’ve got every pelt you could imagine, and then her bookshelves are filled with skulls and bones…loves it. She’s out there digging for bones from the time she was little, researching which skull is this, what skull is that; she doesn’t like science, though; that’s what she tells me: she doesn’t like science. I’m like, you do like science, you nutty kid.

John: You’re kind of doing it; this is where a lot of science started.

Robin: That’s right, and so I’ve been waiting for her and she’s had great teachers here and there, but she really did finally have a biology teacher last year who helped her understand that she does love science, but before that she thought, I don’t really like these worksheets and I don’t really like memorizing these tables, and she’s an interactive person. So, I think there’s a lot of compatibility between open and active learning and experiential learning and high-impact practice and all these buzzwords. People call me an advocate for open, which I am, but really I’m an advocate for learners, like paying attention to the kinds of things they are constantly telling us that they need in order to be successful. While we’re over here shopping for some kind of software program, they’re sitting right here telling us, I’m hungry or I can’t afford my materials or I don’t feel like my voice matters or I don’t know enough to be useful here, so you just tell me what I need to know.

Rebecca: Or I’m not represented.

Robin: I’m not represented. That’s a huge one because when you transfer to this mode of learning, it’s a little bit the sort of Wikipedia model, although Wikipedia is a horrible example because of representation in Wikipedia and the stats we have on that, but the idea that you can pay attention to all the voices in your community but the open movement is really wrestling with this right now to figure out how much is about open and licenses and sharing and how much is about creating an ecosystem of inclusivity, access… the kinds of things that truly do shape a commons, which we mostly don’t have in education, so the commitment, I think, is for me is less to the technicalities of open and more towards the long-game vision, which is really about how do we bring more voices to the table to engage in the community for whatever the community’s needs are.

John: I wanted to go back to a point you made earlier; it reminded me a little bit about some behavioral economic studies and I haven’t thought about this before, but I think it’s relevant. There was some interesting experiments done by Dan Ariely a while back. Dan Ariely calls this the IKEA Effect and he notes that when Duncan Hines first started selling cake mix they sold horribly and the reason was you just added water, you stirred and you baked and people didn’t feel that they had created something, so they changed the mix so you had to add an egg to it and stirred and mixed in and baked it, but by the simple act of breaking an egg and mixing it in, it felt like they had created something in a way it wasn’t where they just added water. One of the experiments he did was he had people create these origami by following directions… of paper cranes and he asked them to evaluate how much they thought their creations were worth and then he swapped them and he asked them to evaluate someone else’s creation and people valued their own at roughly twice as high as the others across the board, and then he changed it in another iteration of this and he took some of the directions out… so it was really hard to replicate and objectively, when people evaluated the other people’s that time they rated the value of them much lower in terms of how much they were willing to pay, but because they put more work into building these things themselves, they rated their own creations much higher, and the simple act of creating something gives you this feeling of ownership and value that I think would be a useful part of this in terms of getting students much more engaged with the process and more engaged with their own learning.

Robin: Yeah, so I would say two things about that super fascinating set of stories that I’m totally going to use all the time, maybe tomorrow, when I speak with your faculty. So the first is that we run a customized major program where students create their own majors and the cake mix effect is enormous in our program; we have almost a hundred percent retention in our program, which I think is so very much attached to this idea that if you create it yourself that sense of ownership is huge. So, the one way I would revise your stories is the Duncan Hines model is kind of a slight of hand, right, you know, we could of just put the egg in there, and so that’s the part that I’m always wrestling with is this no hoops and mean it, so it’s actually kind of a big leap because in education we’ve known for a long time that we want to build student ownership, but we do a lot of tricks to kind of say, doesn’t this look like ownership, so how do we authentically do that instead of just sort of fake removing the egg and that’s where I think you see a lot of institutions push back—they are happy to make their students feel empowered, but they are not happy to empower their students.

John: That’s scary.

Robin: Yeah, it’s very scary and we talked about student-centered learning; when I started doing student-centered learning I was like, “Chumps, you are not doing no student-centered learning because once you center your students the whole course changes, falls apart a little bit.” It’s also the magic of tenure; it’s very risky to do a lot of the things that I’ve been blessed enough to be able to experiment with it, which have paid off, I think, hugely for our students, but there’s a lot of pushback sometimes from students and oftentimes just from institutional structures that can’t really accommodate learning that looks like this very easily, so that egg is kind of the whole thing there, right, and I love your metaphors; I’m gonna borrow them.

Rebecca: When you want to be authentic that also means that you have to be ready to completely change any plans; it’s like, oh, now we’re going down this rabbit hole that I didn’t know we were gonna go down, but I guess we’re going there and we’re all gonna go together and be open to that.

Robin: Some people are like wired for that, like my husband is a sculptor and that’s kind of the studio ethos, but so not how I came to teaching. I mean, I didn’t have my lectures written out but just super organized and when I would come to an epiphany it was always an epiphany that I had planned for many weeks… I think, “Oh my gosh, this reminds me of this thing, can you believe it?” And of course I knew all along that we were gonna be arriving at that epiphany, so when students would move in a different direction, even if I could tell at the time it was brilliant, you would have to pull them back to the place that you were going, but I have definitely changed my mode of operation because the content, really whatever you teach, it doesn’t exist in the world in 14-week packages, so the idea that you can’t do such-and-such because you’re going to miss this key fundamental thing is just bizarre when you think of the scope of knowledge, so I understand people wrestle with accreditation and we wrestle with standards and all these things are realities. But, for the most part, I think really radically meaning a lot of those buzzwords that we use is revolutionary. If you read your mission statement for your university and then you actually do some of that stuff, it’s gonna be crazy; nobody’s actually doing the things they say that they do, in my opinion.

Rebecca: A couple of weeks ago we had an episode about metaliteracy, which expands the idea of information literacy to include the idea of creation, so the idea of becoming more literate in the making of things as part of that information literacy process, which is clearly very connected to the idea of being open, especially when your students are creating this content and creating knowledge. The question that I have is one that I’m wrestling with currently as an educator who’s really about access as well, but I’ve been focusing a lot on access for people with disabilities in thinking about accessibility in that way, digital accessibility and learning those skill sets and where those come in and how do we make sure that things are visually organized and consistent so that an experience through these things that students are making is a good one for everyone who comes afterwards as well?

Robin: I am so happy that you asked that question because this has been my last three weeks; I have barely slept because I’ve started getting so excited. So, for probably the last year or so my own personal challenge has been to think about accessibility in terms of making our materials more accessible, so I’ve been learning about how screen readers actually work in order to fix my own syllabus to redo a lot of annoying things because I didn’t realize you had to use the headings to make things easier. So, I’ve just been learning that basic stuff and that’s been just a long, slow and interesting process. One of the last things that I really hadn’t learned about at all or hadn’t even really thought about was in giving presentations, which I give a lot, I had to think about slides… and so at Open Ed ‘18 in Niagara Falls… I wasn’t there, which is actually an important part of the story because one of the keynoters was Jess Mitchell, who is kind of a mentor of mine in terms of accessibility stuff—she’d be a great guest—and Jess gave a really moving and powerful keynote focusing mostly on inclusion in open and she is very much an accessibility advocate and what was amazing to me as someone who was not there and didn’t see a recording was when I looked at her slides afterwards I was able to experience really the whole keynote because they were designed to be accessible to folks who were in the room, text was organized in a certain ways and things were very clear and I came away really grateful for how she had set up these slides, which was interesting because they were really different than the kinds of slides I make. I had always prided myself on like “Robin made some fancy slides,” you know, they’re like just pretty and like visual impact and bold images, but because they were, I think, graphically designed in a lovely way, I mistakenly thought that that meant that they were actually accessible because they were clear in certain kinds of ways, but they weren’t, they weren’t set up well, so what happened was when I learned and saw in action some of the techniques that she was using, I started to look at this keynote that I was giving the other day—I had like two days left—and now the keynote was ready to go, all the slides were made; I looked at the slides and I was like, oh, crap, you know, no… So, I thought I’ll just redo these slides real quick, but what I ended up doing was really learning about the accessibility changed everything about how I approached the making, which actually ended up changing all of the ideas in the keynote in this dramatically productive way. So accessibility for me, of course, is not really just about like, oh, you have low vision or whatever; it’s very much part of this access broadly-writ idea… that openness… But beyond that because it’s built into how we build; it’s really about how we’re gonna design infrastructure and that is actually my passion right now; it’s less about making these materials—okay, so great, here’s an accessible material, great, they should be—but beyond that it’s about let’s just design an ecosystem now with access at the heart. So, in terms of accessibility, none of that sort of retrofitting one-by-one whatever, but also just what would happen with everything if access for the broadest array of learners was key. I was recently in Providence, Rhode Island at College Unbound, which is just a very cool program for adult learners completing college—they have to have least nine credits to start—but many of them have many more… and there are mostly students of color, mostly poorer students and mostly, I’d say, they seem like over 30 in age and they start their seminars with a hot meal and then after the hot meal they go into their different cohorted seminar rooms and tons of those students have their kids with them and the kids are just a normal part of the learning environment there and the whole place is designed around what kinds of access people needed, what times of day and what services in order to come here to learn and I just feel like everything about the content that we’ll produce and the ways we’ll set up schools and just everything will change if that’s how we build—we build around what I might call human beings, right, which is like the most innovative idea of all, right, it was not technology, it was humans.

John: Audience matters, as Rebecca is fond of mentioning on this podcast.

Rebecca: I almost did it earlier but I…

John: Well, I did it for you this time.

Rebecca: …I contained myself. [LAUGHTER]

John: But, It is important.

Robin: And it’s exciting, I mean, honestly, it’s just exciting because you do realize when you start thinking this way that it is again gonna change everything, right, you’re not just gonna put a caption on your video, it’s gonna be like every single thing is gonna change and that’s why it’s also important to say like, “Here’s how I still suck,” because you can’t just decide to do this and then be done. I’m just learning every single day, I’m messing up every single day and I think it’s better to kind of own that and think of it as a process, which is really invigorating.

Rebecca: To speaking about the process, how would someone get started? What advice would you give someone who is inspired to be more open in their process and the way that they teach and what they put out in the world? What’s the first step?

Robin: Well, the first thing I might encourage people to think about is what excites or interests you here? I think starting with a thing is not really the way to start. So, for example, a lot of times people will come down into our teaching and learning center (where my office is co-located—in the teaching and learning center). So, people will come down—“I need to start a blog with my students”—“Oh, okay, we can help you with that, why do you want to do a blog? “I don’t know; everybody’s blogging.” “Okay, we got to blog.” You really don’t have to blog; you could blog, we could help you, but I think having a sense of the goal: do you want to connect your students out to their communities? Do you feel like that would be valuable for your students? Would you like to lower some access barriers for your students? For me, there’s a lot of excitement that happens when I think about the hardships that we face in public education and trying to make a case for working in more public ways and what public work looks like, so I tried to start with what might excite faculty. So, you can do that on a one-on-one level or when I talk to large groups of faculty I usually start by helping them understand some of the implications of the high cost of textbooks, so if you just say to a faculty member, “That textbook costs a lot,” it’s too abstract. Usually they’ll just say, okay, this was 200 dollars and this one is $180; I’ve picked the 180 dollar textbook, I’m a good person… and they are… but showing them some of the data on what happens to students who can’t afford textbooks, and we have that data collected now and you can reach out to your librarians to access that data really quickly, talking about that with faculty and helping them see this as a social justice issue that impacts whether their students will pass classes, take credits, graduate from college, that I have found is persuasive, but then also talking about engaging their students in the world, really helping them to contribute rather than just consume, become better critical thinkers, all of those things are persuasive. Saying faculty don’t care about cost… I think first of all is not super true, but it’s also like we’re told all the time as faculty, cut costs. Cutting costs does not do wonderful things for learning most of the time. The things we’re asked to cut, especially in our public institutions right now. The age of austerity is decimating to innovation, in my opinion.

John: And the cost of textbooks has been rising at three to four times the rate of inflation for the last several decades?

Robin: Yeah, If you graph it out, I think the thing that I found most shocking was there’s the Consumer Price Index, you know, down below and then there’s the spiky line of the textbook cost and then if you map healthcare—it’s actually in between—it hasn’t been rising as fast as textbook costs, so I think people sometimes find that alarming.

John: Shocking, because that was also rising much faster than the inflation rate.

Robin: Exactly.

John: Going back to the issue of access, the students who have the most trouble affording textbooks often come from households where the parents have less education. Because there’s less early human capital development in those households, those students are already often starting at a bit of a disadvantage and many of them will choose either not to buy the book or wait as long as they can before buying the book. So, they’re far behind when they’re starting their classes and that would be a major factor in their retention on campus.

Robin: Yeah, actually some of this data that you’re talking about comes from the Florida Textbook Study in 2016, which is very persuasive for faculty, I think, but there’s some really new data—Eddie Watson out of Georgia, I believe, that just came out that shows that the benefits of switching to OER in terms of things like course throughput rates, grades and passing and…

John: the drop, fail, withdrawal rate, yeah.

Robin: …that the benefits are especially pronounced for students of color and for Pell eligible students. Some of our most vulnerable learners stand to make the biggest gains when they have access right from day one, and faculty recognize this when you talk to them about it because they are very used to having the small number of students in this side of the room saying, “My check isn’t in yet; I need to wait two weeks until I get paid,” or “I ordered a cheaper version that’s gonna be here in six to eight weeks” or whatever, so nobody’s surprised by it, but to realize that you are actually empowered to solve a problem in higher education is surprising to people and OER actually solves a pretty concrete problem and pretty quickly and the data shows us it solves it pretty well.

Rebecca: So what you’re saying is that OER is the gateway to open pedagogy?

Robin: Well, it’s so funny… [LAUGHTER] I have actually become maybe more famous in the community for saying the opposite because that is actually the party line: catch them with the OER and then show them the pedagogy, but as you’ll see in the faculty development talk that I’ll do here at SUNY Oswego tomorrow, I do that a little bit but definitely I think people are kinda like, “Okay, I’m in, yeah, sure,” and then you start talking about the teaching and learning and that’s when people really kind of come alive and then they shrink back again because they say, “Well, that’s you, because you’re techie and you’ve been doing this forever” because it looks overwhelming and I just want to tell them, first of all, I’m an early Americanist; there is nobody less oriented to this work than I was when I started, but I only heard about Creative Commons maybe like four years ago, like that was the first time I heard of it and now every single thing I do is related to this stuff. The learning curve is overwhelming at the very, very beginning, but the tools that you use and the ability to make these kinds of changes, especially if you do them incrementally. It is really within anybody’s ability and people should trust me when I say that because my husband is a sculptor—he’s a studio sculptor, teaches welding and that kind of stuff and he’s doing all of this now. So, he does OER, but he’s also doing lots of connected learning and his students have their own domains and he is somebody who for the most part does not really even enjoy email, so anybody can engage and I think we need good librarians and good instructional designers and we need to keep funding teaching and learning centers because paying big money to fancy software programs and outside contractors, these are sort of Hail Mary passes to save education. But, in my opinion, teaching and learning and instruction shows real benefits, but we don’t invest in it and we therefore can’t expect to get the full rewards that we could get if we were really focused on working with our faculty.

John: And a lot of the really powerful tools used in these courses are free, like Hypothesis, as you mentioned before. Do you recommend, for example, the use of Pressbooks for OER materials?

Robin: Yes, I’ve been very inspired by the Critical Digital Pedagogy folks out of Hybrid Ped and one of the things they talk about is analyzing your tools and I’ve been really trying, along with my work in accessibility—the other kind of learning curve for me right now has been trying to go through my own tools and gravitate towards not just free but open tools and that’s challenging in some ways; in other ways we’re all ready to go. I favor nonprofit companies like Hypothesis and Pressbooks is Open-source software; I use it through Rebus Community, which is a non-profit OER publishing community that’s developing now under the direction of Hugh McGuire, who was previously with Pressbooks and developed Pressbooks. So, I think the tools should not stress anybody out because the tools will be different next week, right? So, it’s not worth getting too worried if you’re like, this tool it makes no sense, okay, well wait till next week; they’ll be another tool, but it’s good to ask critical questions about if we’re really trying to not just save some cash but to maybe transform into more of a learning ecosystem that focuses on the public good, then we need to build infrastructure that has similar commitments to the kinds of content we might look at or the kinds of processes we might use in our pedagogy. That’s my goal now, is to transfer whatever I’m using into tools that have the same sort of investments that I do.

Rebecca: Speaking of infrastructure… We have infrastructure for students in teaching and learning the classroom kind of side of things, but we also need infrastructure to support faculty who want to be open and do open publishing and do this public good or public discourse methods in general. So what recommendations do you have for helping us move in that direction for public scholarship?

Robin: Yeah, but there’s a lot of myth-busting that needs to happen around open access publishing. Mostly faculty do have some pretty good autonomy, so the promotion and tenure processes that faculty will tell you, “I can’t publish in this journal because it doesn’t meet the impact factor regulations for my field.” Well, those are mostly coming from, like that old joke, “It’s coming from inside the house,” right? Really what this is is about faculty education to help faculty understand that it’s not in the best interest of faculty or knowledge to have the commercial publishing industry stranglehold on academic publishing, but of course faculty are concerned that there are quality issues, they think open access publishing sometimes is like, “I self-published this on Amazon” or whatever, so helping them understand that there are definitely low quality, predatory open access presses just like there are low quality, predatory commercial presses and helping people understand that what you’re really talking about is not whether it’s open or closed but what’s the peer review and what are you looking for in peer review. I think we’re seeing lots of institutions move towards open access policies that give faculty lots of autonomy in how they control their materials, but we need to do a better job educating ourselves about what’s wrong and broken in academic publishing right now.

John: SUNY has just introduced an open-access policy for the whole SUNY system very recently, and (at least at our institution) the upper administration, including the President, the Provost, and the Deans, have generally been very supportive, but it doesn’t always make it down to the departmental chairs and personnel committees and that’s a barrier that, as you said, we’re imposing on ourselves and it’s tough to get through, especially if you’re a junior faculty member coming up for tenure.

Robin: That’s right, and usually I tell administrators that I work with, it’s great that you’re supportive; please don’t tell anyone, you know, because we don’t want these to be top-down initiatives, they have to grow from the faculty and I don’t mean that again in the kind of Duncan Hines egg sense—like a fake way; it’s important that faculty steward the new era of academic publishing—that matters; that should not come from administration, should not come from state legislators. The state legislators are only too excited really to say, everyone must use OER. I went to our board of trustees and they were really happy to give us money for open and they said, we’re gonna pass a resolution that everybody needs to consider an open textbook—I said, thank you, I don’t want your resolution; I’m very grateful… Because it really is important that we do the education at the source which really is for the most part with faculty and actually with students, I think, is where it matters and we’ll grow it that way and the reason I have hope is that I’ve never talked with anyone for any length of time and had them say at the end, well that’s horrible and stupid. There’s lots of nitty-gritty problems to iron out and the open access community does not yet know exactly what the best path is for funding open access presses or all sorts of issues, but it’s very hard to find someone to say to you what you’re saying is horrible, so I think that we will see huge transformation in both OER and open access publishing in the next five to ten years, but we need to grow it with our people.

John: And some of the STEM fields have led the way there; the National Institute of Health and all their grants require

Robin: NASA, the White House….

John: …that things be publicly available and in public access.

Robin: Yeah, and of course those publishing models are a little bit different because there’s so much grant funding in science and the public has a right and that might be a little bit different than, say, a monograph by a historian. When we talk about open we always want to talk contextually, I think, and specifically about what makes sense for, I think, two groups: the public and the knowledge—thinking about both knowledge and users for every different example.

John: Where do you see open pedagogy as going in the future? It’s a relatively recent area and you’ve been very actively involved in this, but where do you see things going in terms of new and interesting directions?

Robin: I cannot answer that question because it boggles my mind… the question you’ve asked and I don’t think I can answer it and it wouldn’t help me to go away and think about it. I think what I could answer is where I hope things are going, and I feel very strongly that there needs to be a robust connection between open education and public education, and I feel like we are in a very dark time where our public education channels are being insidiously co-opted for private profits, and even in some of our public institutions you’re seeing the language of public just dissolve, so we’re seeing college presidents saying, “Yeah, that’s over, that era is over; we’re not going to get any more public dollars; it’s dried up; we need to get corporate money, we need to do partnerships, we’re gonna fund ourselves in these new private ways.” I think this is our chance to intercede in what I see is a very downward trend and I think open education has some really incredible possibilities for helping us articulate what public practice looks like and if we can articulate what public practice looks like, the fact of the matter is, and I do not think this is an argument, I think it’s a fact;—it’s true—I really think it’s true that it is in the public’s benefit for the public to fund the kinds of public work that we’re talking about here for both students and researchers and if we could help explain why by being a little more coherent for ourselves with what it means to work in and at public education and research, I think we’d have a better chance at making that case for the public. So that’s where I’m hoping to take all of this is to say really what we’re talking about here is a resurgence for public education at the K-12 level, resistance to the charter takeover and higher ed to say it’s time to reclaim a public mission for our public universities and fund them appropriately and realize that innovation comes from people and not from private, gated… Right now, the idea is that all things innovative thrive in the market and I think that’s because we’ve been intentionally starving and strangling our publics. Wow, that was like really radical.

Rebecca: That was good, yeah.

John: And it’s an important message.

Robin: I think it’s coherent and I think it’s persuasive; I feel people come alive when I talk about it, but we need also some national leadership on this both from inside education and inside government and I don’t just mean nationally,—the United States is in a squalid mess right now, which it is—but just even in the Obama years and whatever like who are our champions for public, where is that coming from? I’d like to see more mentors and like to see our college presidents use this kind of language—if you’d like to hire me to be your college president… [LAUGHTER] Call me. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Maybe that’s a “what’s next.” [LAUGHTER]

John: So, we usually end these podcasts by asking, what are you doing next?

Robin: Tomorrow, I will be here at SUNY Oswego. You know, the question of next is a really hard one; My own personal life has been changed so radically by this. I never saw myself leaving the English department, I never saw myself having a whole in some ways second career. I used to be asked to be department chair because it was your turn, not because I was anything special, and I would go under the table, you can’t make me do it. I declined everything. I really think, though, people with a grassroots passion for doing this work need support at higher levels in higher education. In terms of me personally, I started thinking about trying to step into some of those roles and I can’t say I feel sort of super personally excited about some of the aspects of that work, but I know that even though I see this as a grassroots movement,—and I do use that word—it’s really hard to change institutions, and in order to do it we’re gonna need to get people at every level to care about these kinds of things and so I’m inspired by people like Tressie McMillan Cottom and Sara Goldrick-Rab and they’re faculty, but they step out to set a national example, and I’d like to maybe think about trying to move this stuff a little bit more institutionally, as opposed to just inside of programs or with particular faculty development events. I’d like to see some institutions really step out and lead. SUNY is doing a great job. You guys have about 48 of your 64 institutions, I think, actively engaged and you are careening towards some system-wide impacts, partnerships with CUNY, statewide conversations; this is where I think things really get exciting to me.

John: The community college and SUNY have really been leading and they’ve been very active in doing this. The four-year colleges have been moving, but not quite as quickly and the university centers have a bit more inertia. So, SUNY has been making some really great efforts in providing incentives and doing a lot of encouragement and the workshops they’ve been funding have helped to try to get more grassroots movement, but it’s not as quick as many of us would like, but it’s much faster than it was a few years ago.

Rebecca: Incremental change is still change?

John: It is.

Robin: It absolutely is. Someone was telling me… Is this an economics thing about the parable of the ant, that ants are going up a hill? Okay, somebody on Twitter, you just sent me this,—I’m losing my brain now—but anyway, an ant is going up a hill and when because of the position of the ants eyes they can’t assess the whole hill, so all they do is at every point they could assess, I want to get to the top of the hill, and all they can assess is, okay, this is the next step that I take, so then the ant gets to the next step and it assesses again and that’s the kind of way incrementally the ant will get up. In that sense the ant doesn’t really even have to know where it’s going; it is just able to constantly resurvey and take one more step and I found that really reassuring when someone sent that over to me today. That’s kind of a metaphor for how you can keep going when you don’t always know exactly where you’re going, and also to your other point, community colleges are clearly the national leaders in this work and I find that really good for education because community colleges are actually really good at teaching and learning and it’s important to look at what they’re doing with open to learn our lessons, but also we can just learn a lot from partnering with our community colleges more effectively.

John: And they’re often the first point of access for first-generation students who may find it difficult to go directly into a four-year college, and they have many of the students who most need that sort of access.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for spending time with us and engaging us in this really great conversation; I hope that incremental change becomes much bigger increments as we hear more people and more people get on board.

John: And if you get one person in department doing it, it’s a whole lot easier to convince others to try.

Robin: There’s no secret trick or no secret sauce, it’s just people, so every time somebody as a human gets invested you actually get a lot closer to where you’re going, I think. It’s exciting, it’s exciting, and thank you guys for having me because this like fancy stuff and I feel very listened to and I’m gonna put all sorts of pictures on Twitter of myself in front of these microphones. [LAUGHTER]

John: Okay, well thank you.

Rebecca: Yeah, thank you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast please subscribe and leave review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing assistance provided by Kim Fischer, Brittany Jones, Gabriella Perez, Joseph Santarelli-Hansen, and Dante Perez.

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56. Love’s labor not lost

Who knows and understands the needs of your students better than your own students? In this episode, Mya Brown, an Assistant Professor of Theatre at SUNY-Oswego, joins us to discuss how our students can build open educational resources that take advantage of the unique insights our students have about what novices need to learn to be successful in our courses and disciplines.