This years’ Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences conference was held online while hosted by the University of Alberta. This was the inaugural year for the new Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association (OTESSA) association, with a focus on innovation, research, and practice in areas where either technology or openness intersect with education, research, and, more broadly, within society. Since the conference was not held last year, I had a couple presentations held over, plus some additional new work, which resulted in five presentations! More than I might have liked, but all went well as so many of them were in collaboration with colleagues.
As I reflect back upon the conference, I realize this is likely the most time I have spent consecutively in Zoom yet. As well, it was likely the nicest week of weather in Victoria yet this year. However, the time was worthwhile as the program was full and very rich with interesting sessions. I really want to congratulate the organizing team for pulling together and executing such a lovely conference. I hope to see many of you in person soon 🙂
Developing an “Untextbook” to address open and critical learning design practice
Michelle Harrison, Michael Paskevicius, Irwin Devries, & Tannis Morgan
In this 50-minute presentation we will describe and invite discussion on an ongoing research project intended to develop a framework for the development of a community-sourced open textbook/reader on critical instructional design. This line of inquiry inevitably led to the questions of the role of the textbook itself in open and critical practices, the role of instructional design in light of more open practices, and the evolution of the learning design field of practice. These strands of research were combined in a design-based research (DBR) methodology (Pool & Laubscher, 2012; McKenney & Reeves, 2012) to iteratively develop the framework as well as concepts on the design and the development of the textbook/reader, to which we applied the term “untextbook”. As part of the DBR process,collaborative sessions with various formats were facilitated at OER19 in Galway, Ireland, Cascadia in Vancouver, BC and ETUG, in Kamloops BC where participants were challenged to be creative about the idea of the “untextbook” as conceptualized with its use in open pedagogy (Cronin, 2017). At this session we will present our analysis of what we have learned to date, and invite discussion on our research as well as planned future directions.
Evolving Access to Educational Materials
Michael Paskevicius
The purpose of this presentation is to interrogate how the selection of emerging types of educational resources impact learners’ educational experiences. In the presentation I will review the existing literature on emerging problems and barriers to learners’ access to educational materials, including textbooks and open educational resources. The findings from the literature review confirm that learners are now engaging with an increasingly complex ecosystem of educational materials, both print and digital, in a multitude of differing forms and formats, with various terms of use and durations of sustained access (Author, 2019). Educators have a variety of choices to make when considering the learning materials to be used in their courses, and while fitness for purpose still dominates as the most important selection criterion, ease and persistence of access are becoming important considerations. I will share a model which encapsulates the findings considering the variety educational materials and some of the specific considerations for each. This model will be used for a think-pair-share discussion with audience members, which will inform future iterations of the model.
Deconstructing Open: Meaning and Bias in Pedagogy, Modality, and Access
Valerie Irvine & Michael Paskevicius
Over the past few decades, the meaning of open has shifted from access to more recently including pedagogy and modality. In this session, we will facilitate conversation around the meaning of open as we discuss terms including open education, open educational practices, OER-enabled pedagogy, and open pedagogy. We will concentrate our discussion around three components – pedagogy, modality, and access – with an attempt to focus on the meaning of open as applied to each component. During this activity, we will examine our assumptions or biases. One example we will explore is the xMOOC, which has been described as a didactic approach with recorded lectures, readings, and quizzes. How do we deconstruct this type of open course in terms of pedagogy, modality, and access? Is it open pedagogy if it is open access but didactic in approach? We will utilize editable documents to facilitate this 50-minute activity. Please bring your ideas, definitions, examples, resources, and perspectives!
Investigating Student Engagement with Open Educational Practices: The Results from an Exploratory Survey
Michael Paskevicius & Valerie Irvine
The proliferation of open online teaching and learning resources including educational content, multimedia, shared learning designs, software, and learning activities provide both a challenge and an opportunity for educators and learners. The challenge for faculty, students, and independent learners is in navigating this new landscape of abundance, dealing with new formats and representations of knowledge, and combining appropriate resources for use in teaching and learning. This abundance creates a complex environment for individuals who are both designing and accessing education as they require an emergent set of open and networked literacies. Further, digital literacies are required to access and recognize components of the open web and, in doing so, further contribute to knowledge in technically appropriate and legal ways. The goal of this study was to understand how learners are integrating digital literacies in relation to open access resources, open copyright models, networked learning environments, and open educational resources for their academic and creative works. This presentation focuses on the early results of the study, which include a survey conducted with teacher candidates. The findings from this study will offer insights into potential curriculum gaps related to the development of digital literacies in the context of open education.
Impact of Open Learning Design Shifts to Support a Federation of Learning Journeys
Valerie Irvine & Michael Paskevicius
For this session, we discuss the learning design of a core undergraduate educational technology course in a teacher education program that uses an open education model of course blog with aggregated feeds of learner-owned blogs. We will describe the methods to facilitate communication and scaffolding. As we are still developing iterations to the course design, we will share lessons learned and successes achieved as it pertains to best practices for the open education design. Because this is a multi-sectioned course, we describe emerging issues of shared ownership, attribution, and collaboration.
This session will be of interest to researchers, course designers, program administrators interested in teacher education, open education, network literacy, technology adoption, portfolio- and competency-based assessment, and shifts to inquiry-based learning. We will present information about the technical design, learning design, and assessment. Since the course activities are in the open, we will showcase the course site and approach.