Tag Archives: OER

Other AAC&U Group, Syndicated

I am Open (and so can you!)

The book cover for Stephen Colbert's book I am America and so Can YouFor the next few weeks, I will be taking a history course, something I thought I would never do again after I finished my dissertation. Shawn Graham is teaching an online digital history course at Carleton University and has opened it up for non-matriculating students.

The entire design of the course is fantastic for open learners. Rather than just allowing us to watch from the rafters, Shawn has set up a Slack team and is active in the channels. Shawn asks that students blog for the course and use github to keep a record of their progress in the coding exercises. The course readings are all openly accessible and Shawn has asked that the students use Hypothes.is so that their reading notes are open (you can find them in the Hypothes.is stream with the tag hist3814o).

For the first week, Shawn has assigned a set of readings on the concept of open notes research within history and the humanities more broadly. Open notes research is more commonly practiced in the sciences. Jean Claude-Bradley was advocating for the concept in chemistry as early as 2006. Open notes science improves reproducibility and verifiability of results, and it also opens up the vast array of information that is gained during research but never published.

Open notes research has been slow to catch on, and it doesn’t take long to brainstorm possible objections. Publications are the coin of the realm in academia, and sharing your research notes could possibly allow someone to scoop your ideas. However, I agree with the readings that Shawn has curated and his push during this week of the course that open notes research is the best practice. Clearly, as I am writing this blog, I feel that sharing my thought processes helps me to clarify my thoughts and develop my understanding of my research. Sharing our reading notes with Hypothes.is and collecting our code in GitHub take this a step further. We’re thinking, reading, and experimenting (coding) out loud.

I am taking Shawn’s course, because I want to see how he uses Slack, and because I think the course design is fantastic. I’m already a convert for open notes research and have blogged about it repeatedly here, here, here and in many other posts. This site as a whole is an argument for open notes research and the related ideas of getting rid of disposable assignments and empowering students to contribute to a broader knowledge community. However, I did enjoy the week’s readings, especially Caleb McDaniel’s post that turned me on to open notes research a few years ago. I look forward to joining in for the exercises next week (this week everyone was learning MarkDown and Git). Most of all, I want to encourage any readers in the ed tech world who have not taken a digital history or digital humanities course to at least poke around Shawn’s course to see the wonderful overlap between that knowledge domain and the current ed tech focus on digital literacy and citizenship.

Open Participants, Syndicated

well lit rabbit holes

Noon I ducked down to our local “Maker Space,” which has open hours ’til 1:00.   I’ve been going there for years whenever something’s weird with whatever version of my dynamo hub light I’m trying to get rolling.

Long story short:   the person who knows how to take gadgets apart & put ’em together was coming for the 1:00 thing, which seems to be an open Python and things like that session.   Facilitator is a person who teaches Python to people in Information Science grad students who are “non-STEM,” and, she says, often phobic about math as soon as it turns into “x=” something so she has found other ways.   It was interesting to hear conversations among people in the University community.

It also took ’til 4:00 to figure it all out and get it back together and get it charged and… now I have to find the right thingy to put it on the bike, and no I didn’t so much as *touch* the tech project.

This a.m. I discover a tweet talking about David Wiley of Lumen Learning’s latest blog which talks about people using “open” in ways that aren’t open enough…we need those 5Rs…  oh, and the comments are closed. Nothing ironic there, is there?  The comments and tweets on blogs about that blog make me realize again what a tight-knit group these guys are (lots of insider references).  (My opinion:  if you’re going to want a certain definition for a term, then don’t give the term a name like “open.”   Hello?   It already has a ton of meanings and interpretations. Name it after somebody, maybe… )

It’s time to do some courage-seeking …

 

 

Open Participants, Syndicated

Podcasts R Us

https://www.insidehighered.com/audio/2017/03/22/pulse-app-algebra  is 24 minutes about a guy and an algebra app that he says is the first on the planet like it — you get to drag and drop things to solve algebra equations.  (Start at 18:30 and you can be spared the l-a-b-o-r-i-o-u-s background… )    I share his mystification about the underuse of the media (like me, he thinks Khan Academy is a dronefest) but … actually, doesn’t the “Dragon” algebra software pretty much do that?

I also share his appreciation for the visual-kinesthetic fluency aspect of algebra, and his disdain for teaching students the whole “add 3 to both sides of the equation” — and then stopping there, when they’re doing everything by hand, one step at a time.   I do wonder how much understanding gets lost if people just jump to “move it over and change the sign” too quickly — but it’s a wonder, not an assumption.   Could be that it really does cut the cognitive load without cutting the understanding… or it could be that it turns into a process like changing a mixed number into an improper fraction — motor memory, but often without a *clue* as to what the numbers mean.  I wonder if it helps with understanding the importance of that equals sign thing…

Wonder if he’s ever stumbled on the OER community and the idea that sharing the code, etc. could mean better things could evolve…

Time to get out of rabbit holes and back to Camtasia.

Open Participants, Syndicated

Professional Development Day!

Wherein I have watched the “Open Pedagogy” webinar from OpenOregon.org, wherein the participants discuss having students *create* “open” content in courses.   (First off is the caveat that no! this isn’t appropriate for everything! and there’s much discussion of the need for careful planning and leaving room for privacy and diverse student needs.)

I’d love to hear some Universal Design for Learning people get in on that conversation.   Imagine applying Universal Design for Learning guidelines to these assignments.  Imagine planning to reach the “Learners in the Margins” from the get-go.

Meeting to brainstorm about using quizzes and visuals to make our course adaptive.   Be still my heart – no, don’t 🙂   We’ll start with the ones we have… then embellish using multimedia.

 

Open Participants, Syndicated

Online courses

So!   IN between applying for a job to help enhance and create math courses… I’m trying to … build a math course!   For our folks who need to prep for the test … or already took the test and need to learn stuff…

We’ve got Modumath, but its online presence is — well, it’s *not* open, but it would be typical of an open effort.   Really great videos have been uploaded and you can go through the videos and answer questions as they play and get instant feedback.

There’s a printable PDF that has the same information in text form, and a self-test with answers.

There’s no adaptability at all.   There isn’t even individual … anything.   All users from a single license go to the same pages.

So!   Our job is to make this more individual.   THe tutorial videos are outstanding, albeit low-tech.   Our plan is to put the videos into modules, and then add our own quizzes.   Here’s where we can be … ADAPTABLE!   and USE BADGES 🙂   And … if it’s to prepare for a test that’s proctored ^3   then … cheating will, as my teachers always said, “only cheat yourself.”  (And there would be stuff for getting you motivated like you find here from MIT about getting you to write a little about your values before you do the stuff).

We can have a plain old “did you get it?” quiz… and then a Thing To Do If You Didn’t Get It that you have to do to take it again, and then … you don’t move on until you pass (though there Always Needs To Be An Alternative because sometimes you do need to move on).

… then, when we’ve built enough things around it, we can make our own modern videos and not have to have a subscription to another product.

Of course, if I do it here, it might be a challenge to make it open… but if I can stay a step ahead on my own — gee, I just *happen* to know about this OER video that will fit, because I already made it! — then…

… so tomorrow in the early hour the plan is to learn what the ‘grunt work’ part is, where we plop the video into the module… happily that’s the kind of task that I can do around working w/ students, unlike programming, which reading up on Lumen Learning made me recognize the potential value of learning.

I did a pretty good job with that Java stuff with the basics, and honestly I think the basics could work for making adaptable activities.   I did the silly integer app , right?   What if I really, honestly *had* focused hours each day for it?   LOL I’d probably get past 60 on my StackOverflow rep!!!   (I’m over 1100 on Canvas..)   I can dream, can’t I?

Open Participants, Syndicated

A Tentative Toe Dip: #OpenLearning17

I just found out about #OpenLearning17: A Connectivist MOOC for Faculty Collaboratives. Since I’m already on a quest to learn more about open education as I revise one of my primary courses, I figured I’d give it a whirl. To be quite honest, I have no idea what a faculty collaborative is :). It sounds […]

The post A Tentative Toe Dip: #OpenLearning17 appeared first on Camille Freeman.

Open Participants, Syndicated

A Tentative Toe Dip: #OpenLearning17

I just found out about #OpenLearning17: A Connectivist MOOC for Faculty Collaboratives. Since I’m already on a quest to learn more about open education as I revise one of my primary courses, I figured I’d give it a whirl. To be quite honest, I have no idea what a faculty collaborative is :). It sounds […]

The post A Tentative Toe Dip: #OpenLearning17 appeared first on Camille Freeman.

Open Participants, Syndicated

OER and equity

or, too verbose for Twitter R Us.

So I read on twitter that “Open educational resources () and open source software are the single best way to ensure for all students.”

Ensure?

Let’s talk about ‘equity’ and the adult ed folks in need of basic literacy and numeracy.

Ensure?

OER are starting to serve some people well.   IT’s an awesome adventure.

However, when I talk about adult ed and literacy and numeracy, I’m referred to OpenStax and OpenEd and… no, those materials are not designed for these folks.   The designers for learning MOOC is a single example of a real effort to get OER  materials designed and delivered to adult ed providers who need it, but it only chips at a few ice flakes on part of the iceberg.

 

I’ve been encouraged to give the #openlearning cMOOC a chance because it might not be as dry as I fear… but then I read statements like that.

It’s analogous to having an amazing library that’s “open to everybody” — well, except it’s in the nicest part of town, with no infrastructure for access and — erm, you don’t even want to be walking down that street if you don’t look like you live there and don’t know the hidden social rules. (And of course you have to have time to get there between shifts, and…)  Still, it’s OPEN!!!

It is open.  IT’s wonderful.   However, it isn’t equity. (Sorry, that’s my mathiness showing.)  And y’all wonder why only folks with graduate educations do MOOCs.

WHen I ask about adult ed and equity, and the answers are all about LTI and sharing protocols — again, I need time and training to even know what that means.   And frankly, based on my experience w/ Canvas…  knowing what they mean doesn’t help.  They’re utterly inadequate.     Getting units after an amount is asking too much. Logging in? THat’s our first weedout of the unworthy.  (The first of *many.* )

Only Canvas is the venue that *is* more open.   MOst “open” stuff that I learned about at the OER conference?  Oh, it’s open … to … faculty.   To major efforts at institutions. Oops.   Equity.  Right.

THen there’s UDL, and all the preaching that it’s best not to apply it retroactively.   This is a golden opportunity, people…. if you really mean that stuff about equity.   LEt’s do!

(And sigh, I did go back and do a note to self on Canvas.  YEs, I was told that ‘don’t assume people who insult and belittle you mean to be negative!’   and I do understand that that’s the culture… but I also know that nobody’s going to so much as notice whether I lurk or not… it’s so much like cycling communities, where people will drop you in a heartbeat and then wonder why no beginners ever go on the rides… they don’t *mean* to put you down but you’re such a Fred!)

Open Participants, Syndicated

What does “Open” Mean?

I’ve been intrigued by the idea of open educational resources for a while now. Since I’ll likely be switching to an open-access textbook as part of this process, I’d like to learn more about the open educational movement in general. I’ve enrolled in the Becoming an Open Educator course created by Open Educational Practices in […]

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