Pickin’ out the highlights of the scenery. Some some little clouds they looked a… little … like… me.

Gord Downie, New Orleans is Sinking

So I’ve been just sitting here working away on an eCampusOntario funded project, with a multi-institutional team of people whom I like to refer to as radical pedagogues, and an unexpected treat has revealed itself. This post, I hope, will serve to reveal it even more.

But first, how about a little bit more context, yes? Ok then! The project itself is called something like Ontario Extend: Liberated Learners Edition. We have not actually settled on the name’s final form, but the idea is that it is Ontario Extend, But For Learners This Time. So, whereas Ontario Extend for Educators has the Empowered Educator Framework which includes modules in teaching, collaborating, Curating, Technology, Experimenting and SoTL, Ontario Extend for Learners has the Liberated Learner Framework including modules in learning, technology, collaborating, and navigating.

That multi-institutional team (Trent, Cambrian, Nipissing, Seneca, McMaster, Brock and Windsor) of rad pedagogues is oh say about 10% of the way to completing the development at this point. One piece of our plan, the one I think that we value the most, is to have students co-designing with us at every level of the development. So we hired a bunch of student co-designers to join in on the fun. Once the co-designers were in place, we had a bit of a realization: We have budget for subject matter experts. The subject matter is basically “How to Student”. Hence, the students ARE the subject matter experts. That’s their money. Let’s get it to them.

And thus was born the Liberated Learners Design Sprint. It ran in late June, and it invited students of all stripes to join us and we’d pay them tell us the stories of the “wicked problems” that they’d faced in their journey before/during/ after/between their programs. The sprint sessions were held at lunch time every day of the week. Monday was a more traditional kick off what-the-heck-is-this webinar where we told them what we were asking them to do, and then Tuesday to Thursday were opportunities for everyone to come and “try out” their stories. They would join breakout rooms aligned with whichever of the four modules their story best aligns and to tell them, and listen to the others. Student co-designers lead these rooms and these sessions really served us well in drawing out rich, authentic experiences. Friday was then a showcase event in which four people who were able to already complete their stories shared them to everyone. And then we asked everyone to have their written stories in to us by the end of the next week.

And now we have 110+ stories of the authentic issues learners have faced, that we’re working to align to and inform the content and activities that go into the modules that we will now begin to create. A rare few were some pretty weak submissions. Very short, not-well thought out. Bummer. But on the other end, and completely overshadowing the weak submissions, are these rich tales of the trials and tribulations of the learning journey that we would never have had a sniff at including into the program without first hiring student co-designers and then asking them to take the lead in the sprints.

Just look at some of the titles of the stories:

• Anti-Social Sociology Major
• Crayola markers got me through the first year of University
• Captain Depresso
• Teaching Incon-(ass)istant
• Extra-Curricular Extremist
• Fake It Till You Make It
• The Social Caterpillar
• zzZZzzzzZoom University
• Fishing for 60’s

You know you want to read those stories! Well, as luck would have it, there is a place to see these stories coming out, one at a time over the next (many) weeks! I’ve had the Open Learner Patchbook sitting a little dormant for a while, but it dawned on me slowly that the stories we’d drawn out of these students are the same types of stories that the Open Learner Patchbook had originally invited, so I all of a sudden had a bunch of new fodder for the site!

So, while we comb through all the stories we’ll align them to and allow them to inform the upcoming Liberated Learner modules. But, we can also pick out the highlights of the scenery and share them out one at a time on the patchbook. We’ll pick a new one and work with its author to turn their stories into a post, and release them pretty much weekly for the next many weeks.

In fact, go have a look at the last two posts, which came from the design sprint:

Oh and one final update. The Liberated Learner project was funded as an eCampusOntario Virtual Learning Strategy project. They are kicking off a series of community webinars with a student panel discussion about this very design sprint on July 22 ant noon Eastern. Wanna join in? Register here: https://vls.ecampusontario.ca/community-of-practice/

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

Somewhere towards the end of the podcast episode I am about to share, I try to tell the host how I felt about the opportunity. I didn’t quite say it right, so I’ll try again here. While Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show was a bit before my time, I do have the sense that getting asked on to the show, for entertainers at least was the ultimate sign that you’re doing well at the thing that you love to do.

In that sense, I think that the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast, with Bonni Stachowiak, is the Tonight Show for post-secondary educators, and to be asked on and to have the opportunity to be interviewed by Bonni is absolutely a dream come true for me. It’s also hugely validating of any efforts I have made in the world of open education and just generally being an educator and instructional designer. Whoever’s next up to bat on Bonni’s show, you’re in for a treat!

So without further ado, have a listen here to hear me realizing a dream

A couple of notes from the show. Bonni is so incredibly humble that she says she was intimidate to ask me (?) on her show! I crunched some numbers and it turns out her show has approximately 150 times as many downloads as mine lol! Also, before we began recording, we plotted a way to try to discuss how a twitter joke I made relating *NSYNC vs. Backstreet Boys to the *ASYNC vs synchronous debate of online learning. During recording, Bonni set me up to talk about it nicely and I totally whiffed on it, giving like 5% of the context needed for it to make sense to listeners. Thank you to editor extraordinaire, Andrew Kroeger for cutting that part out and saving me from myself! And one final note, I am quite fond of the list of “resources mentioned” on the episode page because they look so random. The list includes a keynote I admire, some resources I’ve worked on (which makes sense) but also books about hip hop and David Cronenberg movies (which seem to make no sense to be included, but hopefully do, if you listen!)

Anyway, if you have a listen, I hope you enjoy it. I certainly did!

That image you scrolled by to get to these words… that’s the Nacho Ramp. It’s named that because we ate nachos off of it instead of skateboarding on it. I mean, we’re trying to skateboard on it, but we are so far more successful at the nacho eating thing.

The notion of dropping in on that thing is absolutely frightening to 42 year-old-not-much-of-a-skateboarder me. What can I do to prepare? Probably a lot of things. Purchase lots of padding. Work on my balance, agility and flexibility. Visualize it happening. Play some Tony Hawk video games and watch Youtube videos of others doing it. Get connected to people in the skateboarding community. Sure those things will help. One thing for sure is that the path to my success in this endeavor lies in pain and failure. And it relies on me actually following that path myself. And at some point I will be prepared to drop right in and down that ramp and skate away into the sunset and it will be glorious.

Now that the embargo has been lifted, I can tell you about another thing I’m about to drop in on. I am part of a project that’s been awarded funding, through eCampusOntario, to design, develop and deliver a sibling to the Ontario Extend Empowered Educator micro-credential. This time for learners themselves. The original Extend is built around the “Empowered Educator” framework. This time we’re working up the “Liberated Learner” framework.

Whereas the Empowered Educator is meant to help educators develop the skills and abilities they need to teach in a digital age, whatever the learning context, the Liberated Learner seeks to help learners develop the skills they need to learn, whatever the teaching context. It’s not really just one nut to crack. It’s a bowl of nuts we’ll need to crack one at a time and then, hopefully serve them up to you in a big bowl of OER.

Who’s the we? Well here is one of the best parts. The team is chock full of some of my absolute favorite heroes of teaching and learning whom we are lucky enough to have working right here in our province. It’s a team effort from 7 different Ontario post-secondary institutions. I am listed as the lead, but I’ll probably mostly just need to keep myself from gawking at all the awesomeness coming from this group. I plan to coax and cajole everyone involved into blogging some of their journey as we go, so stay tuned for updates and to find out just who these heroes are. I’d also love to invite you into the discussion. Hop into the comments below to let us know what nuts you think we need to try and crack (and if you know how to crack them, tell us that, too!)

Let’s pop back to the Nacho Ramp again for a minute. I didn’t acquire this wooden learning environment just so that a 42 year old can finally learn to hit a skateboard ramp. Oh no, no no. Like the Wu Tang, it’s for the children. And like me, it’s up to my kids to follow the crashy, ouchy journey themselves to be able to do it.

It’s like that with the Liberated Learner framework, too. The more seasoned (read: older) members of the team are not involved in this just so that we can figure out how to liberate our own learning, although that’d be cool if we did that a bit. Built in to the proposal is a plan to co-create this with members of the target audience of the project itself. Student co-creators are being brought in to every phase of the project. The more experienced team members will be there, maybe modeling, maybe advising, nudging. Maybe just trying to keep up or getting out of the way. Mostly we just want to help put the ramp there so that the student co-creators that we are working with can show us all how to shred.

The bullseye of our target audience for the liberated learner framework is that student who is getting ready to drop (back?) into higher ed. Whether that’s just the beginning of a post-secondary career, between semesters or years of a program, or coming back to a new program after some time off. It may be a crashy, ouchy, bumpy journey, but we hope to help make that drop in happen with as much padding as possible

After all, that ramp needs to be remembered for shredded knees more than shredded cheese.