Geogebra + Illustrative Mathematics + Your LMS 
= Great Teaching and Learning

Sept. 4, 2020 

       SABIER is excited about our new LMS course that will fully engage middle school math students in  distance learning. Monitor all student progress in real time without the hassle of screen sharing. Increase the communication and collaboration in Illustrative Mathematics middle school math with Geogebra and an LMS course specifically designed for distance learning – Schoology, Canvas, or Moodle.

Our free, openly licensed LMS course  extends the capabilities of Geogebra’s exciting new interactive applets designed for  video conferencing software. (This link has a great short video describing the app.) At their own pace and time, students will be able to continue their Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams online synchronous lessons to collaborate and work in groups.
        Increase communication between teachers and students, and  build  community by enabling students to communicate with their teacher and each other using video, chat, audio, or photos. Expand assessment options synced to your student information system. Parents will appreciate the links to the extensive Illustrative Mathematics material provided for parents. The LMS course gives teachers quick access to the narratives that describe the mathematical work that will unfold in each lesson in every unit. Fill out this form to receive the free, openly licensed LMS course.

The Stone Arch Bridge Initiative for Education Resources, SABIER, is pleased to announce the launch of a Chemistry course for K-12. This is a course that uses a chemistry text from Libretexts and  is housed in a Moodle course with homework quizzes created by Andrew Lyman-Butler. Andrew described the quizzes and his thinking in a Medium article:

“Considerable variation in assessment items between students and between attempts. Numeric questions make use of Moodle’s “calculated” question type, in which random numbers within set limits are generated for each question, and student responses are evaluated using a teacher-supplied formula and a margin of error. Further variation is incorporated by using an item bank with multiple variants of each question type, which are sampled at random every time a new assessment attempt is generated. Two students sitting next to each other will have completely different quizzes, and a student re-attempting a quiz will have it regenerated from scratch.”

 This course will be available for download from the SABIER Moodle site upon request. All components of the course are openly licensed so that teachers can modify any portion of the content or quizzes to meet the particular needs of their students. In addition to the quizzes that are aligned to each section of the content, there is a template for lab reports and a grading rubric for those reports. A forum will be available in each content section that allows each student to respond to a prompt and then reply to the posts of other students once they have made their posts. SABIER’s teacher professional development cohorts will explore various strategies for using both lab reports and forums. 

Please contact Dan McGuire (dan@sabier.org) to be included in the teacher professional development cohort and to receive instructions for downloading the Moodle course file. There are still slots available at no cost to teachers or their schools for the teacher professional development cohorts. Limited support is available to assist in importing the course into Canvas, Schoology, or D2L. We do not recommend using the course with Google Classroom except via a link to a free Moodle site. LTI functionality to LMSs other than Moodle will be available in 2020.

open books, open files, open texts, open apps

[736 words]

Despite my best intentions, I was unable to get very far this year on the OpenLearning CMOOC/faculty collaborative. As interesting as it was, the activities began at a time when I was already committed to a number of other high-priority projects and duties, especially 1. completing my work teaching an online course (with a few students who has “incomplete” grades and needed extra attention from me, and time time to complete their work), 2. taking an online course where a major assignment was due at the end of March, and 3. presenting multiple papers at the NeMLA 2019 conference (program available by clicking the following URL: http://www.buffalo.edu/content/dam/www/nemla/NeMLA%202019/NeMLA%202019%20Convention%20Program.pdf) in the Washington DC area. It was way to much for me to handle. So, of course, the first thing to go was the least pressing, even if the most interesting, Gardner Campbell’s CMOOC. (I know that it was not, strictly speaking, “Gardner Campbell’s” but that’s how I think of it, since he is one of the originators of the professional development CMOOC course on open learning and inviting collective reflection on technology.)

In spite of bailing out of the OpenLearning ’19 CMOOC, I continue to think about open learning, especially in the context of online education. What is more, I am as determined as ever to develop and run a free course on using target-language media resources in French to develop intercultural capability (or intercultural competence, if you prefer, or even intercultural communicative competence). Indeed, I think that this will be one of my major initiatives this year. I am also going to continue to explore openness as a general pedagogical concepts.

That does not change a certain skepticism that I have relative to “open learning” in certain forms. One of the things that irks me is the existence of “openlearning.com,” which looks a bit like a commercial vehicle for monetizing online teaching expertise by encouraging instructors develop independent courses that the site will host for a fee while hinting at the possibility of financial returns for the teacher. Of course, what they do not say is that designing a course, publicizing it in a way that is likely to attract significant student interest, running it a way that will do more than simply satisfy one’s customers, but also give them skills and/or knowledge of very high value, so high, in fact, that it will motivate them to publicize your course, and to do all of this in a way that is sustainable and feasible… is an almost impossibly difficult task for a single person to manage on her or his own. So the intimation that it can be profitable is, in my view, an exploitation of some folks’ naïveté. Teachers with what might be a good idea for a course pay good money to buy a subscription so that they can develop and host their course using the OpenLearning infrastructure, possibly in the hopes of making money… even though in most cases, individuals are likely to fail to create a commercial winner that is also academically excellent. This scheme, of course, makes money almost exclusively for OpenLearning.

Now, that said, I note that there are some institutions that seem to have invested significant and substantial resources in the develop of truly open learning resources, like Open University, MIT and Carnegie Mellon (their OpenCourseware and Open Learning Initiative sites) and, of course the big MOOCs (edX, Coursera, France Université Numérique/FUN, etc.). There are teachers, thinkers, pedagogues, leaders, and visionaries who are truly committed to the “Open” ethos and to CMOOCs and the like. So I’m not skeptical about everything. But when websites and Twitter-voices talk about Open, there is almost always some confusion about exactly what they mean. Open textbooks licensed through Creative Commons are one thing. Truly free open courses are something different. Disguised and seemingly free materials and courses are yet another kind of ostensibly “openness.” And folks are not always precise and forthcoming about which flavor or orientation of “Open” they mean.

So part of what I intend to do in coming weeks is to reflect on Open and different kinds of “openness.” I’ll critique the ideas and I’ll point toward those dimensions and implementations that I think are the most valuable, ethical and productive. And, of course, I’ll label and discuss those items that are not so honest, are less than fully ethical, or otherwise seem problematic.

So… stay tuned for some research into… and critical thinking about… “Open.”

-RRD

First, the interview with Pomerantz led me to read “50 Shades of Open” and I am utterly perplexed – not about the content just as to what I thought ‘open’ was as of last week. I find my understanding has deepened but also changed … yet again (yay, learning!). Pomerantz and Peek depict many aspects of what it means to be ‘open’ and I find that ‘openness’ is defined by the context of use – as in what, how, where, what purpose, which makes the term ‘open’ much more fluid and even more difficult to pin down. It actually reminds me of my own area of study currently. Instructional Design and Technology has struggled to define itself and still does today – are we educational technology, technological instruction, educational design, instructional technology? (and so on…) Academics find that the terminology shifts and changes depending on the context much like ‘open.’ This confusion is not a bad thing, it just gets you thinking more and more and around in circles about specificity or the impacts of this ambiguity (both positive and negative).

Second, I thoroughly enjoyed the interview with Dr. Rob Blair. His Democracy Erosion course was a great example of open-style collaborative learning. I am a huge fan of constructivist learning approaches and I can see great potential in the collaborative techniques used in this course design – recommended it to my husband for use! More so, I was intrigued by the design aspect of this course as an instructional designer. I would love to look deeper into the design choices, philosophical underpinnings of design, and design strategies that are used to develop cMOOCs. Instructional designers argue that the design mechanisms and not the delivery system itself is the key to optimal achievement of learning outcomes … would be interesting to see how this stands in these new connectivist scenarios.

Last, open pedagogy is interesting from an instructional designer’s (ID) perspective as it is, from what I gathered, experiential learning. Much literature argues that experiential learning/discovery learning is the key to contextualizing real-world problem solving. Learners develop a better sense of their ability to solve real-world problems or learn new information when it is contextualized and the learning is directly experienced – we can better understand and connect to prior knowledge that we have when our learning is situated. So why not situate it within a crowd of various-minded learners who directly construct and experience the learning together – a crowd whereby the ‘professor’ is the facilitator or does not exist in the traditional sense. Instead, learner guidance is provided by our peers. It also brings people together to discuss and collaboratively work on real issues (education with more purpose!) There are just so many interesting angles to look at as an ID.