Tag: BC Campus

Another click on the wall

April 11, 2018 / Irwin DeVries / 2 Comments

What to do when your technology fails in the classroom? This was a student teacher’s question submitted for our weekly online forum. The ensuing discussion was robust, with many examples shared. When the projector broke down in an elementary class, a pupil in the class had suggested the perplexed teacher sing the fun-dance action song that was intended to be played, and the pupils could act along. In another case a teacher decided make animal noises to compensate for failed sound clips; another played charades. When a Smart Board broke down, the pupils proclaimed “The Smart Board isn’t very smart today.” Smart pupils! There were many wonderful and creative examples. In some cases I think the workarounds were as good as, or better than, the technology-supported versions.

Below is a list of some lessons gleaned and summarized from this class’s collective practicum experiences and workarounds shared in the online forum. Inspired by a session offered by BCcampus’s Amanda Coolidge, there was interest in the class to share helpful products developed in the class with a CC license. I’ve named this one Another Click on the Wall, and I hope others will not only find it useful in their teaching-with-ed-tech practice, but also 5R it for others as well. (It should be copy-and-pasteable from the text below.) This project brings to mind discourses around “pedagogies of failure” but that’s for another time.

And here are some accompanying lyrics, which may be sung to this fairly recognizable tune:

We don’t need no applications
We don’t need remote controls
No dark projectors in the classroom
Teacher leave them vids alone
Hey! Teacher! Leave them vids alone.
All in all it’s just another click on the wall

Another Click on the Wall

Classroom technology fails and bails

By the students of EDIT 4150 TRU, Spring 2018 class. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Tip 1: When something breaks down and you can’t fix it, explain the intent of the activity to the students and let them suggest alternatives.

Tip 2: Don’t be afraid to step out and try something different when you’re stuck. It may be risky but students will appreciate your efforts, especially if you can maintain a sense of humour about it.

Tip 3: Check everything – technology, connections, accounts, passwords, permissions – ahead of time to make sure everything is working.

Tip 4: Learn from accidents – e.g. sometimes students will listen more closely if the volume of a video is lower even if it wasn’t originally intended that way.

Tip 5: Think on your feet – example: put a microphone (if available) up to a mobile device speaker if the audio output to the A/V system isn’t working. AKA pulling a rabbit out of your hat.

Tip 6: If your planned AV doesn’t work, mime or mimic the actions or sounds you wanted to play. Or… have your students do it. It might even be fun. AKA practice your farm animal sounds ahead of time.

Tip 7: Have a hard copy handy – e.g. in case the audio book stops playing, you can keep reading from the text. Same goes for slides, discussion/activity notes, etc.

Tip 8: Flip the app – e.g. turn an app designed for competition among students into a cooperative class activity by having them all work from the one device (gather them around, or if possible plug it into your projection system and let them provide the answers for the teacher to input).

Tip 9: Remember to sync the Smart Board; or else you’ll sink it.

Tip 10: Have your own emergency tool kit – a few cables, spare adaptors, charger, audio connectors, etc. suited for your own digital environment. Also paper and pens.

Tip 11: Charge the devices. Keep them charged. Check early to make sure they are charged.

Tip 12…add your own…

Ten years after: Running the rivers again

October 5, 2017 / Irwin DeVries / 2 Comments

A little over ten years ago the BCcampus Educational Technologies Group (ETUG) held their spring workshop at Thompson Rivers University. Titled Running the Rivers: Challenging Currents in Teaching, Learning & Technology, the program included such topics as The Wiki in Post-Secondary Education, In the Moodle, and, presented by no less a luminary than Scott Leslie, Finding Free and Open Learning Resources.

Apart from its use as a metaphor, the “rivers” reference in the program title also acknowledged the flowing-together of the North and South Thompson Rivers in Tk’əmlúps, the local indigenous Secwepemctsín name for Kamloops, meaning “where the rivers meet” (as shown in this blog’s masthead photo).

Another convergence took place today at the same location, with a strategic framework planning session for open textbooks and related initiatives held on our campus. Ably led by Dr. Rajiv Jhanghiani from BCcampus and Kwantlen Polytechnic University, the session’s purpose was to combine multiple open educational resource efforts into one combined framework.

The threads being woven together:

The TRU student union (TRUSU) open textbook initiative, which has been under way for well over a year now.
The BCcampus Zed Cred program, from which TRU, along with two other institutions (Justice Institute of BC; KPU), has received grants to develop a zero-cost textbook one-year academic certificate.
Internal funding received by Open Learning from TRU to develop open textbooks.
The impending rollout of the first year of OERu studies at TRU.
Initiatives in the library to promote and curate OER.
The ongoing mandate of the Open Learning Division to provide open education to our students.

This was a big day for us, as we felt excitement and awareness build about our collective strengths combined to promote and expand the reach and benefits of openness in education. As the plan develops, it’ll be shared here and elsewhere for suggestions, and for others to use and adapt as they wish.

OER in the land down under

November 5, 2014 / Irwin DeVries / 0 Comments

Some smart planning placed the 3rd meeting of OERu Anchor Partners right after the Australian National Symposium on OER this week. That meant a number of non-Australian participants could arrive a few days early and participate in both events. Held in Hobart, Tasmania, the two-day Symposium kept us busy with an engaging mixture of keynotes, larger workshops, institutional showcases, and small group discussions with reports, all centred around successes and challenges in a variety of Australian OER/OEP programs and projects. Impressive numbers of Australian universities were involved in the program, including:

Wollongong
Southern Queensland
La Trobe
Charles Sturt
Western Sydney
Swinburne University of Technology
Deakin
Tasmania (host university)

Without doing justice to the full program, here are a few quick items that jump to mind from the two-day blur that we were treated to:

Elder Aunty Brenda Hodge‘s warm welcome to participants.

UTAS’s development and Senate approval of a TELT White Paper along with a set of Curriculum Principles, both with values-based OER focus, and the building of open practices into teaching performance expectations. From the Curriculum Principles document: “We contribute to a vibrant community of practice who share, adapt and reuse high quality resources to enhance and extend our curriculum offerings.” (Like the sound of that!)

The use of OER, flexible and distance programs of the University of the South Pacific in the face of difficult technological and other challenges as recounted by Theresa Koroivulaono.

Doctoral student Mais M. Fatayer’s description of a model used to create a faculty/student community of practice within the classroom that creates and shares OERs for others to use.

Collaborations and knowledge building/sharing about open badges among a committed body of volunteers and agencies such as Mozilla, Creative Commons, MIT Media Lab, Jamlab, Open Knowledge Foundation, and NYU Steinhardt Shool work at P2PU as recounted by Delia Browne.

Christine Ewan’s consultation project with the Higher Education Standards Panel to advise the government on how quality practices may be affected by “disaggregation” in higher education, as with the introduction of credit for MOOCs, RPL and other such alternative methods of assessing learning.

Along with the advances in OER and OEP described in open sessions and small groups, the challenges faced in Australia will sound very familiar to anyone involved in this field. Challenges of understanding and promoting open licensing practices, funding, the need for new learning design approaches and models, finding and sharing OERs, the need to realign our institutions along more “open” lines are just a few examples. However, the sharing of experiences and ideas among participants at the symposium was highly encouraging and the signs are clear that we’ll all be hearing a lot more about OER/OEP in Australia in the months and years to come.

Caution: Open course developers at play

March 4, 2012 / Irwin DeVries / 1 Comment

Much has happened at the OERu since the formal launch meeting in November. In the open curriculum project, a series of public consultations through the SCOPE forum at BC Campus and subsequent discussions among partners have led to the selection of eight prototype courses for initial development. In order to support the open development and design stages, two online workshops were recently conducted through WikiEducator, OERu’s virtual home. The courses provided hands-on practice and experience with Creative Commons licensing, and with developing and formatting content in WikiEducator. The purpose of going though these steps is building capacity among partners and supporters in setting up prototype courses in an entirely open environment. We were fortunate to have leaders of such reputation as Cable Green of Creative Commons and Wayne Mackintosh of the Open Educational Resource Foundation.

WikiEducator provides the ability to revert, fork into different versions and collaborate in various ways in content development. And of course good coders can go under the hood and do a whole lot more. However, there are some helpful tools anyone can learn such as simple pedagogical templates, mechanisms for importing and/or creating Creative Commons licenses, and an Open Office plug-in that permits the export of basic document formatting properties into WikiEducator syntax. At present the LMS is always available for delivering the content extracted from the wiki, but a flame of hope continues to burn that we can either make better LMSs or move beyond them in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime we make do.

Equally interesting are emerging discussions and proposed models around learning design factors for open pedagogy. This is the next big challenge. While open and distance education has a long track record of practice in independent study, the past 20 years of collaborative and networked learning concepts and practices confront real challenges in the face of the “lonely” distance learner working through open courseware. Support networks of peers as well as potential volunteers and mentors are on the radar as well other creative ideas.

There are many challenges to “open,” not only legal but also in terms of technical issues as well as deeply embedded concepts of quality and governance in higher education that deserve careful consideration and dialog. We have much to learn from the free and open source software movement in terms of building powerful and sustainable communities around major projects.

A little over a decade ago, Eric Raymond wrote in The Cathedal and the Bazaar, “It may well turn out that one of the most important effects of open source’s success will be to teach us that play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work.” So far the work of OERu does feel like play, and if having fun is a good thing – then we’re not doing too badly!

Unwrapping the OER package in 2012

January 1, 2012 / Irwin DeVries / 1 Comment

#oeru In one of the highlights of 2011 for me, I had the privilege of attending a two-day meeting at Otego Polytechnic in Dunedin, New Zealand to participate in formalizing plans for implementation of the Open Education Resource University (OERu). The meeting was attended by representatives of 13 tertiary educational institutions from around the world and 2 non-teaching institutions, together known as Anchor Partners. The Canadian partners attending were Athabasca University and Thompson Rivers University (where I work).

In addition, there were 148 registered virtual participants from 41 countries participating through live video feeds and microblogs, as well as others who were unregistered. Planned by the OERu Foundation in New Zealand and BC Campus in Canada, and sponsored by the Commonwealth of Learning and UNESCO, Pacific States, the goal of the meeting was to outline the first steps in the implementation of an OERu concept that had been incubating in various forms over the past few years. An earlier meeting in February 2011 had established the foundational concepts and “logic model” for the OERu, with preceding public discussions and consultations with the higher education community worldwide including open seminars conducted on BC Campus’s SCOPE site (SCOPE, 2011). The underlying reason for the establishment of the OERu was the expanding world of open educational resources (OER). The Open Education Resource University (OERu) foundation, a not-for-profit entity, was established to assemble a consortium of universities that could support and accredit learning undertaken through OER courses. That is, they determined to make low-cost education and credentials available to learners worldwide by contributing their own OER courses as well as repurposing other OER. This “parallel learning universe” (from Jim Taylor, 2007) was established on a logic model based on collaboration among partner universities; i.e., the provision of education institution services and support infrastructures.

The establishment of the OERu signifies a shift in the focus of OER from only content to include processes, both in the repurposing of OER as well as in the support mechanisms undergirding the learners’ engagement with the OER. While many OER are in essence publishing initiatives (although this is beginning to change, e.g. MIT), the OERu is focused on the multiple processes associated with online learning at the university level. The processes include curriculum planning, course design and development, pedagogy, student support, assessment and credentialing. Supporting these processes are community service by institutions and volunteers, new business models for OER education, technology infrastructure and student administration.

The OERu is not in itself a university. Rather, the intent is to build collaboratively, among the Anchor Partner institutions and others, a system of access to free open educational resources in the form of courses and programs offered through the university network, alongside possible user-pay optional services provided by the institutions including tutoring, accreditation and assessment of learning, and credible credentials. The OERu Foundation is structured not to provide courses or develop and administer educational policies. Instead, out of consideration for institutional autonomy, the OERu facilitates the collaboration of Anchor Partners and other participants in contributing their own open education resources as well as other available OERs, along with the application of their own internal educational policies in their interactions with the partnership and participating students who engage with their own universities. Thus it acquired the mantra of a “parallel learning universe” in that it was intended not to replace any of the functions of the partners, but rather to form a collaboration that would work alongside them and in which they can each engage to the extent and in the manner that works best for the individual institutions (Wikieducator, 2011). The seminal parallel learning universe concept was outlined in a paper by Jim Taylor (2007), citing recent studies that indicated a massive growth in the need for higher education worldwide, to the extent that two new universities a week would be needed just to satisfy the need in India alone. The increasing availability of free courseware online worldwide was seen as a vital key to improved access to higher education worldwide.

What does the new year hold for OERu? How will it play out? The model is still emergent and it could go many different ways. I for one am keen to see how this plays out and will provide updates here.