2024 Open Education Conference

This interactive panel will feature authors of three diverse chapters from the open collection, Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures. Collectively, the panel will share insights on their authoring processes, open collaboration, participation in the authors’ community, and the value of coalition-building with diverse voices across global higher education to create more hopeful futures. The discussion will draw upon common themes across the chapters: reimagining teaching and learning, critical approaches, and open practice as a force for change. The three chapters represented in the panel draw on lived experience from North American, European, and African perspectives, mirroring the global breadth of the wider collection. This session is designed as a discursive space for the panelists to share their unique experiences as authors, collaborators, and community-members in the hopes of inspiring others to adopt similar methods of open collaboration and authoring.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Reflect on open authoring, collaboration, and the peer review process from a variety of diverse perspectives
• Compare and contrast the common themes and challenges that prevail in higher education across the globe
• Assess the challenges and opportunities of openly collaborating within wider networks
• Appreciate the value of accomplishments in open scholarship and authoring

Slides available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10919/121325

Large-enrollment courses tend to produce assessment headaches for instructors in nearly any discipline. And when courses depart from testing and grading by hand, assessment can become even more complex. These assessment challenges can reduce the likelihood that an instructor chooses an open textbook. While subject matter experts have begun to generate human created and/or AI-written/human edited test banks for their topics, these testbanks typically align to QTI formats, which are multiple choice, lack graphics, and don’t meet the needs of some courses especially those in math-intensive disciplines. In 2023, Departments of Mathematics and Statistics at Virginia Tech, with support from the University Libraries Open Education Initiative began piloting WeBWorK, an open-source hosted software solution already used at many institutions. We present a case study of this pilot project, discuss project framing, decisions, impact, WeBWorK and OER adoption, and our hopes for the future.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Describe programmatic efforts to explore homework software in a campus or system environment.
• Meet other people dealing with math assessment and mathematically-rich homework software issues.
• Find further information regarding low-cost and open homework systems
• Be able to articulate the use case for a system like WeBWorK.
• Summarize our programmatic efforts, reflecting on decisions made, the capacities of our team members, barriers and lessons learned, and results part-way through year two.

The Salish Sea Curriculum Repository is a collaboration among educators at Whatcom Community College, Western Washington University, and other bioregional institutions to make available materials for use in developing and teaching lessons and courses about the Salish Sea. The repository includes original OER as well as an index of curated resources. Built in WCC’s Omeka S installation, the repository uses Dublin Core metadata standards, linked data, and submitter-generated metadata to support discoverability of learning objects. Through a short-term work opportunity lasting 35-40 hours total, three students have contributed to improving resource discovery within the repository. Hear from all three students about the work of and lessons from learning to write concise, keyword-rich, plain-language resource summaries and cleaning up item metadata to facilitate curriculum-sharing among an interdisciplinary, cross-institutional faculty group engaged in place- and land-based teaching.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Write a strong resource description for an interdisciplinary user group following a student-created human algorithm
• Structure transformative work/learning opportunities for students
• Collaborate with students and librarians on using Omeka S as an open source tool for resource discovery
• Understand the value of the Salish Sea Curriculum Repository and land- and place-based learning more generally

E-portfolios serve as important tools for students, aiding reflection and presenting samples of work to potential employers and graduate schools. However, ensuring accessibility for students with varying digital literacy levels remains a challenge. Join Terry from Trent University and Amber from Boise State University as they discuss this pressing issue. Drawing from Terry's project, “An e-Book of One’s Own: My Learning Journey,” and its influence on Amber's creation of “An ePortfolio Template for Language Majors,” we'll explore the development of openly licensed portfolio templates using tools like Pressbooks. Together, we’ll reflect on our experiences and discuss how these templates empower students from every skill level, working to ensure all students feel confident and comfortable showcasing and reflecting on their work with ease and inclusivity.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Identify challenges related to accessibility for students with a wide range of digital literacy levels.
• Explain the concept of openly licensed portfolio templates and their potential benefits for student engagement.
• Explore practical strategies for developing and implementing openly licensed portfolio templates using tools like Pressbooks.
• Apply insights gained from the session to promote inclusivity and empower students of all skill levels in showcasing and reflecting on their work.

How do you make innovation work when the day job as an educator gets ever busier? Where do you find inspiration and solutions to practical problems on fragmented social networks? Over the past 10 years, our organization has built a growing community of practice on the back of our day-to-day business activities, and we have experimented with moving these activities to social spaces that are run and owned by and for educators. In this presentation, we will share lessons learned from two such transitions: our move to Mastodon, a self-hostable, decentralized social networking platform, and Ghost, an open source blogging platform. During the sessions, we’ll use White’s Visitors/Residents foundational model and a "pre-mortem" evaluation to share our perspectives on the current state of social media and discuss the practical setup on new social platforms and highlight common pitfalls. We think it’s about time to assert your digital identity and reclaim your socials!

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Use federated social networks such as Mastodon for professional development, dissemination and networking;
• Evaluate how engaging with different social networks aligns with their values and competencies;
• Explore belonging and engagement via a visitors/residents model;
• Carry out a ‘pre-mortem’ reflective exercise about social media for professional development;
• Apply lessons learnt and practical know how to their own personal, professional or institutional social media use.

SLIDES

Open education requires slow, sustained relationship-building and creative thinking, but this work is often built around funding deadlines, or crammed into the small spaces between other projects. Taking the theme of the conference literally, this session explores what it means to “manage” and "spend" time in open education work. Through group discussion, we will connect our personal experiences to concepts like calendar culture, precarity, urgency, and slow movements. We will reflect on how to balance different approaches in our work and organizations, and hopefully come away with renewed self-compassion and a few practical strategies to try. This session is designed for open education practitioners at every experience level and organization type, although the presenter comes from a U.S. higher education context.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Approach the challenges of time-bound open education work with more clarity and self-compassion.
• Implement 1-2 new strategies for navigating time in open education work, such as a calendar practice, software/app, or self-care and boundary-setting approach.