Å·ÃÀ¿Ú±¬ÊÓƵ

BLAIR: Welcome to the Emerge podcast series, brought to you by the University of Å·ÃÀ¿Ú±¬ÊÓƵ Boulder Arts and Sciences Support of Education Through Technology, or ASSETT, Innovation Incubator. The ASSETT Innovation Incubator is a three year pilot spanning fall 2019 through Spring 2022 that provides a safe resource space for the arts and sciences community to further ideas for active teaching and learning with technology. This series will feature conversations with participating faculty, staff, and students on topics ranging from metacognition and wellbeing, student success, multi-modal, participatory publishing, and inclusive data science. We hope you enjoy learning about the unique projects and perspectives from our community.

Today's Emerge podcast, Invigorate Your Classroom With Non-disposable Assignments, features guest interviewer Alexis Harris. Alexis is a junior at the University of Å·ÃÀ¿Ú±¬ÊÓƵ Boulder. Majoring in English, Alexis is also pursuing her teaching licensure in secondary education, and is in the Creative Technology Design program at the Atlas Institute. Alexis is an undergraduate student intern for and member of CAMPP, the Collective to Advance Multimodal Participatory Publishing, an interdisciplinary team of the ASSETT innovation incubator. One of Alexis's greatest passions in life is to learn as much as she can, making her a great addition to the innovation incubator and CAMPP. Please enjoy Alexis's interview on non-disposable assignments.

ALEXIS: A typical day in the life of a college student includes first waking up and hustling to campus for the eight AM class. There, weary eyed, they'll scramble to take notes in their notebook as the professor flips through slide after slide. Next, they'll have a quick break for a late breakfast consisting of iced coffee before hustling to their lab period, or they'll take note, take observations down on a heavy lab book that feels too big for three credits. Lunch offers a brief reprieve before they have to take a test in their afternoon class, hastily flipping back and forth between questions. After some club meetings, and maybe a nap, a student has an average of three hours of homework a night, where they will pencil in even more learning onto their papers, which they may or may not turn in the next morning.

These long days of work also include a lot of paper waste. In fact, according to the New York City government, the paper discarded during the school year in one New York City school, added up to 28 pounds for each student, teacher, and staff member. With 100 sheets of paper weighing around one pound, that means for a district with 10,000 students, they are using around 28 million sheets of paper in a single year, most of which gets thrown in recycling bins if we're lucky, trash cans if we're not, crumpled, lost inside of backpacks, binders, and desks, never to be found again, or even burned in a bonfire signaling the start of summer and the end of school year.

The issue of paper waste from schools has been something that our country and our world has been collectively trying to solve for a really long time. But what about the intellectual waste that comes with it? What does it mean when students do worksheet after worksheet, test after test, homework after homework to prove their knowledge when they're destined to throw it away when that summer bell rings?

My name is Alexis Harris, and today I will be talking to Amanda McAndrew, who combines instructional design, ed tech, and faculty professional development in her role at Å·ÃÀ¿Ú±¬ÊÓƵ Boulder's Arts and Sciences Support of Education through Technology Group. Joining us will also be Nikki Jobin, who is a senior instructor of history in the Stories and Society Residential Academic Program at the University of Å·ÃÀ¿Ú±¬ÊÓƵ Boulder. Together, they will help us understand why so many of the things we do in school end up in that recycling bin at the end of the day, and how to help us begin making assignments that will actually matter to students and stick around. Yes, today we're talking about renewable or non-disposable assignments. To understand what renewable assignments are, we should begin first by understanding the foundational concept which gave rise to them. That is open education. Amanda, to start what is open education?

AMANDA: Thank you so much, Alexis, for that great introduction and welcoming us here for this podcast. I love how you framed the student experience, and I love your question, but what about the intellectual waste, how you brought that up. Open education is a really, really broad concept and hard to describe in a short amount of time, but I'll try to get the idea across. It's really an evolution of open education resources or OER, and to me, it's a community, a culture, and even a social justice movement. It's a way of realizing the actual promise of the internet and of democratizing education.

To start describing open education, I'll rely on some definitions from some of the top organizations that are supporting OER and open ed. One is the Creative Commons Organization. They define OER as teaching, learning, and research materials that are either A, in the public domain, or B, licensed in a manner that provides everyone with free and perpetual permission to engage in the five R activities. The five R's are retaining, remixing, revising, reusing, and redistributing the resources. So Creative Commons has licenses that allow individuals who are so inclined to make their works available for others to engage in those five R activities. It's a way that we can have a copyright, but give others more ability to use what we have created.

Then also, a group called SPARC. SPARC stands for Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. They define it as teaching, and learning, and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers, and is licensed for open use. This means permission is granted through use of an open license, such as the Creative Common Licenses, which allows everyone to freely use, and adapt, and share the resource. So this means that there are people who believe that education is a human right, that access to knowledge is fundamental to our existence. Many of these people are willing to share their works in a way that others can have access to them for free. We believe that this is how great ideas come into existence, by having access to the knowledge commons. In other words, sharing knowledge drives innovation.

So without getting more hippie dippy, philosophical on everyone, I'll go back to the original idea of open education. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has a definition of open education that says the myriad of learning resources, teaching practices, and education policies that use the flexibility of OER to provide learners with high quality educational experiences. So basically, open education is the teaching practices, and methods, and strategies that OER enables. So you can't really have open education without OER.

But it is what we can do when we start to open doors of the classroom, when we unlock the barriers of time and space to get outside of the learning management systems that we often use, and to make what we are doing in the classroom visible to and invite the world in. It's an ethos of sharing and doing something for the greater good. It means making knowledge accessible in the sense that it's readily available to people with a diverse range of abilities, but also across socioeconomic and geographic boundaries.

So practically speaking, for higher education purposes, it means writing or using an open textbook in your courses so that students don't have to pay a hundred or more for a textbook, and then they don't have to endure that experience, and they can also keep it as long as they want. Renting textbooks is one way that saves students money, but then they have to give that textbook back and they've already spent a big amount of money. OER allows you to still keep that book.

It means building and contributing to a knowledge commons like Wikipedia. Our students can do that. It's open for them to edit, and there are wikipedicians who also vet that work. So it is reliable. Our students want to find authentic audiences for their work, and we want to give them those authentic audiences, things like service organizations or younger students that could use the materials that they create. It means utilizing the internet to publish student works, things like blogs, websites, arts and photo galleries. I could just go on and on.

ALEXIS: Wow. Well, as a college student myself, I can already see some ways that open education would really benefit me. I think last semester alone, I had to spend around $400 on two textbooks that were outdated and that were barely used. So returning to our main focus with our new understanding of OER, what are renewable assignments, and how are they related to this concept?

AMANDA: Renewable assignments are a really good practical example or description of what education really means in real life. So David Wiley of Lumen Learning is widely quoted in the open education community, and he said this about ... He called them disposable assignments, so we can either say disposable, non-disposable or renewable assignments. But these are the assignments that students complain about doing and faculty complain about grading. They're assignments that add no value to the world after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away. Not only do these assignments add no value to the world, they actually suck value out of the world.

So I don't know. That might sound a little bit familiar to you, and I've used this quote many times in conducting course design workshops for faculty. I think it's hard for them to hear, but it really hits home. It's blunt and jarring, but because, who wants to suck value out of the world? Nobody. So I think we can all relate to the feeling that it invokes and how to break out of that mentality of doing things the way they have always been done. It gets faculty thinking about what are the possibilities for their students. I think it helps set the tone for them to really give meaning to and think about what student centered or learner centered actually means.

ALEXIS: Yes, I definitely agree. As someone who is always working for hours on papers for my professor to be the only one who reads them, this already sounds really exciting to me. It always seems like a huge waste of my effort to create something that only one person is ever going to see, and I know a lot of my peers agree. Though I have to say, I'm having trouble seeing exactly how renewable assignments might be implemented besides maybe encouraging students to publish their papers. Luckily, Nikki has some really cool projects with students, which is all about creating non-disposable work. Nikki, do you want to speak on your personal experience with creating renewable assignments? How does this look in your classroom?

NIKKI: Thank you, Alexis. Of course, I would love to share some of our examples of what we do in my classes. It really runs the gamut from everything that Amanda was talking about. This year, I started using an open educational resource textbook in one of my introductory level history courses. And this is a great textbook. It doesn't cost students money. It's a wonderful thing to use because it's well written and conveys the information that they need. But it's also kind of bare bones. When you buy a textbook from a big publishing company, it comes with lots of images, and maps, and questions, and glossaries, and all kinds of other things.

So I'm actually asking my students in this class to help me build out those extra resources as assignments, and they will be used for future students. For instance, we have an assignment to build a timeline for one of the chapters in the textbook. I will go through those timelines with them, and help them edit them, and we'll get them to the place where they can actually be published as part of the textbook for next year's students. I've heard from students that they like the idea that they're doing something that is going to help somebody in the future. So I think that's a really cool example.

Another thing that I love to do is I actually take almost all of my classes to the Special Collections Department in Norlin Library every year. Doing history is all about, for me, getting into the resources. How do we know what we know about the past? And a lot of it is from the artifacts and the written evidence that we have of the past. Special Collections has some of the coolest items around, as does the Å·ÃÀ¿Ú±¬ÊÓƵ Art Museum. So I've taken students to Special Collections, I've taken them to the art museum, and then I asked them to pick out some objects that we actually view in those classroom visits, and put together an exhibit, a digital exhibit online that relates to the theme of the class.

I've had students in past semesters do a compendium of the Crusades. I've had students do exhibits relating to coins from the Roman Empire, and so relating to the emperors and the way that they're depicted on the coins that they had made during that time period. We then put the pages together. They basically write the material and put together their individual pages, and then we put those together on a mecca and actually have them available for students to look at.

Probably one of my favorite exhibits coincided with something that Special Collections was doing. And so we had students in the second half of the Western Civ sequence, the Europe since 1600 class, and they basically got to look at artifacts from World War I and World War II, including posters that were done for recruitment for World War I. I had some amazing student exhibits dealing with posters, and letters, and things that were created at the time of World War I that they put then put together to each make pages in this 20th century World at War exhibit on a mecca online.

ALEXIS: As an instructor, you sound really passionate about what you're doing in your classroom. I think that's really important. And you've spoken a little bit about student reactions to this work and how positive is it has been. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more on how students have responded to this type of work.

NIKKI: For the most part, students are really excited. I will say for the most part, because there are some students that don't really want to have the pressure of having something put out there into the internet for somebody else to see. And so I try really hard to make sure that students know that final stage of publication for future students to use is up to them. But that is the end goal that I would really like to see, and it certainly doesn't affect their grade if they choose not to publish it. But I think those students who choose to go the route of actually having their work published out there on the internet for everybody to see, they do feel a sense of pride, and they do put a little extra in. I've certainly heard back from students that they like the idea that they could then point back to that later and say, "Hey, this is something cool I did in one of my classes, and look at the skills that I learned in order to do it."

ALEXIS: So you speak a little bit on publishing students' work on the internet, and I know Amanda specifically is working with the University of Å·ÃÀ¿Ú±¬ÊÓƵ and an organization called BuffsCreate through the College of Arts and Sciences, which actually allows students to take control of their information online, and also actually really ties well into what we're talking about today. So, Amanda, do you want to speak a little bit on BuffsCreate?

AMANDA: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So BuffsCreate is a project that we have in the College of Arts and Sciences. It is basically our instance of Domain of One's Own, if anyone is familiar with that. Domain of One's Own was developed at the University of Mary Washington, and it adopts Virginia Woolf's mindset around a Room of One's own. In Woolf's essay, she asserts that women need a room and a space to be writers. And this is really pretty much the same for our students today. They live their lives online, so they need a space online to be able to write, and to be, and to learn how to live in this information landscape that our world is these days.

So what BuffsCreate does is it's basically web hosting. We work with a company called Reclaim Hosting to offer this service to our students and to our faculty. It gives them a domain name and a space to host any of their academic and creative works, and course projects, like what Nikki was talking about. They can use a variety of open source applications to build their websites and to control what they want to share and what they don't want to share.

It's a space for experimentation online, and to be free from and to not being encumbered by all of the corporate interest of other social media or other web hosted services where they're trying to sell you something, or they're trying to collect data on you, or they're trying to direct you to use their service in a certain way, or it's proprietary, so that if you ever want to get what is in that service out, you've got to pay something. So this is a really good service for our students to be able to blog, to create websites, to create course projects, to do things to make their work visible to the world and have authentic audiences, and have something to show for the work that they've done here, something that doesn't end up in the waste basket.

ALEXIS: As a user of BuffsCreate myself, I actually created my own blog, and it's just really my own space where I feel comfortable posting. It's really just a place for my portfolio, but Nikki has really inspired me to maybe think about posting more than just my resume, but maybe some of the work that I've done for classes for the world to see.

So we've gotten some really great specific examples from just a couple classes at Å·ÃÀ¿Ú±¬ÊÓƵ, but moving beyond just Nikki's classroom and Amanda's work with BuffsCreate, how do you see non-disposable assignments fitting into the future of education? And this is a question to the both of you. What institutional changes do you hope to see as teachers begin implementing some of these ideas from open education in their own classrooms?

AMANDA: That's a really big question, the future of education. I like to think that maybe I'm affecting the future of higher ed a little bit, but it's probably above my pay grade. But anyway, I do know what I'm trying to do and how I'm trying to affect small changes at the College of Arts and Sciences here at C Boulder. As part of the innovation incubator, I was motivated to share the concept of open education, and to start to build some momentum around using open ed resources, and to think about the possibility of what it could do for our students beyond just saving textbook cost. And don't get me wrong, that's super important and huge for our students, but I also want to find ways to make our students' work more visible and more meaningful for them.

In the incubator, I lead a project called the Collective to Advance Multimodal Participatory Publishing, affectionately known as CAMPP, much easier to say than the long acronym. There's CAMPP with two Ps. So this is a group of faculty who are working with students on various publishing projects. Some are like what Nikki has described. Others involve students creating open online annotations. Another is publishing a student driven journal. One is publishing curriculum for K-12 students. One is about sharing performance-based facilitation tools to break down barriers in community social justice work. And there's more projects than that. Those are just a few examples.

But CAMPP is really about building awareness and capacity to do open education, to realize that this can really change the way we think about the experiences we want our students to have, and to give them authentic experiences to build on and to build from when they leave the university and when they're out in the work world. They've had some more authentic experiences beyond writing an essay or taking a fill in the bubble exam. So I hope that is helping to make some small changes and helping instructors see how they can do more open education projects.

NIKKI: I think that this is definitely an example of how one little pebble in the pond ripples and grows. Because when you think about where open education started, I think the first time I started to hear about open educational resources on campus, it really was all about textbooks and saving student money on textbooks. And like Amanda, I would say that's absolutely important, but there's so much more to it. So when you talk about the future of education, I think things like CAMPP, which I'm also a part of, are giving us the opportunity to explore what that future might look like. And certainly, I think for my students, I hope that in one year, two years, five years, more and more students are taking advantage of the opportunity to build their own portfolios and to do work with things like BuffsCreate to have their own voice be a part of their education rather than it all be from the top down.

ALEXIS: Well, it seems that things like open education and non-disposable assignments require some extra time and effort from professors and students alike, but the rewards seem to outweigh the drawbacks, as you guys have been saying. Nikki, as an educator with experience in this work, what words of encouragement and advice do you have for other educators wanting to implement this in their own classrooms? What other things do you think faculty should know?

NIKKI: I think there's probably two main things I would say. Well, actually maybe three. First, dream big. Dream big about the possibilities. That's the first thing. But two, start small. Start with a little project, start with something manageable because it can be pretty overwhelming to think about all the different opportunities out there. And the third thing I would say is we have amazing resources on this campus. We have resources through ASSETT. We have resources through the Center for Teaching and Learning. We have resources through our libraries. And so your university, if you're listening to this from somewhere else, probably has similar types of resources. And particularly librarians can be amazing at helping you locate the types of things you can work with to produce these kinds of assignments. It's that nexus between what we have to offer from places like our libraries and the assignments we create, and then the technology we use to actually get that assignment out there that the magic happens. So explore where all those resources come from.

ALEXIS: Well, thank you again to Nikki Jobin and Amanda McAndrew for taking the time to sit down with me today. I really appreciated hearing your guys' insights, and as a student myself, I'm really excited to see some of these changes hopefully being implemented in my future classrooms.

BLAIR: Thank you so much for joining us for today's conversation on the Emerge podcast series, an offering of the University of Å·ÃÀ¿Ú±¬ÊÓƵ Boulder ASSETT Innovation Incubator. If you're curious to learn more about today's topic or the innovation incubator, please contact us at ASSETT, A-S-S-E-T-T, at colorado.edu. We look forward to hearing from you.