This year, VIU’s Teaching and Learning Leadership Council is engaging with the brave new world of open pedagogies. According to BCcampus (2019), open pedagogy, also known as open educational practices (OEP), “…is the use of open educational resources (OER) to support learning, or the open sharing of teaching practices with a goal of improving education and training at the institutional, professional, and individual level.” When instructors use open pedagogy in their practice, they invite learners to join them as co-designers and co-creators of teaching and learning (BCcampus, 2019). Throughout this academic year, members of the council will be taking up open pedagogies in a variety of ways, applying principles of open education to their existing practice through self-directed and reflective inquiry. At the end of the academic year, they intend to share with the larger VIU community, and perhaps beyond, reflections of what they learn throughout this process. What follows are some of the projects council members have committed to.
Carla Tilley (Nursing)
Carla is interested in continuing to look at digital story telling as an open practice that could be incorporated into nursing education. Carla presented on digital storytelling to her BSN Faculty on curriculum day. Carla sees digital storytelling as one example of digital pedagogy that could perhaps be easily incorporated into BSN’s existing teaching practice.
Joceylne Praud (Political Studies)
Joceylne is working with her POLI 222 course (Governance and Public Policy in Canada) by having students create and showcase public policy briefs. She is planning on showcasing the briefs on a VIU WordPress site so that the public policy briefs are indeed public.
Eliza Gardiner (Theatre)
Eliza is interested in exploring the concept of an open-education journal hosted a VIU. Although just an emerging idea at this time, an open education journal at VIU could be an open and accessible space, digitally and visually engaging, where VIU students and instructors can showcase their work related to open pedagogy and OERs. The (awesome) working title at this point is “Open Airium.”
Bonnie Davidson (Education)
Bonnie Davidson continues to consider how to make her courses most accessible and open to her students. She is looking more at opportunities to use ZOOM in her coursework, and has recently registered for a MOOC offered by Athabasca University entitled “Technology-Enabled Learning.”
Jessica Gemalla (Horticulture)
As part of her program’s advanced identification course, Jessica is working on creating an herbarium with her students. Students have been collecting and pressing samples over the past few weeks, and have started mounting and labelling today. Attached are a few images of our progress. The aim is to have about 15 specimens complete this semester, and then work with the library to have the documents digitised and catalogued. The herbarium will remain here at the VIU G.R. Horticulture Training Centre as a study resource for future classes. Subsequent classes will add to the collection. The digital images with data will be accessible on the internet as a virtual herbarium.
Brook Pearce (Centre for Experiential Learning)
Brook is interested in learning more about pressbooks, and more specifically how to create a Pressbook. He plans to collect feedback from recent VIU graduates and create a first draft of a Pressbook entitled “What can I do with my degree.”
Sarah Carruthers (Computer Science)
Sarah is working on developing an open resource tool for students in her first year programming course by having students create a tutorial for future students. Students will also give one another feedback on their submissions for a bonus “helping behaviour” mark in the class. The open site will likely take the shape of a WordPress blog.
Mary Anne Moloney (Nursing)
Mary Anne’s project is for students to develop a case study that can be used by any student in the class as a resource for the next three years. Students will develop a videoed presentation in the form of a roleplay with two different scenarios. They must teach a topic around perionatal care to two different patients to show how the teaching would vary by context. Students will post it and the scenarios will be open to the cohort for review when they go into their 4th year placements.
Charlene Stewart (ABE)
Charlene has already been working on an open resource for students to submit strategies for successful learning. Charlene is streamlining the process, developing formats and guidelines that make it easier to manage for herself, and easier to use for current and future students. She is also preparing a faculty guide to creating such student-created open resources.
Sally Vinden (Hairdressing)
Sally is working to create awareness and greater uptake of OER across the Trades. Sally is creating a created a map or gantt chart to work on how to communicate and share information in the Trades. She will be bringing in outside ‘experts’ in OER in trades for various events in order to raise the profile of OERs. By the end of this academic year, Sally hopes to have five instructors present on their experiences in adopting, creating, or using OERs.
Dawn Johnson (English Language Centre)
Dawn is working on creating an online VIU Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) community. Having done some research with past grads, Dawn has decided to use LinkedIn as the platform because it is both professional and accessible around the world. The purpose of this TESL community is to support each other in terms of teaching methods and resources, as well as teaching opportunities here in Canada and abroad.
Heather Wakely (ABE)
Heather is taking an existing open source biology textbook and adapting it for her ABE students.
Riki Cox (Education)
Riki is working on an open resource with her PB5s (these are post-degree students new to the Education faculty). Together, Riki and her students are working on an inquiry question: “Why aren’t all students in my class thriving?” and each student has chosen a path out from this question which they plan to study. This project will likely continue into the Spring semester culminating in “chapters” of a Pressbook.
Resources
BCcampus (2019). OpenEd. Retrieved from: https://open.bccampus.ca/what-is-open-education/what-is-open-pedagogy/