Open Pedagogy Recap: OpenLab at the CUE/OER Showcase!

On Friday, October 30, the OpenLab team along with City Tech librarian Cailean Cooney hosted a digital workshop as part of the 2020 CUE Conference and CUNY OER Showcase.

This conference was originally planned for March 2020, but was rescheduled due to the pandemic. Because so much about our teaching and learning environment has changed since then, we adapted our February Open Pedagogy session to talk with folks about access and accessibility in our current circumstances.

Below are our discussion questions- talked through together via Google Docs instead of on chart paper!- and some highlights from participant comments.

1. What connotations do you have with the word “accommodation”?

people shouldn’t be “accommodated for,’ but instead design should consider the full range of human experience / abilities / dispositions”

“an accommodation is a place to stay…it’s a place at least comfortable, ideally welcoming and friendly, for all of us.”

Requires medical documentation, submission to disability office, approval and recommended “reasonable accommodation” for traditional learning styles”

Flexibility, willingness to make things easier and accessible.”

2. How do OERs help us address equity and access? What does the platform you use to share open course materials with students have to do with access? 

if students can’t get to materials from their available devices, this is a huge barrier to entry! mobile/tablet access is how many CUNY students (and honestly fac/staff) use the web!”

The platform is critical and should not be a secondary consideration. Using proprietary platforms to share open content is (IMO) problematic, and is a reason I’m happy that open solutions like openlab exist.”

Our LMS on campus simply can’t be used on a mobile phone even though the vast majority of my students are using mobile phones”

3. How does our current sociocultural situation affect how we think about access in higher education? What new questions or concerns have come up around using technology to facilitate access?

Access to … food, health care, child care, technology, space to work– it’s all part of the mix. We have to think of “access” in this much larger context.”

I’m thinking much more about how to take time into account in course design, course expectations for students, and for faculty. For instance, the time it will take to do required readings?”

I’ve most of all been thinking about how to make my sites accessible to those with poor internet access. Post-COVID, I realize that I need to redesign sites checking for bandwidth, loadability. I tested my sites with Google Page Speed, and although they seem fast on my internet, they clearly are not easily loadable.

I’ve been using more radical course policies than I have been brave enough to try in the past. I don’t want to go back, even after the pandemic. The current situation is just a more heightened/visible version of a situation that totally already existed.”

FLEXIBLE DUE DATES”

The technology needs to be taught, not just assume everyone knows how.”

4. What are some current strategies you have, or would like to try, to make course content accessible / useful / usable to all students, with shifting and complex needs?

Reflection-based grading: students respond to their own work from a reflective perspective, analyze what they struggled with and did great at, and assign themselves grades based on their work towards each project in the first-year writing/whatever course. (Read Jesse Stommel on ungrading!)”

Check-ins with students”

Lastly, some resources that might be useful in considering accessibility strategies:

Commons in a Box OpenLab at NYC Digital Humanities Week

Blocks. Spinning.

Did you ever show friends or colleagues City Tech’s OpenLab, only to have them ask, “How can I have an OpenLab at my school/institution/organization?!”
The answer is Commons in a Box OpenLab!

Please share information about the NYCDH Week workshop introducing CBOX OpenLab, tomorrow, 2/7, at the CUNY Graduate Center:

RSVP

UPDATE: Slides from the 2/7 workshop

This workshop introduces Commons In A Box OpenLab: free, open source software that enables anyone to create a commons space specifically designed for open learning, where students, faculty, and staff can collaborate across disciplinary boundaries and share their work openly with one another and the world.

Funded by a generous grant from the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities, the project brings together Commons In A Box (CBOX; http://commonsinabox.org/) — the software that powers NYCDH — and City Tech’s OpenLab platform for teaching, learning, and collaboration (https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/). The result is a teaching-focused version of CBOX that provides a powerful and flexible alternative to costly proprietary systems, and is already being adopted at CUNY and beyond.

We will begin by introducing CBOX OpenLab and demonstrating its features and functionality, using examples drawn from City Tech’s OpenLab and BMCC’s new installation. We will then engage participants in group discussion of how they might use (or are already using) CBOX OpenLab, and the benefits and challenges of open learning.

Equipment: Laptops helpful, but not required

 

Recap: Getting Hands-On with Research Projects on the OpenLab

Thursday evening brought the last Open Pedagogy event of the semester, Getting Hands-On with Research Projects on the OpenLab. A working session, the workshop focused on tools and strategies to implement research practices on the site. Faculty who attended were especially interested in exploring methods to support web-based student research. The event began with OpenLab Community Team members presenting strong examples of research and collaboration on the OpenLab, including Prof. Raffi Katchadourian’s professional portfolio, the collaborative Opening Gateways site, and Prof. Jody Rosen’s interactive map assignment, a Being in Brooklyn Walking Tour.

Participants then broke into working groups to begin to implement particular strategies according to their needs. For example, one group discussed integrating visual mathematical elements, like graphs, into posts as a way to build resources for students in Economics classes. An OpenLab Community Team member is now looking into possible WordPress plugins to enable this kind of activity. Another group considered using the OpenLab to facilitate the design and implementation of a survey, as well as its results. How exciting to see faculty members begin to implement ideas that they had been developing in Open Pedagogy events throughout the semester!

To that end, thank you to all who participated in Open Pedagogy events this spring! We look forward to following your ideas, projects, research, and collaboration on the OpenLab!

WAC Workshop: The Creative Classroom, 5/6, 1:00pm

The Writing Across the Curriculum program’s final workshop of the semester, Tuesday May 6, will focus on creative classroom activities that engage active learning and promote student engagement. This sounds like a great opportunity to learn about opening the classroom to creative possibilities!

webpage for 'The Creative Classroom' on the Faculty Commons site at City Tech

Download  The Creative Classroom poster

Check out the WAC OpenLab site

 

Interested in Publishing your Educational Research?

 

There’s a workshop today on developing research questions and methodologies for publishing educational research, and I thought how useful this could be for this group. When we work on the OpenLab, we’re building on great projects that have come before us and continue to inspire us, such as other open sites at other CUNY colleges, or the inspiring work that Jim Groom talked about at the OpenLab’s launch. But as much as we’re in good company with those esteemed colleagues, we’re also innovating and experimenting in new ways, ones that others would benefit from learning about. It would be great to think about how the ways in which we adapt our courses for the OpenLab, and adopt open pedagogies, would become the foundation for research projects and publications. If you’re free at 1:00 on Thursday, Febrary 21st, please consider attending. And consider sharing your ideas here to get others engaged in the endeavor!Event promotion for 'Developing Research Questions & Methodologies'