What course are you interested in creating as part of the School of Open?
When you think about creating a course, ask yourself, "What do I want to help people DO?" versus "What do I think people should know or learn?" For example, I want to help:
We want to help elementary (or primary) educators easily find and use free, useful resources for their classes. We also want to help them think of and incorporate activities that teach their students digital world skills -- such as finding, remixing, and sharing digital media and materials on the web.
How can open content, tools, or processes help people do what they do better?
Open practices include using the content, tools and processes shared with us, enabling others to use, share and adapt what we create, and supporting transparency in our content, tools and processes. If a course involves teaching or learning about any of these practices, either broadly or in a particular field, then it probably fits in the School of Open.
Elementary educators can take advantage of open educational resources, or OER, for when they need free materials to supplement lesson plans -- or even for creating new lesson plans. They can also tap into the OER network of teachers already sharing and using materials with each other. They can share their own work online, contributing to the pool of shared OER and simultaneously to the improvement of their resource by other teachers. They can lead by example, for other teachers but especially their students by finding, creating, remixing, and sharing their own work first through a collaborative online project. They can then incorporate a similar activity for their students, having them learn these web relevant skills and directly experience the benefits of engaging with open resources and the collaborative process. Teachers can share their own experiences about the course transparently, via blogs and social media.
Is there a specific aspect or mechanism that keeps people from taking advantage of open stuff?
Think about the key obstacles that discourage someone from learning about openness, applying open tools, or sharing their work openly. For example, what might cast doubt into a musicians mind when it comes to using openly licensed material? Why might a graphics designer refrain from sharing their works openly? Are there good reasons for not going fully open or are certain misconceptions playing a role?
Elementary educators may be restricted by district determined curricula (lack of flexibility), restricted internet access through school systems, time, resources, training, and child privacy laws. Child privacy laws are good reasons for teachers to not share their students work, except anonymously. They might also be restrained by their district policy around who owns the content they create and/or use.
Who are you trying to help? Think about the course from the learner's standpoint.
Who will be taking the course? What real world questions is s/he likely to ask? What needs is s/he likely to have and barriers s/he is likely to run into?
Elementary/primary educators. Open to anyone in the world, but we will be facilitating course from US pacific time zone.
Create a user scenario:
- Draw the person you are trying to help.
- List 3 questions (or more) that person would ask or list 3 problems s/he needs help solving.
- 1. How do I find free stuff I can use in my courses, legally?
- 2. How do I know the stuff I find is free to use?
- 3. Why should I teach my students about finding and sharing open content?
- 4. How do I get my students to share online without violating their privacy? Will I be risking my job if we do collaborative projects via the Internet?
- 5. Who owns the resources I create? remix?
- 6. Why should I share my own resources online?
- Describe that person's situation in a few sentences or short paragraph, either out loud or written down.
- Jill Samberg is a 5th grade teacher. She is teaching writing composition from district determined curricula, but has some leeway in the activities and exercises she might have her students do. She finds the old composition books boring and irrelevant to the digital age, and really wants her students to incorporate digital resources, like multimedia, into their learning. She has some time, as she is willing to improve her lesson plan for personal and professional enrichment, but no extra money or other resources to put towards this effort. She would like to find examples of what other teachers have done, in addition to free resources she might adapt for her class. She also wants her students to be able to find and incorporate media - but to do so without breaking any copyright laws. Her main goal is to get her students to be excited about writing composition, while at the same time learning more relevant writing skills for the digital present and future - whatever learning forms this may take.
What can you reuse and build on?
Do openly licensed resources already exist that explain/teach any of this? Are people already teaching or learning about related topics elsewhere that you can tap to collectively build the course?
Yes, some - we plan to adapt and incorporate as appropriate the list of resources at http://pad.p2pu.org/p/Courses_for_kids.
Document your thinking behind the course and learning activities
The learner may ask, why am I doing this? What am I learning? Be transparent about the learning objectives.
Participants will learn the following skills:
+ Finding/discovering educational resources that are open for sharing and remix (CC licensed or in the public domain)
- Project: Exercise of finding several open educational resources for use in the classroom.
- Badge: Eureka! Open Detective. Finder. Recognizer. (pics: gold?) - Awarded to project that finds resource for topic chosen under CC license, able to identify what s/he can, can't do with it.
+ Remixing open educational resources
- Project: Exercise of adapting an open educational resource for classroom use. Optional: may work with others if they are working in same subject area.
- Badge: Remixer. Alchemist. Media mixer. Mixer. (pics: cocktail? brew? double, double toil and trouble?) - Mashed 2 or more CC/PD resources together?
+ Sharing remixes on the web
- Project: Exercise of CC licensing and publishing an adapted open educational resource for classroom use.
- Badge: Open___maker. Uploaded..
++ Attributing CC licensed materials used
- Project: Exercise of CC licensing and publishing an adapted open educational resource for classroom use.
- Badge: Attributor. Creditor. I gave credit! Credit for credit. Due credit. - Proper attribution verified according to CC best practices.
++ CC licensing their works
- Project: Exercise of CC licensing an adapted open educational resource for classroom use. Optional: Applying a CC license to their personal blog.
- Badge: Licenseur. Sharer. Publisher. I know how to make it machine-readable. I know how to choose a license.
+ Explaining CC licenses and how they work
- Project: Popcorn-style remix of an educational resource about CC for students. By the end, all participants will have contributed.
- Badge: Open teacher. Explainer.
+ Collaborative editing
- Project: Popcorn-style remix of an educational resource about CC for students. By the end, all participants will have contributed.
- Badge: Collaborator. Contributor. I got someone to ...
+ Supporting transparency in all work processes
- Project: Share experiences on blogs and social media. Provide peer assessment/feedback/critique on public discussion forum.
- Badge: Transparency. Sharer. I documented..
+ Advocating openness (extra credit)
- Project: Have their students participate in the popcorn-style remix of an educational resource about CC, by creating a video on how to share music and other media.
- Badge: Advocator. Open Advocate.
Course Badge for overall completion - Open Educator / License to Share
Resources for Week 3: Find the materials with the rights you need
= FEEDBACK =
- I LOVE the final activity. Getting the kids involved is not only a great way to validate the learning that the teachers are doing but is great to get them inspired by the kids and their creativity.
The one thing I would suggest thinking through is how to encourage teachers to incorporate this in the classroom. Is there a general unit this would fit into best? Do the teachers have time to implement this? each district and grade will have different requirements so it might help having a resource to help teachers get started or extend tht peer discussion with some overhead support to help them actually kick start this level of engagement Since I see it as an extremely important "extra credit"
- Good point about suggestion existing units where this might fit it. I have had success implementing this through ELA (digital storytelling), research projects and library media units, as well as in technology/multimedia creation/media literacy units.
- host a discussion about different individuals' needs and then brainstorming as a group to address those needs: have some sort of plan to get them using it in the classroom; a great way to establish better understanding for people who might still behaving some difficulties with the concept and even result in some great collaborative ideas
Also popcorn is relatively easy to use I think but every user will have a different technical background, maybe another option for remixing?
- i meant popcorn style (like when you read in a circle and you popcorn the next person) not the technology
Sime teachers also might not have blogs, is there a default place where thy can all contribute without that or social media?
- hm, i could set something up or do an RSS feed..
- Can't they do that on P2PU? (Will be easier for some anyway)
I'd also be curious to see what the kids think once the teachers show their final product. Not sure if that fits here, maybe in the shared experiences?
- hm, maybe as part of final blog post - report what your students' reactions were
I know this will come with the more in depth build out but I would also like to see some target questions for teachers to think about throughout the process that might help for a more fruitful reflection at the end of the course.
- yes, def will have discussion q's dispersed throughout
Let me know if you need me to clarify or elaborate on any of this Jane! Excited to see this come together!-Victoria
Feedback from Paul Stacey
as this course is facilitated it may be useful to explain who the facilitator is and what role the facilitator will be playing.as this course will be following a schedule over 7 weeks it may be worth giving participants a sense of the overall weekly rhythm the course will have especially the plan for when virtual meet ups will happen- really like the 4 means of communication/interaction, 1. weekly virtual meet ups, 2. asynchronous discussion forum, 3. blogs, 4. twitter. Be great to explain why these four methods have been chosen and how they complement each other pedagogically.
Will tweets to #cc4ed somehow be aggregated and displayed within the course framework? - the week 1 requirement for participants to setup a blog using something like WordPress, Blogger, or Tumblr may be overwhelming for some and may require a significant time investment beyond some K-12 teachers capacity. I'd hate to see significant drop out due to this right in the very first week.
Might be worth giving those for whom this is a showstopper an alternative? Might be simpler for them to merely post to the discussion? Or alternatively set up a course blog they all post to? - I like the book Shared Creations: Making Use of Creative Commons and activities in it - nice resource
. Might be worth capturing from course participants one or more K-12 resources that stand out for them as being exceptional. Teachers like to hear from other teachers about great resources they are using that others may also find useful. it may be worth delineating between openly licensed resources (eg. images, audio, video, …) from openly licensed K-12 curricula (eg. CK-12, curriki, …) Openly licensed resources are in a sense raw materials, not necessarily created with educational intent, that teachers can include in courses to supplement and enhance core curricular materials. Openly licensed K-12 curricula has been authored with educational intent and usually are intended to fulfill mandated learning outcomes. I think K-12 educators will be interested in both but will appreciate this distinction as it helps them think through just what they might be looking for in terms of open resources.- the more I look at the descriptions we use for our CC licenses at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ the more I think we need to more carefully use terms like remix, tweak, build upon, redistribute, and download. No where do we define what we mean by any of these terms and I think some differentiation between them could be helpful. The way I see it there is a difference between an adaptation, a remix and a collection. All three have different implications when it come to licensing and attribution.
Expect K-12 teachers will appreciate something that helps clarify these differences. This could involve activities that, 1. create an adaptation, 2. create a remix, 3. create a collection. - one of the main questions I repeatedly get in K-12 is "how to evaluate the quality of OER?". An activity that helps K-12 teachers understand how OER quality can be assessed may be useful - see http://www.achieve.org/oer-rubrics for example
Feedback from Christina Hendricks
- 1. In the "ETMOOC" course I'm a part of right now (http://etmooc.org) we have similar communication tools as what you suggest (blogs, twitter, discussion board--though ours is through Google+), but we also have a social bookmarking group that we can contribute to. Ours is on
Diigo, which I find really useful because you can highlight and put notes on pages and share that if you want (or just save your highlights/notes for yourself). That way, when people find other resources on the web they think are useful for the group, they're all in one place--which I think is better than trying to hunt them down from a discussion board. - 2. I do agree that a blog aggregator would be best. Otherwise, people are going to have to search through the discussion board to find blog feeds amongst the other items in the discussion board. I wish I could help with this, but I don't know anything about it other than what I posted earlier from Alan Levine.
- 3. In ETMOOC there is also a
twitter list that people can subscribe to. I think they created it on the "etmooc" twitter profile itself, by just adding people's twitter accounts to a list. See here: https://twitter.com/etmooc/lists. Now, this would take a good deal of work on the facilitators' part, to set up a separate twitter account and add people's profiles to the list, and perhaps you would rather participants just add each other themselves, and that's fine. Just thought I'd mention another way in case it sounds good. It would allow participants to just subscribe to the lists created centrally (though they'd have to resubscribe each time a new person was added to the list, which is a downside). You could, alternatively, have them send a tweet to an account asking to be added to a list, rather than hunting for their twitter handles in the discussion board. Of course, feel free to ignore if this sounds like too much work or wouldn't really make things easier for the participants! - 4.
On each week's page, I'm not sure, as a layperson, what the "discussion" refers to. Does it mean that's what will be discussed in the synchronous meeting, and/or what people might discuss in the discussion board, and/or what they could blog about? I think it refers to what will be discussed in the meeting, but perhaps you could clarify? - 5.
On the remix and attribute week (week 4), I went to the linked P2PU course on Teach someone something with open content (remix section): https://p2pu.org/en/groups/teach-someone-something-with-open-content-part-2/content/edit-and-change-the-resources-as-needed/ I found that, as someone new to remixing, there wasn't much there for a newbie on just HOW to remix things. I wanted to know how to change a photo, how to edit and change a video, but there isn't much about that. There is a link to a lesson from Michigan Makers on this week's page, but it's under "bonus" and people might not notice it. I wonder if separating out links to remix tools on the page would be helpful, and adding a couple more remix tools. For example, Mozilla popcorn has a pretty easy interface for remixing videos (https://popcorn.webmaker.org/ ). I don't know of any other image editors, but maybe others do.
- 6.
I had a similar issue for week 5: I might want to create a video or something else multimedia, but if I don't know how then there are no resources for me! I think some links to digital storytelling tools might be good here. Here is one website I use with a good list of tools: http://50ways.wikispaces.com/StoryTools - I asked my Twitter folks how to do a simple blog syndication, so that all blog posts could be put in one place. One person suggested Google Reader Bundles; you set up a folder in Google Reader with the feeds from all the blogs you want to include, and then you can make a bundle out of that that others can see.
Feedback from Victoria Lungu
- will you send out a reminder or anything each week?
-Consider asking people to also highlight their grade level/s. This will definitely impact how they teach their kids and what projects they might be doing. It might be implied with the personal introduction "I am an __ teacher" but still worth highlighting.