Last month, we kicked off our GO Chat series for 2021 with a dive into all-things-open, as in Open Educational Resources (OER), Open Pedagogy, and Open Science.
We started with a brief discussion about several recent articles that caught our attention:
Helping us understand this journey about all-things-open was UMBC alumni Dr. Karen Cangialosi, a Professor of Biology and Open Education Faculty Fellow at Keene State College (KSC) in Keene, New Hampshire.
Although she regularly incorporates open pedagogy in all her courses, Karen explains her journey started with an episode of the podcast, The Future Trends Forum by Bryan Alexander. During the episode featuring Gardner Cambell (2016), Karen recalled, "I'm a biology professor who used mostly traditional materials, but I did a complete 180 when it came to open education after listening to Gardner Campbell."
A proponent of Open Educational Resources (OER), Karen says OERs are an important gateway to open education in terms of people, practices, and content. Open pedagogy is about access, agency, and community. Karen describes a learning environment where her students can work with her to create content or learning outcomes, write an attendance policy, design self assessments, or determine how they will be graded.
While students can be unsure, or even resistant to this approach, Karen suggests that since most students will not know what this process can be about she still offers more traditional methods, content, or assessments. And what often ends up happening in those instances is that a few weeks after watching classmates create and share content, students will come to her and ask, "Can I change? I want to do what they're doing instead of this 25-page paper I said I'd write."
When it comes to students sharing content, Karen never requires them to create openly licensed work; however, she provides examples and opportunities that make it possible. For example, her BIO 318 students created a textbook -- A Student's Guide to Tropical Marine Biology that is utilized by other students across the open education community.
Karen acknowledges open education has been building slowly and she frequently guides colleagues to start with "your desire as a professor and what you want students to do and learn in your course." As higher education is changing dramatically now due to COVID-19, Karen sees faculty ideally positioned to shape those conversations and changes. Read more about Karen at her website: https://karencang.net/
Roy Prouty
HPCF System Administrator
Research Computing Specialist
Roy Prouty
HPCF System Administrator
Research Computing Specialist
As part of our ongoing commitment to security, the Unix Infrastructure group will be conducting its quarterly system patching on Friday, February 19th and Saturday, February 20th. While many of the systems will be patched without any service disruption, there are some systems which require the downtime of key services. The schedule below outlines which key services will be offline and for how long.
Friday, 2/19/2021 between 5pm and 10pm (most systems will only be down for a short period during this time):
Saturday, 2/20/2021 between 9am and 11am(most systems will only be down for a short period during this time):
Please let us know if you have any concerns or questions.
Thanks!
Tim Champ
Manager of Unix Infrastructure
UMBC DoIT
UMBC’s Learning Analytics Program is a community of scholars interested in using analytical data to advance student achievement and success. We’re relaunching the program after, like so many things, Covid-19 interrupted our plans. The program has two parts, a community of practice and a competitive mini-grant program supported through the Provost’s Office.
Meetings of the community of practice are open to all faculty, full and part time. During these meetings, we’ll share ongoing research, have invited speakers, and learn about the data, tools, and platforms that faculty can use to improve student success and learning. We’ll have infrastructure experts, data scientists, and others on hand to help interested faculty with access to data and to help design analysis or interventions to better understand the factors that improve student learning or student success in face to face, hybrid, or online classes.
Our first meeting of the community this semester will be held on March 11, where we’ll have virtual visitors from Indiana University show some of their work on grade surprise followed by a discussion about using learning analytics from both a practitioner and research perspective. More details about the seminar are available here.
The mini-grant program is open to all faculty (full and part time). Each successful applicant will receive $2,000 in research funds and when needed, a license for our visualization software to enable the exploration of data and the sharing of discoveries. The Analytics and Business Intelligence Teams in DoIT and the Provost’s Office will provide support to those who need assistance with data (and will coordinate support with IRADS when needed) and in creating visualizations or helping design and implement the analysis of data.
We are interested in proposals surrounding student success and retention through graduation, especially those that explore relationships between activities and learning in one course and outcomes in others. We are also interested in proposals from instructors of courses that have low success rates, are critical progression points for students, or that impart fundamental skills required for success in the major or program. Collaborative proposals are allowed and encouraged. Multiple proposals with different goals may be submitted from the same department. Participants who identify course or practice redesign as part of their work are eligible and encouraged to compete for a Hrabowski Innovation Award.
Interested in more details? Here are links to the WebEx recording of our kickoff meeting and the PowerPoint presentation that went along with it. You can also contact me (Bob Carpenter) or John Fritz directly.
The Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) warns of a text message from “Maryland-MDot Urgent” which addresses “MDot Customers.” This message was NOT from MDOT. This message contains a link that will ask for your personal information. MDOT will not ask you to enter your personal information in such a manner. This message is SPAM. It has been reported to the MDOT’s IT Department.
If you receive this text message: DO NOT click on the link. DELETE the message!
If you have clicked on the link: Please visit the Maryland Attorney General’s ID Theft page: https://www.marylandattorneygeneral.gov/Pages/IdentityTheft/default.aspxfor information on identity theft and ways to protect against identity theft.
Received any suspicious emails or messages? Please send them to security@umbc.edu
To read more articles published by DOIT visit: https://itsecurity.umbc.edu/critical/?tag=notice
]]>In a survey of more than 900 students from fall 2020 who completed courses that utilized no-cost or low-cost Open Educational Resources (OER), UMBC students said they appreciated saving money on instructional materials and would recommend an OER course to others.
Nearly 90% of students said the quality of the OER course materials was of similar or higher quality than non-OER course materials. In the surveyed courses, faculty replaced traditional print textbooks with OERs and provided supplemental digital homework tools. Forty-five percent of students who completed the survey said they would be fairly likely or very likely to enroll in an OER course again, while 53% said they would recommend an OER course to others.
Instructors Sarah Bass (CHEM 101), Tara Carpenter (CHEM 102), and Maria Manni (SPAN 101/103) replaced traditional print textbooks with OERs and provided supplemental digital homework tools.
Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium (digital or otherwise) that are released under an open license that permits no-cost or low-cost access, use, adaptation, or redistribution (UNESCO, 2002). OER can include textbooks, syllabi, supplementary materials, quizzes, assessment rubrics, homework, or labs.
About 60 comments were provided about students’ experience with OERs. The majority of written feedback focused on positive engagement with the digital resources and homework tools that supported students’ ability to practice problems or equations and learn vocabulary.
Students offered additional comments about how they would use money saved from OER toward paying tuition or other fees (64%), covering personal expenses (55%), buying textbooks or materials for other classes (46%), or taking an additional course (19%). Some expressed challenges with the materials themselves, such as relevance to course content, impact on learning style, or ability to annotate online content vs. printed material.
Additional observations:
A total of 551 students completed the survey from the 917 invited to participate. The survey was distributed to students using Blackboard’s native Enterprise Survey tool.
Explore how you can adopt OERs for your course:
Attend upcoming virtual events:
Contact OER co-chairs Erin Durham (edurham@umbc.edu) or Susan Biro (sbiro@umbc.edu) for more information on OER at UMBC.
]]>Roy Prouty
HPCF System Administrator
Research Computing Specialist
VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate slides and leave comments in several ways – text, voice, audio file, or webcam. VoiceThread is available to any instructor who would like to incorporate this engagement tool into their digital toolkit for academic continuity. With VoiceThread, faculty and students can:
Demonstrate procedures to help students prepare for a practical exam
Explain decisions when selecting subjects for a painting’s composition
Foster greater community in large, lecture-based classes
Debate the pros and cons of a controversial issue
Practice foreign language skills during role-play
Critique a classmate’s composition
To learn more about Voicethread and to expand your use of Voicethread in your teaching, please consider attending these webinars:
Using VoiceThread in Blackboard
Feb. 9, 2021 at 1:00pm ET - Register here
In this hands-on workshop, you will learn how to create VoiceThreads and then add them to your Blackboard course as lessons or assessments.
New Assignment Features Workshop
Feb. 16 at 7:00pm ET - Register here
In this workshop, you will learn how to turn new assignments on for your courses and begin using them with your students. We will review all of the workflows, new features, and options for your VoiceThread assessments.
New Assignment Features Workshop
March. 9, 2021 at 1:00pm ET - Register here
In this hands-on workshop, you will learn how to create VoiceThreads and then add them to your Blackboard course as lessons or assessments