[B] Assignment Week 1:

(Please post a response by Sunday, 7/24)

Below is a list of just a few, common categories of educational resources that can be designed to be student-driven. 

An in-class activity (i.e students are tasked with generating a grading criteria for the class, or for a project)

A handout/A study guide: (i.e students create a hand out or study guide that they think would help other students learn an important topic in the class)  

A video: (students can take a pre-existing video that is either public domain or uses a CC license and edit or remix it with other CC/Public Domain footage)

An essay/article that synthesizes information from  copyrighted articles or textbooks for the benefit of other students. 

For more ideas and information about types of open assignments, take a look at this list of assignments (which is itself an OER!)

After considering these lists, answer the following questions:

1) What skills are most necessary for your students to absorb and apply the content/topics of your class?

2) Which of the above categories (or another of your choosing) do you think would best help them learn these skills?

3) As you saw in the example from the live session, it’s possible to take an existing educational resource and edit or remix it–is this something that interests you? If you were to search for a pre-existing OER to edit, what search terms might you use? 

10 thoughts on “[B] Assignment Week 1:

  1. Howard Mandelbaum (he/him)

    1. The skills for Math 108 (Social Science Math) include Ratio/proportion, linear equations, set theory, Venn diagrams, precents, combinations/permutations, odds, and statistics.
    2, The best activity is a hands-on activity. Math is a subject best learned by doing. To be frank, handouts are ignored video’s they would bore them because they are not actively involved. they lose interest in after a few minutes and essays same thing. as videos. An activity on the other hand whether in small groups (2 or 3 students), would afford them the ability to utilize the skills required for Math 108 and where stumped would force them to access materials where they were weak on the subject or some aspect of the subject. Working in a small group would allow more adept students to help bring along less adept ones and promote learning.
    3.Search terms would be “OER for Statistics” When I “googled” this term I got a wealth of subjects on the
    Iowa State University web site that would fit (I think) very well with objectives of Math 108.

    Reply
    1. Marlene Goldstein

      Hi, Howard –
      I like your idea of small-group activity to work on problem solutions. I still have nightmares of being a (poor) student in advanced math and having no resources to turn to when I was “stuck”. The small groups would benefit both those who can learn from others as well as those who can coach to others.

      Reply
    2. Bruce Shenitz (he/him/his)

      Great that you’re off to a good start finding resources. and I agree with Marlene–it will be very helpful to students, especially if they don’t immediately see how to go after the problem in front of them.

      Reply
  2. Julie Kiss (She/Her/Hers)

    I will be using a dual subject area course for all assignments of the OER/Open Pedagogy Summer session training. The course is titled “The Biology of Gender and Sexuality” (BIO / GEN 255).
    1) Students must perform close readings, remember and understand biologically relevant, anatomical/ medical terminology, and be able to explain the difference between biological sexes at the level of chromosomes, hormones, and internal/ external characteristics. Towards the end of the semester students will use this to discuss the social construct of gender and how it drastically differs from the distinction of sex within the animal kingdom.
    2) I believe a course generated glossary with linked images and videos or a test bank would be most helpful. I have used real-life case studies to illustrate such information in the past; unfortunately, students who don’t have a strong grasp on biological concepts or medical terminology, generally those who enrolled under GEN, specifically struggle with these types of assignments. I would like the class to be fair to both the students who enroll for the gender studies major requirement or as a biology /science major elective course.
    3) I may be interesting in “remixing” a resource. Though, I’m not sure how I would go about doing that. I would search terms such as Estrogen, Progesterone, Testosterone, Luteinizing Hormone (LH), Follicle Stimulating Hormone (FSH), Menstruation, biological sex, gonads, testes, ovaries, etc. I don’t think I could search the terms “gender” or “sexuality” because I end up with thousands of resources that are not applicable.

    Reply
    1. Howard Mandelbaum

      It sounds like you have a good handle on the subject and procedure for OER for your course as well as some of the difficulties for the students. I would think that working in small groups (2 or 3 students) would allow the more adept students to help those that are more likely to struggle with the concepts.

      Reply
    2. Bruce Shenitz (he/him/his)

      One other class participant is talking about having students create a glossary (completely unrelated subject area) and it strikes me that such a project is both a valuable learning experience and can be a useful future reference for other students.

      Reply
  3. Marlene Goldstein

    1. Hello, everyone! One of the courses I teach at John Jay is Stress Management. Applying relaxation techniques is a subset of skill acquisition in Stress Management and many would agree it is the most popular or the most enjoyable, so I think I would focus on that area. Even within the subset of relaxation there are a number of different skill techniques, such as meditation, yoga, aromatherapy, and more. Some of the skills that students need to hone for relaxation are mindfulness (freeing the mind; present focus), environmental sensation (sound, lighting, temperature), physical awareness (clothing, comfort, hunger, thirst).

    2. Practical application works best, though application has been limited in an online setting. One such relaxation technique is “autogenic training” – and students practice by reading about it and then try it by following (I always hope) a step-by-step description in the BlackBoard lecture. I think a tremendous step up would be to have students collaborate together in creating a video where each student would demonstrate (or lead) several of the steps, and have it compiled into a, say, 8-minute video that could be shared.

    3. I can envision taking the original compiled video from the very first class (fall 2022) and using it for future classes, ie having students add to edit or remix it.

    Reply
  4. Cody Stitzel

    The skills most necessary to absorb the material are encoding, comprehension (an ability to make sense of the material they have learned), memorization, repetition, cued and uncued retrieval, and analyzing (an ability to break the concept into parts and understanding how each part is related to one another). The skills most necessary to apply the material are accurate self-reflection, identifying and avoiding biased thinking, evaluating (an ability to make judgments based on a set of guidelines), and innovation (an ability to put the information together in a new, beneficial way).

    An essay/article that synthesizes information from copyrighted articles or textbooks for the benefit of other students is likely the best type of assignment for students to learn the above skills in a Psychology and Law undergraduate course. I’ve found that students have the most difficulty with a paper assignment, and so I’m thinking of ways to incorporate open pedagogy into a paper assignment. More specifically, I’m hoping to de-identify D level papers written by previous students and provide this to current students as a starting point for editing, adding, deleting, etc. I think I will then review my own edits of the same paper in class, to provide corrective feedback, and then ask them to re-edit their papers for a second time. In this way, I hope to not only scaffold learning but decrease the brunt of the necessary feedback while grading papers at the end of the semester.

    Yes, editing or remixing an existing educational resource is of great interest to me. The search terms I might use include psychology, forensic psychology, law, criminal justice, social justice, social injustice, U.S. legal system, expert testimony, case law, forensic psychological assessment, social psychological research, etc.

    Reply

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