[C] Assignment Week 2

Using a platform of your choice, find at least one OER that you would like to incorporate in your assignment and include a link to it.

1) Write a few sentences explaining how you might incorporate this resource into your assignment. It could be a source of information, a template, a guide, a tool to help with creating/revising/remixing etc. Or something else!

2) Include, specifically, how this resource can be reused, revised, or remixed.

3) What license does this OER have and how will it affect your use of it?

Please answer by Sunday, 7/31

13 thoughts on “[C] Assignment Week 2

  1. Mengia Tschalaer (She/her/hers)

    Hi everyone,

    1)PLATFORM: I would like to produce a podcast with my students as part of the THL fellowship that could be used as an OER resource in future courses. I have previously taken a masterclass for the production of podcasts where we were acquainted with a myriad of free podcasting platforms to choose from (https://themeisle.com/blog/best-free-podcast-hosting/). I tend towards choosing Anchor (https://anchor.fm), a free and Spotify affiliated platform, for the production of these student-led podcast.

    2) INCORPORATION OF RESOURCE: With Anchor, I can sign up with a username and password that can be shared with students who wish to contribute to the podcast series in the future. As part of the THL fellowship, I will work with a production team to create an intro and outro jingle to frame the podcast and to help the listener identifying them as part of the same series. Students will be able to re-use that jingle for the production of future podcasts. The platform, which can host an unlimited number of podcasts, can be shared with different courses and will be open for others to use and contribute to. That way, we can establish an interdisciplinary collaboration amongst faculty and students and initiate/continue stimulating cross-disciplinary conversations. I would like to design this assignment as a collaborative and scaffolded final project with a clear, timeline and with activities starting after Week 2 of the semester. The goal for the students is to experiment with creating a storyline for a podcast series that draws on creative writing and autoethnographic accounts and to produce a podcast that includes the development of technical skills such as planning and recording an interview and collaborate with the sound editors for the editing process.

    3) LICENSING: On the anchor website it says: “By submitting User Content, including any Provided Content (defined below), through the Services, you hereby grant to us a non-exclusive license to use, edit, modify, create derivative works from (such as transcriptions of User Content), aggregate, reproduce, distribute, communicate to the public, make available, transmit, display, and perform, the User Content in connection with the operation of the Services, the promotion, advertising or marketing of the Services, and the operation of Spotify’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business. This license is worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable (through multiple tiers) and transferable and granted for the maximum duration afforded under the underlying intellectual property rights. Where required by mandatory law, this license shall be terminated when you terminate your Account or we terminate your access to the Services.” (https://anchor.fm/tos)

    I understand that once the material is up on Spotify, everyone has the right to use, edit and modify the content. While this is in spirit with the OER requirements, this might also allow for outsiders to modify the content without needing our consent to do so.

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

      Thanks for the information on podcasting platforms. You raise an interesting point about the licensing. From what I say, there’s no requirement that attribution be made as in a Creative Commons license. Did I miss that somewhere in the small print? I think Mike had posted a link to the Queer and Trans Prison Voices that was published on CUNY’s instance of manifold. (https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/projects/queer-and-trans-prison-voices). I’ll be discussing it briefly during our synchronous session on Wednesday. Perhaps it would afford you and your classes more control over your final work, while still allowing for the 5 Rs of OER.

      Reply
        1. Mengia Tschalaer (She/her/hers)

          I unfortunately can’t participate in today’s synchronous session. I will however watch the recording. I am a bit confused on the licensing question. Does the podcast explicitly have a CC license? Or are Anchor’s licensing stipulations sufficient? I am new to this and thus a bit clueless, I am afraid.

          Reply
  2. Diana Moore

    Hi!
    The OER I am choosing for this assignment is a Modern World History, a textbook by Dan Allosso and Tom Williford (https://mlpp.pressbooks.pub/modernworldhistory/). I envision two major uses for the textbook. First, I would like to use it as a free textbook that can replace the textbook I had been using. I generally like the textbook I teach with, but would like to remove the financial barrier to students’ education and think this would probably work fairly well as a substitute.

    Additionally, I want to use the primary sources at the end of each chapter as the basis for an assignment in which the students create their own OER. I was really inspired by Robin de Rosa’s blog and how she had students provide introductory material for a text. I think having students create that type of information for their primary sources would be very beneficial, both for them in the act of creation and for future sections of my courses who would have concepts explained to them by their peers at a level that might make more sense to them. I still want to push my students and to have them engage with more sophisticated language but do not think that it is always necessary. When we are focused just on content and information about the past, I think there is room for more casual language.

    The textbook has a Creative Commons NonCommercial ShareAlike license. As far as I understand, I am able to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or form, which means it can easily be used as a textbook. The license also says that you can adapt, remix, and transform the material as long as I give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate which changes were made. I am not sure exactly what this is supposed to look like. If the students add in their own content box/preface that was clearly separate from the primary source, would that work? I am also somewhat unsure of where to put this material. I started to investigate and it looks like this specific textbook relies on Pressbooks, which is sort of expensive ($12/month for a single author or $40/month if you want to collaborate). Could the students instead take the material and put it into a Blackboard Wiki that the entire class would be able to consult? Would that count as OER if only they were going to look at it? Should I put the information somewhere else so that it can be accessed by later sections of this course or even students outside of John Jay? As you can see, I don’t really understand this part of the process and hopefully we can talk more about it.

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

      Hi Diana. Sounds like you’re well on the way! I’ll be talking a bit about Pressbooks this week. CUNY has a Pressbooks licensees, and anyone with a CUNY email can get an account: https://pressbooks.cuny.edu The platform is well supported an CUNY, and the team can do a demonstration (remote). I know of a couple of other faculty who might be interested in this, so after this webinar is over we can set up a session.

      Reply
  3. Guido D. Giordano

    Hello to all, I hope you are doing well. Below, my Assignment for Week 02.

    The assignment I intend to build for a course of mine using OERs would be based on defining “Environmental crime” for my Environmental Crime (EJS 240) course, using a “What Environmental crime is” and “What Environmental crime is not” scheme.

    I went through several platforms (including “Project Gutenberg”; “Merlot” and our CUNY/John Jay platforms) searching for entries like “environmental crime”; “crime”; “definition of crime” and “defining crime”. All of them were searched with and without quotation marks.

    I had a hard time finding useful material. Failures included links that were not functioning and even a link that directed me to a book for purchase. With all, within “Merlot” I ran into a very interesting “Collection of definitions of ‘Organized Crime’”, containing 150 different definitions of the same concept. See links below:

    https://www.merlot.org/merlot/viewMaterial.htm?id=85579

    http://www.organized-crime.de/OCDEF1.htm

    At “Open Textbooks Library” (https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks) I also came across OER textbooks from both “Environmental Science” and “Criminal Law” for Students to use. Links are provided below:

    https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/introduction-to-environmental-science-2nd-edition

    https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/criminal-law

    1) I would incorporate these resource as content tools, for them to be able to improve at how to define “Environmental crime”. The “Collection of definitions” helps Students to be able to see to what extent we define the same thing differently. The other two sources give them technical tools for them to define “Environmental crime” properly.
    Additionally, the “Collection of definitions” could also be a possible template for them to also build a “Collection of definitions of ‘Environmental Crime’”. Although this is not the goal of the assignment I have in mind, I do not doubt that it would be enriching for the Students to do this, and very useful for future cohorts and for the whole field of environmental crime.

    2) The “reuse” that these resources have for me are basically serving as information material. I do not initially foresee an actively collaborative use of these materials, in the sense of the Students working with me actively transforming these resources, changing them.

    3) The “Collection of definition” had no specification whatsoever about the type of license, and Merlot did not provide specific information on this aspect either, as far as I recollected (it actually specifically said this data was missing).
    The other two (02) sources had the same license type, namely “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike” (CC BY-NC-SA). This essentially means that we can “remix, adapt, and build upon” these works with non-commercial goals, so long as we: 1) credit the previous creators; and 2) license our creation under the exact same terms as these ones (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/).
    Evidently, even though there are some restrictions to this type of license, they do not impede our assignment from developing properly, and they even provide us with some space to “do something extra”, in the event that we want to: for example, we could create new versions of these books that actually use our “Definition of Environmental Crime” guide as a source, in which case we would be cited there as a source as well. This could generate a “win-win” scheme: these books enrich and promote our work; our work enriches and promotes these books.

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

      It sounds like you did a lot of searching, so I’m glad that you eventually found some useful material. Your students’ work could make a valuable contribution to a field where there does not appear to be a lot of existing OER material.

      Reply
  4. Maria Elena Pizarro

    Greetings to all!

    1. I found a journal article that seems to be a good fit for my International Law course on-
    LawArXiv: Open Access Preprints in Legal Scholarship (merlot.org)

    LawArXiv Papers | “The Legal Basis for the Exercise of Jurisdiction by the International Criminal Court and the Preparatory Work of the Rome Statute (I),” Journal of International Relations and Comparative Culture, Vol. 16, No. 2 (March 2018), pp. 67-74. (osf.io)

    This is an unfinished article explaining the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, and focuses on the legal question how the court’s jurisdiction applies to third parties. In past international law courses, students have been interested in the legal justifications of international courts’ jurisdiction over foreign nationals, and most intrigued, both, by the U.S. not ratifying the Rome statute, and why specifically the U.S. objects to the court’s jurisdiction.
    The article provides a good explanation of the ICC’s jurisdiction, and as an assignment would ask students to first, identify the legal question/debate raised in the article and comment as to whether the Rome Statute creates obligations for non-party states without their consent. They would need to research the legal basis for this jurisdiction and add alternative explanations to the one provided in the article. Second, I would ask students to compare the U.S. position with another country’s objection to ratifying the Rome Statute. And, finally, to pose two or three questions about the role of the ICC that concerns them.
    Examples of questions I can use are:
    1. Does the ICC have jurisdiction over non-member third parties?
    2. What is the legal basis for this jurisdiction? What are alternative explanations
    3. Does the U.S. have a valid legal challenge to ICC jurisdiction according to
    International law? How do other non-member states compare?

    2. Students will be providing different perspectives on the use of international law and adding reasoned arguments to the ongoing legal challenge to the ICC’s jurisdiction by the principle of state sovereignty (consent). The questions each student poses can be shared with classmates, and future students, to be researched, revised, or challenged. The resource would evolve as an open discussion/debate among students on the specific legal implications of the ICC on member and non-member states, and how the role of the court expands to meet new challenges to international criminal law.

    3. The journal article is listed as having “No license”, so not sure if this qualifies as an OER resource. I did not see any other explanation other than listed as an open access resource.

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

      This sounds like a good use of Open Pedagogy. I looked at the article and I see at the bottom of the page that it is copyrighted by the Center for Open Science. Clicking into one of the documents listed, if you click to the right of “no license” field, you’ll see a dropdown showing that the copyright is held by the individual author. (I’m not sure why it says “no license” since copyright is a form of license. I guess they mean “no creative commons” or other licensing scheme.)

      Reply
  5. Noriko Watanabe (she/her/hers)

    I am planning two types of OER components to use in the first part of my beginning Japanese course. One of them is to replace Workbook and to supplement the main textbook currently used. Since the textbook alone does not offer proper support and exercises for students who struggle with the new writing system, the OER material will eliminate the need for Workbook, saving students the cost of it. The second is creation of students’ accounts of learning the new writing system and a study guide, which I hope will offer encouragement and psychological support.

    1. For the first segment of introducing and practicing the Japanese syllabaries, I would like to use a part of Musubi (https://dspace.lib.hawaii.edu/handle/10790/3422) as a supplementary material to teach the characters, hiragana, and to replace a part of Workbook. The main textbook and an accompanying workbook are usually used to apply and master the knowledge and skills. Musubi is a complete textbook for a beginner’s course, but will not completely replace the current textbook, and therefore I will use only a part of it without any modification. The material offers exercises and examples for students to practice the writing system, parts of which can be homework assignments.

    I use other free resources offered by the publisher that can be accessed without any restrictions, although the copyright for them is not open.

    2. Also, if possible, I would like my students to document and chronicle their reactions and progress on how they are learning the new writing system, offering insights into the stages of familiarization as well as their tips for success for the next generation of students. For this assignment, students will contribute their perspectives throughout the semester.

    Musubi, the OER, has CC-BY-NC-ND lincense, and can not have any derivatives. I don’t understand exactly the difference between SA and ND, but I believe I am not making any derivatives since I will use the material as is, but only a part of it (about the firs 70 pages out of 128 pages).

    Reply

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