[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 284 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Arley Cruthers talks about process over product in open education.

[00:00:12] Announcer: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

[music]

[00:00:19] Bonni: Hello and welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of facilitating learning. We also explore how to have effective productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. I’m grateful to be welcoming to this show Arley Cruthers today. She is a writer and an instructor of applied communications, that’s business communication at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

She has loved teaching ever since she got hired as a secretary for a summer camp and somehow ended up teaching Microsoft Office to six-year-olds and getting yelled at by parents for playing too many math games with the kids. She is a wonderful open educator. She has taught creative writing in her past and rhetoric and composition. She especially loves working with people who have grown up believing that they’re bad writers or people who are new to English.

In her applied communications classes, her students analyze their emoji use, uncover their written voice, compete in the grammar olympics and generally impress the heck out of her. In her spare time, she’s a novelist who has published two novels, Post (2007) and The Time We All Went Marching (2011). She also writes genre fiction under Laine Ferndale with a co-author. Arley, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:02:00] Arley: Thanks for having me.

[00:02:01] Bonni: It has been a while since we’ve been connected and I feel like every time you send a tweet out, there’s something worthwhile that I need to bookmark or come back and revisit later. Thank you for all the wisdom that you share on that social network.

[00:02:14] Arley: Oh no, I learned a lot from Twitter. I’m glad at least some of it was valuable, it’s not just all me talking about my toddler.

[00:02:21] Bonni: I do enjoy that too. I think it’s nice when we show up in our full human form, toddlers and all, it’s really nice. I chuckle because our kids are now five and seven, every time I see one of those parent-related tweets, I smile and say, “Oh, I remember those times.” We’re recording this now while the toddler is sleeping?

[00:02:40] Arley: Yes. Making the most of that valuable nap time.

[00:02:43] Bonni: Yes. I feel very honored that you would come on the show, period, and then secondly that you would take that precious time and invest it in this, thanks for being here today. I know one of the themes that we’re going to discuss today is this idea of process over product and I’d love for us to start with way back when with your experience as a Paralympian.

[00:03:07] Arley: I was a Paralympian, I was on the wheelchair basketball national team for seven or eight years and that experience definitely informed my very first teaching job or “teaching job”. I was 17 and I got put in charge of a junior wheelchair basketball team. When you coach able-bodied sports, sometimes you coach the best eight-year-old on a particular neighborhood, but when you coach wheelchair sports, you coach everyone from a six-year-old able-bodied sibling to an 18-year-old who maybe has some cognitive challenges.

My Paralympian career and my wheelchair basketball coaching career was this very cool early introduction to thinking about diversity and thinking about how each athlete could get their need met even if those needs were really, really different from one another.

[00:03:52] Bonni: I’m trying to envision this because I know it’s a wide age range that you worked with and I just think about teaching a class that’s predominantly 18-year-olds or predominantly 22-year-olds, that must’ve been an incredible challenge for you?

[00:04:05] Arley: I think because it was my first teaching experience, I really didn’t recognize it as a challenge. I was just like, “Oh, let’s just figure out a way that we can all work together.” I had a lot of really amazing coaching mentors but it really allowed me to think about how to put different people in positions of success. How can you have that six-year-old feel like they’re not just trying to catch up with that 18-year-old.

That they’re actually working on skills that they need to work on and feeling like their interaction and their experience at that practice was meaningful rather than like, “Oh, I’m just so far behind. I need to catch up.” Helping certain athletes take on a more of a leadership role if they have already mastered those skills. I was lucky to have a lot of really good coaching mentors.

[00:04:47] Bonni: My son is seven and he is really motivated in his learning process and also just in his learning environments, like at school, in the classroom. Really motivated by the positive reinforcement tools and I know that one of the things, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this before but there’s a thing called clip ups. There’s a chart in the classroom and if they clean up without being asked or if they do positive behaviors and they’ll get clipped up.

I haven’t thoroughly investigated all the criticisms but we could imagine that if that is really the only thing driving that behavior, then it’s not really a learned behavior it’s more of a conditioned behavior that probably if we didn’t have the clip ups may not occur as naturally. For him, it hasn’t really been a concern to us because he does still clean up his stuff even if we don’t clip up at home and those kinds of things.

As you were telling your story about coaching the wheelchair basketball, I’m just digesting the sense of how much of when I was growing up, it’s very individualized and individualistic, more of a competitive aspect to it and that’s again, pretty deep-rooted in much of American culture. What was that like for you both in the culture of wheelchair basketball and then also the broader Canadian culture?

[00:06:00] Arley: Well, I think wheelchair basketball is actually good for me. I was someone growing up where I was grade focused, especially when I acquired a disability. People often talk to disabled kids in very saucy voices and I was like, “No, I’m going to get 100% on that test.” I became very grade focused. I was very lucky for wheelchair basketball where a lot of the coaches were, again, focusing on that process, focusing on that–

When you’re playing in a team sport you need everyone’s contribution and because of the way that wheelchair basketball is set up where there’s this classification system where every athlete is given a point value depending on their level of disability and then you can only have a certain number of points on the floor. One of the things you learn very quickly is that I have more function, so I’m a class four but if you want to get into a scoring position, you need those class one athletes, everyone has their role to play.

Really good wheelchair basketball coaches do a good job of making that visible about how to be good at wheelchair basketball, you have to have that connection, it’s about that connectedness and everyone being able to value everybody else’s contribution.

[00:07:03] Bonni: There is still a focus on winning?

[00:07:05] Arley: Yes.

[00:07:06] Bonni: The focus on winning is winning with a team?

[00:07:10] Arley: Yes. When I think that– My coach Tim Frick, who was my coach both provincially and internationally for a really long time, one of the things that he always used to say is that in order to focus on winning, you have to forget about winning. That is something that’s hard for me to do. I’m someone if I take a deep water aerobics class, I’m someone who’s going to be wanting to push those old ladies out of the way, wanting to be the best.

I’m very competitive but the thing that he would do at the beginning of every season is, especially, I remember I went to one Paralympics at the 2004 Paralympics season, he sat everyone down and he would say, “Okay, let’s close our eyes, let’s imagine how is it feel. It’s the gold medal game, you’re putting on your Jersey, you look down, you see the Canadian flag, you’re getting strapped into your chair.”

He would walk you step by step through that game until finally, “The buzzer goes, Canada’s won. Are you crying? What does it feel like? What is the weight of that metal around your neck feel like?” Then he would say, “Okay, now we need to stop and forget about that moment. We need to put it away and every day we need to focus on that process.” Because in sports, you can be perfect in your preparation, you can do absolutely everything right and someone else can have a better game than you and you can still lose.

If you put all your stock in that gold medal, you’re going to be sorely disappointed but if you focus on that process, that’s when you’re going to have a rich and valuable experience no matter what and probably you’re going to get that result you wanted. When I started teaching that was a lesson that I really took to heart.

[00:08:37] Bonni: It’s hard for most of us to focus on the process, especially in the way that our educational institutions for the most part treat grades and things like that, it’s really, really hard because everything’s pointing you towards that GPA. Our scholarships are based on it, the ability to go on to grad school are often based on those grades. How do you and your teaching then help your students begin to focus more on the process and less on the product?

[00:09:06] Arley: Well, one of the things that I do, especially in the intro class that I teach is a lot of the students I teach they don’t have a lot of time. I really want to be cognizant of their time and making the most of it. It’s a process driven writing, it takes a long time, it takes a lot of trying and failing. The way that I have tried to reward process and tried to think about what are the skills that my students need, what’s the process that I want them to think about when it comes to writing and how can I allow them to take risks without it punishing their grade?

In that class we do this great big giant report project where it’s two classes worth of students, last semester was three classes, 75 people all writing one great big giant report and the goal is to write a report that could actually change something and have a real-life impact. Even though we write, this last semester was 150 pages, nobody gets a grade on it.

The report is simply almost like our sandbox. It’s a place where we practice our skills.

It’s also the students’ contribution is anonymous and they don’t have to take part of what we’re doing in class that day, but they can take part in the way it’s meaningful to them because everything that we do is really focused on– This week we’re learning about synthesizing research. This day we were learning about citation. This week we’re learning about how to edit for plain language because students know that they’re not getting graded, it’s an opportunity for them to take risks and to try something. If it doesn’t work out, another student can come in and fix it.

They get graded on individual assignments leading up. The real focus is on that report. It’s very cool to say to them at the beginning of the semester, the whole of last semester’s report and say, “This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to write 150 pages,” and have students say, “There’s no way that we’re going to be able to do that.” Then kind of how I set our intentions. Then every week there’s always a point in the semester where I log into the report on Google Docs and it’s there. It’s this huge giant thing.

[00:11:02] Bonni: I will really appreciate hearing a little bit more about how that all works. It’s anonymous to you too? They’re not logged into Google Docs, so you don’t know who has made what changes?

[00:11:14] Arley: Yes. The assignments that they do leading up to the report. Basically, they write a proposal for what research they’re going to do. They analyze the research that they do and they write basically a proposal where they tell me what grade they think that they deserve. They reflect on their own performance, basically like a performance review. Then at the end of the semester, they take what they learned and they remix it in a new way to teach it to somebody else.

They can create posters. I’ve had boardgames, I’ve had memes, I’ve had songs, I have poems, poem extracts. If they participate, if they make contributions, they’re going to have a lot of material to write in their performance review. It’s going to be fairly easy for them to make a case that they deserve a good grade, but if they don’t, there’s a lot of other ways that they can make that case. That often students who are new to English, a lot of students I teach, especially in the summer, this is their first class in English.

They maybe didn’t do as much writing, but they helped out somebody who was not there. They fix somebody else’s citations. They created a chart or a graph. They taught somebody else how to use a video editing program. I had one student who made original music for everybody else’s videos in the class. Sometimes, the students are not able to say, “I wrote 1,000 words,” but they contributed in so many other ways of the writing process and making it seem that that’s meaningful, that those contributions matter. That’s writing.

Brainstorming, talking with a friend. It all counts as writing. Students often leave with just the idea that they’ve improved within this course and they can keep improving. Not, “I tried to write a report and it didn’t go very well and I guess I’m not a good writer. I’m going to just struggle with writing the rest of my career.”

[00:12:51] Bonni: Are there other assignments that they do beyond what you mentioned? The proposal, the analyzing, the research, the proposal for the grade and that end of semester culmination, remix. Are there other things too or are those?

[00:13:05] Arley: They do a portfolio where they revise their work at the end or they can choose to take a final exam. There’s also a couple of grades for peer reviews. Their individual assignments. We also just, and this was something that students actually created. When I first did this assignment, it was just all individuals. We decided halfway through the semester we need a bit more structure. Fifty individuals, it’s just too much.

We broke them into accountability groups where your group is just there to provide you a little bit of support. We would give different groups, different tasks. The next semester I turned that into a committee assignment where every student is in an accountability group. Each week, a different student is the team lead. At the end of the week, they give me a little progress report that says what it was team working on, what did everyone do in class and out of class and what challenges are we still having?

Which allows me to figure out everyone. I thought I covered citation, people are still confused I’m going to go back over it or a student is really struggling, I can now check in and heap that student out whereas I wouldn’t realize that that student was struggling for. It’s just a small assignment, but it helps to give the report a little bit more feeling of like it’s not just you floating in this giant project.

[00:14:18] Bonni: You are describing these things and you’re describing them well, but there’s nothing like seeing it. I do want to let people know that in the show notes today, which will be at teachinginhighered.com/284 are a couple of documents. One is the proposal I believe for the project itself and the other was the resulting project. They are remarkable.

I’m going to recommend everybody go take a look at each of these documents because you really can’t get a flavor of it until you see all the names of the people. You said 75-ish people between the classes and then just the heart and soul and everything that they put into this. Describe a bit about what was the problem that they looked to solve collectively as a team.

[00:15:05] Arley: This semester, the most recent semester, they looked to solve how our school can better support international students. We have a lot of international students. It was also a chance for domestic students to learn a lot more about international students. They did original research. It was really cool to just see the students feel both pride in being able to share their experiences but also this is a topic that they know a lot more about than I do.

I love being in a position where of everyone in the class, I’m the one who knows the least about the topic. I’m the one who’s playing catch up. It was a huge learning experience for me too that they were able to not only share their stories, but they did a lot of surveys and interviews. We found some really interesting data about international students at our university. Then we were able to then compare it to other scholarly research on the topic.

Oe of the coolest moments from that particular class was that we had to write the executive summary, which is the most important part of the report. The students had looked at a bunch of different models and one of the ones that they had been attracted to was one that was more storytelling driven. We had this moment where everyone sat in a circle. We just started writing a story based on our research.

A lot of our international students are living in quite extreme housing conditions. One student said, “I live with eight people in a two-bedroom apartment.” All I hear in my life are alarms going off. Just alarms ringing. We’ve got to put that in the story but what you hear. Then another student said, “I didn’t know I had to register for classes. I was delayed a full semester before I even started.” We put that in.

They told this little story kind of evolved. Then a student drew a drawing to represent that story. Those are moments that I can not have design. Most executive summaries do not contain a story. It was really, really cool to have students take ownership and decide that they’re learning about persuasion. This to them was the most persuasive way to tell the story about what it was like to be an international student at our university. I’ve heard from all of the people who’ve read the report that’s the most impactful thing.

[00:17:03] Bonni: I’m going to read just a few highlights from the table of contents. As you mentioned, there’s the executive summary and some acknowledgements. There’s a background, some of the academic barriers that international students face, financial barriers, mental health barriers, social barriers, and then some recommendations at the end and references.

As a complete side note, this has nothing to do with your project. I just love hosting this podcast because I learn every single time I have an episode. You invited me to come see your Google Doc and I see right here a menu for Zotero. I did not know that you could use Zotero inside of Google Docs. Zotero was my favorite references manager and here it is right here. I’m looking at it on the screen.

[00:17:51] Arley: I did not know either until a student taught me how to do that.

[00:17:55] Bonni: I wonder how recent that is or if I’ve just been missing it for a long time and completely missed it. That is amazing. What a remarkable thing. People really do need to go look at the show notes. One other question I had as you were describing this, I’m still having a hard time picturing how you could do this with one class but let alone with two, how are you bringing in the ideas from two different sections of the same class together?

[00:18:17] Arley: Actually, last semester was three classes. The students have a role in deciding how they best want. The big challenge is each student is doing their own original research and then they’re reading an article. How do we take what they learn, what each student learned and make it accessible for every other student to draw on? We do it through a series of Google Docs. Next semester, I’m probably going to make it more of a forum that students can input, but they decide what categories are important.

Then I create a series of Google Docs and students copy and paste the most important quotes and their research findings. Then in class, we do a series of activities where we work on synthesizing. My real goal for that project is synthesis. That is not just going to be like I researched this little piece and I put this in the report, but I’m going to go to that Google Doc and I’m going to maybe one person read a scholarly article on this topic, I did a survey, somebody else did an interview and maybe some of these sources disagree.

One of the things we work on in class is how we can take all of that evidence and synthesize it into one argument. We work in class on the Google doc. Everyone works directly within the document. Every semester, we have a little bit of a different process because we have a different topic. It’s a bit of messiness and we don’t end up capturing everything. I’m a big believer in Student Agency. We have some students who did really remarkable research.

Last semester there was a student who did great research on how international students use technology, but he chose not to include it in the report. That’s okay because it’s an open project. I don’t ever make students participate. They don’t have to contribute to that report. We don’t end up capturing everything. In times, it is messy, one of the goals of the project too is kind of embracing this messiness.

It is remarkable what we are able to capture and how students are able to build off work of students they’ve never met. Like students in my Thursday class who they’ve never met are building on the work of someone in my Tuesday class or my afternoon class.

[00:20:15] Bonni: When you started out doing some of these things in your teaching and really what you’re describing, we both know as open education. Did it just start out1 you were comfortable with the messiness because of your history, because of your own human development I guess is the best way to asking or maybe you got reminded that this messiness is a part of the learning process at the time?

[00:20:36] Arley: I’m someone who I have had a lot of different roles. I’ve been a Paralympian, I’m a novelist, I teach Business Communication and especially when I write novels, I tend to have a pretty messy process. For my second novel, I threw away 250 pages, threw in the garbage, deleted it off my computer and rewrote it in six weeks. I’ve always found that that messiness has paid off.

When I got hired to work at a school business, I did go through a couple of years where I was like, “No. I got to be a business human. I’ve got to be proper and professional.” I think I’ve slowly come to realize that that messiness and the lack of, there being easy answers and there still being rough edges is actually a benefit in my teaching, especially within a school of business that it is beneficial for students to see that things don’t always have to be as polished and as perfect and that you can go in as… and still arrive at a cool place.

[00:21:32] Bonni: Your use of the phrase rough edges, that’s not the first time that I’ve heard people talk about that in the context of messiness. You using it though did remind me that I don’t think what you’re trying to say and most certainly what other people on past episodes weren’t trying to say is all messiness, all the time, all chaos. That’s going to be helpful to people. When Alan Levine was on the show, he talked about that he and Mia, and I forgot Mia’s last name, starts with a Z.

They have spines. They use the analogy of spines in their courses and both of those are just incredibly creative educators. I just love that because to me, the messiness is not as easy for me as it is for you and it’s not as easy for me as it is for them. I like asking the question, what are those spines or what are those edges that you do put in place to then help the messiness be able to flourish?

[00:22:31] Arley: I think it takes a lot to get that buy-in. I think that especially, I teach a lot of students from cultures where their education system is a lot more focused on memorization. This is something that is very new to them. If I’m going to ask them to do something hard, you’re right. I have to have that structure in place. This is also a first-year class, so we have to have a structure. I definitely don’t want to make it seem as if it’s just this chaos.

We have a really clear plan that I go through. Every class I bring up this diagram of here’s where we are in the process, here’s the steps. We check them off one by one. I have to do a lot of buy-in. If you read the assignment prompts, you’ll notice that it says over and over again, it’s okay if this feels stressful. It’s okay if this feels messy or if this feels confusing. We’re going to work on this together.

We have a clear lesson plan. The assignments are clear and laid out and all individuals so that even if things go totally wrong, students aren’t getting penalized. If the report doesn’t work out for some reason, it doesn’t impact students’ grades. Part of it is at the beginning of the semester really making it clear, here’s this task that I’ve laid out, here are the ways that this is going to progress every week.

I also keep it simple in the sense that we do one thing in class and one thing out of class. It’s just little tasks. I’ve got checklists and stuff that students can see, here’s what we’re doing this week. It’s just one thing in class, one thing out of class. I am often really impressed by how students– We spend the first couple of weeks feeling like, “Oh, no. How is this going to go?” But that students are really willing to buy-in.

This project is set up so that students could do absolutely nothing on the report and still, because it’s all individual assignments, get a good grade and it’s all often remarkable to me how students do buy-in. I think, yes, it’s two parts. One is that making really clear here are the stepping stones that we’re going to take. Here are the learnings we’re going to hopefully achieve along the way. Here’s how each one of these assignments builds on one another, but then also stressing that because we’re taking the focus on the grades. If things don’t work out, you’re not going to be penalized.

[00:24:42] Bonni: Because it’s a writing class, you do have a goal for every class that you would teach like this that at the end is going to be a written project, some sort of a report. There’s probably some similarities like will they all have a table of contents? Will they all have references? That part of the path could be planned in advance but then as to what gets explored, that’s wide open, correct?

[00:25:04] Arley: Yes. One of the big challenges is because I don’t know the topic in advance. I know the structure, I know the path and I can walk students through, but I do have to be open to surprises. I taught four classes of my Intro to Communication class three classes this semester. I did this big report. One decided that they wanted to do an international student survival guide. Things looked a lot different in that class. There is a slightly different focus. They all hopefully at the end got the same skills, but it was just a slightly different focus. It’s being open to trying to make sure that there’s enough structure to not confuse students but also being open to surprise.

[00:25:43] Bonni: These projects, these outputs are open in the sense that people can view them that aren’t a part of your institution. Is this correct?

[00:25:53] Arley: Yes. The remix projects that they create, they can choose they want to have open creative commons license on them. All the ones that do have creative commons licenses, I collect because I come from a Canadian institution, I can’t put student work on anything that’s stored on an American server. Right now, the report that we’ve done is in Google Docs and I have the assignment prompt to share.

I do also share student work. This semester, another teacher at my university, they’re going to be building on the report that we did. Those students are going to do a deep dive into our report and make it better. I do make everything accessible because the goal is that we don’t want to just have it done at the end of the semester. We want other people to build on the work that we did.

[00:26:35] Bonni: One of the reasons I’m asking is I’ve done a number of somewhat similar works before. There’s a lot of differences too, but there’s always that feeling of I have put them in Pressbooks and then made it where they were eventually for sale on various book sites. Students really got motivated to be able to hold in their hands their finished product. My goodness. I’ve done some episodes on this which I’ll link too in the show notes in case anyone wants to go back and listen to those.

It was really challenging. It was enormously challenging. I sometimes wonder if an approach like yours might be a little bit easier while still getting some of the benefits because it’s one of those where I have to just question, do I want to continue to have it be this difficult? I sound really selfish right now, but we have to get realistic about what’s possible to do in our lives with all the differing priorities that we have.

[00:27:26] Arley: Yes. I print off a copy of the report for the students. Every semester, the last day of class, we get to take a moment and hold that report in our hands and take a look and see our names and celebrate. That, that’s the moment at the beginning of the semester that I said we’re setting our attention towards and that’s the thing of the end of the semester. We get to hold that report in our hands.

We are using Pressbooks to the survival guide that we wrote, but I hava an amazing OER librarian colleague who is helping me with that because Pressooks is an amazing platform but we ran into a few logistical hiccups that I’m lucky to have– Kwantlen has amazing support for open education. I was lucky to be able to draw on that.

[00:28:02] Bonni: I love Pressbooks. One of the small things that– You’d run into this no matter what you were using, but people not understanding that if you started in Microsoft Word and then you copy Microsoft Word and you put it on any web thing that’s going to talk HTML. There’s hidden HTML code in there. Do you know how to take it to a plain text editor to strip that hidden stuff out? Those are skills which if they belong in the class that you’re teaching, by all means, we should be equipping our students, but it’s when they don’t. Then I find myself feeling like I need to do it. It gets messy, as you said, you brought up the messiness.

[00:28:42] Arley: Then uploading images and making sure links are correct and making sure everything’s accessible, that we want to publish something that has all those accessibility guidelines. It was one of those situations where if at the end semester, every student wrote their chapter, but the formatting where it is still a work in progress for the survival guide. I’m working on an OER textbook right now. Pressbooks is just such an amazing platform. There is so much that you can do with it.

[00:29:05] Bonni: There really is. I haven’t gotten an e-mail from them. I usually wait until they have a sale on there where you can take the watermark off for the PDF. They usually wait until there’s a sale then buy them. There’s Pressbooks. We’ve got to get your e-mail again. Send me a promotion and I’m a sucker for them every time. Before we get to the recommendation segment, I did want to ask one other question that circling back to when you were talking about the process of paraphrasing, synthesizing.

It dawned on me as you were describing this so much of what I see and unfortunately, what I’ve experienced in my early days of teaching is that we ask them to do that work outside of class and then we upload it to a site like Turnitin and then we punish them either by shaming them or the worst, failing the class because you didn’t paraphrase correctly. I’m starting to see that it might be helpful to listeners to hear you talk about doing that work inside the class and what the benefits are and how people might get started with that?

[00:30:08] Arley: I think that’s one of the most valuable things because I do have a lot of students for whom citation is completely new. Even the idea of sources having owners is completely new. That’s a very western way of looking at sources. The nice thing about this report is that I get to model that. I do an activity in class, for example, where students bring one quote that was meaningful from their research. Then, as a class, we work to come up with a claim and then different students supply the evidence.

I show, here’s how we need, here is how we quote, here’s how we paraphrase, here’s when you would paraphrase versus quoting. Then they have a chance to go and practice it in pairs. Go and write a claim, look in the Google Doc for some evidence and see if you can write a paragraph that was in evidence that defends that claim. Then I can go back and say, “Here’s a great example. This student did a great job of integrating this quote into your sentence.” Then they’ve got that in-text citation.

Here, we can see that maybe just paraphrasing like what needs work here? How can we make this use less of the original tasks? Because it’s anonymous, it gives us a chance to really work with student material and tackle some of the issues that students are having with citation in a way that is just more focused on the process. That we all need to practice those skills. They get to see in real-time too how those arguments come together and why you would combine different sources in this way or why you would quote what makes something that would be good to quote rather than what makes something that would be good to paraphrase.

[00:31:40] Bonni: They have in front of them either computers or some kind of a device in order to be able to type while they’re in class?

[00:31:47] Arley: Yes. If they have laptops. They bring laptops. If not, I have a paper version of all the activities and they can access the sources on their phone. They can access the Google Docs on their phone. Then they can work in that way. I have some classes where very few students have laptops. There are times when I have to take what students have written and transcribe it, but they’re able to roll up their sleeves and practicing in real-time when I’m there to be able to help them and go around to groups and say, “Why did you choose to put that in quotation marks?” For example.

[00:32:18] Bonni: That’s wonderful. This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. What I’d like to share today is from Brian Mathers’s site. He has a website that is a remixer site. It actually has a lot of different things you can remix. A playful one is where you can remix a skateboard. A lot of times he does it where it’s somehow tied to somebody’s project or it’s tied to an event or something like that.

It’s sometimes not an event that I’m familiar with at all, but I always am guaranteed if I go check out what he’s been doing that I’ll be entertained and also get to play around a little bit myself and experiment. The remixer that I found that was really fun to play around with is called Storyline. I’ve put a link to that in the show notes. What storyline lets you do is construct a quick polaroid storyline that looks like it’s connected by a line or some ribbon going through it. You can customize all of the images, all of the text.

The one that I’m looking at on my screen right now just happens to be a timeline, having something to do with Napoleon. It says events one through four and I can see four different historical photos or paintings, I believe, actually, not photos, the 1700s, no, it wasn’t photos, but it’s just a delightful way that you could create some images that you wanted to go into your classes, but also could introduce this to your students as well. The number of pictures can be customized. The pictures themselves, the titles and the text underneath the pictures as well as all of the colors.

Then you can download it or share it to various social media. There’s all kinds of options we could do with this. This is just one remixer but if you click at the top on remixes, there’s all different kinds of ones like I mentioned. There are some that were around conferences, but then there are some fun ones with skateboards and he’s very tongue and cheek sense of humor. It’s just really a fun site. You get kind of lost there. That’s my recommendation today is to go check out his remix project. Arley, I’m going to pass it over to you for yours.

[00:34:22] Arley: My recommendation is a MOOC that the University of British Columbia puts on that’s called Reconciliation Through Indigenous Education, that’s offered by Dr. Jan Hare. They offered a couple times a year. The most recent one starting October 15th but if you missed that one, they offered in May as well. I think every educator needs to be thinking about decolonization and reconciliation.

It’s just a really amazing move where there’s indigenous knowledge keepers, there’s videos, there’s all sorts of resources. A lot of what I learned in that course I’m still thinking about. I think it’s a must-do for every educator.

[00:34:59] Bonni: It looks amazing. One of the nice parts about it is it is free, but then you also can pay a small sum. In this case, it’s $50 US to receive a verified certificate if you needed that for your own professional development reasons at your institution. Lots of options for us, but it looks like a tremendous course. Thank you so much for sharing it.

[00:35:19] Arley: It’s one of those ones, I feel like I could take it five times to really get the full benefit of it. It’s just such a rich experience.

[00:35:25] Bonni: I am so glad that we got connected on Twitter and that I got to have this conversation with you today, Arley. Thanks for investing your time in Teaching in Higher Ed and also investing your time on Twitter so we can continue to learn from you as well.

[00:35:37] Arley: Awesome. Thanks so much. I’m a big fan of the show. This was pretty exciting for me.

[music]

[00:35:44] Bonni: Thanks once again to Arley for coming on today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. It was episode number 284. If you’d like to access the show notes and the transcripts, that will be at teachinginhighered.com/284. If you have yet to sign up for our e-mail updates, you can do that at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. What you’ll get when you do that is a free e-guide of 19 educational and productivity tools that I use to keep me productive and also to keep my teaching more engaging.

I hope you enjoy that free e-guide as you also enjoy the show notes from the most recent episode of the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast along with an article on most weeks written by me about teaching or productivity. You can subscribe at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe.

[00:36:38] [END OF AUDIO]

The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning. 

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.