@July22-M-1-cohort thanks for your patience with this recap — I’ve been out sick this week so it’s taken me some time to get all my notes in order. A few major things:
- Next week will be our last session in Phase 1 of the program.
- Phase 2 will involve monthly meetings (alternating between 1:1 in your teams and altogether as a cohort). During the session, we noted that the Monday 3:00-4:30pm ET timeslot works well for our Phase 2 session — @vmartinez @dbrellas can you both please confirm? I’ll send out invites accordingly, with a first group session on Dec. 5!
- A lot of interest was expressed in writing together - @mbilling is looking into some options to organize this. More to come on Monday!
- Another theme that was loud and clear was around overwhelm and accountability. I’m here for you all if you need some support on planning your project work — this can be a topic we revisit in our first Phase 2 conversation. We looked back at some slides from Session 4 (on care and compassion in collaboration) and Session 9 (on vulnerability)
- @BAmbos is also in the process of putting together a shared Google Drive folder — with the intention that everyone can create a sub-folder for their project documents. This way, it’s easy to access each others work, share feedback, etc.!
- We only got through half our session on Updates. I suggest we visit the portion on Adoptions and Reporting in Phase 2, as it feels more relevant + timely to your projects.
Session Recap
Our focus in Session 11 was all about the life of your OER after release — what happens when it is used in the classroom? How do you keep it up-to-date so it stays relevant going forward? There are many possibilities for adaptation and growth that your OER allows and this will feed back into the community around the book. This phase is an exciting one as you determine how your OER is being used, what impact it is having, and what ways to share this more widely. Sharing insights and impact can take many forms, but what matters is to continue the storytelling process! The work you’ve done to create and use your OER matters, so make it visible.
Adopters are part of the book’s growing community so connect them with one another and provide multiple lines of communication between the users of the book to share their feedback or coordinate on improvements. Recall the 7 principles of Indigenous Storywork and Indigenous Educational Frameworks from Session 3: Respect, responsibility, reverence, reciprocity, holism, interrelatedness, and synergy. In creating OER, we hold a shared responsibility to make sure we are responsive to feedback, mindful of further accessibility improvements needed, paying attention to changes needed based on evolving conversations in the discipline and more. It’s important for educational materials to stay current — be it in terms of form or content!
Maintaining and keeping your OER current will ensure its continued relevance and ongoing adoptions of your book, year after year. Anyone invested in the value of the resource has an incentive to contribute to maintaining and updating it — so be public about the work you’re doing on the book. This will let people know when to expect changes and how to offer their support. More significant changes should be made outside of academic sessions so as not to disrupt students. Keep a record of edits and updates in the book’s Version History. Once an OER is “out there,” it gets adopted and used in classrooms, opening the possibility up for feedback from students. In doing so, you can determine the impact the OER is having and also look for ways to improve and update the OER so it serves students even better!
Next week, we’ll be moving into our final session in Phase 1 of the TSP! Join us next week, where we’ll be reflecting on the past 12 weeks and looking ahead to Phase 2. We hope to see everyone there, so we can spend some time as a group to look back and plan ahead!