We started the year with a snow day… at least for a couple of hours. It was a fun day for the kids at home, but the adults had difficulties getting work done. Tonight, I watched (since everyone else fell asleep before I even started!) the OpenEd 2021 session entitled “Student Curation of Content and Assignment: Case Studies from CUNY Kingsborough Community College.” Dorina Tila is a faculty member from CUNY Kingsborough Community College. They began with a short introduction to open pedagogy, then provided examples of assignments, and then some recommendations. Tila described open pedagogy as “focused on students co-creating the context of the class” while closed pedagogies focus more on “didactic content.” The aim Tila has is to make instruction student-centered where “students can participate in the formation of course content.” They do that by having students curate information and select a country they will research. Tila has a form to help students select a country of interest so that they curate content on a place they want to learn about. Students then conduct research on macroeconomic indicators of that country throughout the semester. Tila mentioned that students share their information through online folders and documents. The second example Tila mentioned was a group curation of information “binder” and slides that learners compile and share with the class. The third example was what Tila called an unintentional group curation of information. In this assignment, students are split into buyers and sellers and then participate in a class auction. Tila showed whiteboards full of graphs and predictions. Students validate the theory through this economic experiment and, indeed, unintentionally share information to validate the theory. An anonymous survey Tila implemented indicated students were satisfied with the activity and then the student perceptions were supported by student learning on a 100 question exam! Wow. I am impressed. Tila showed student improvement in performance as well as the perception of learning and interest in the information curation activities. Tila’s slides had Creative Commons logos, and the statistical analyses seemed well planned and convincing. The idea of using fifty questions for material focused on the “open” activities and comparing to the performance on the remaining fifty questions is powerful. I also appreciate the use of group curation of information with a focus on being transparent about knowledge co-creation.
