Tonight we watched the Open Ed 2021 session entitled “Psychology 101 Collaborative: Creating and Sharing Course Activities to Foster Student Success.” Lisa Young is the Faculty Director at the Center for Teaching and Learning at Scottsdale Community College, and Debbie Barker is an instructional designer at Maricopa Community Colleges. Alisa Beyer joined the presentation and is a faculty member in psychology at Chandler Gilbert Community College. Their slides are available at: tinyurl.com/opened21PSY Their slides are beautiful: black background with splashes of color, and each section is numbered. I ended up spending half an hour finding slide templates on Slide Mania after learning that that’s what they used… Beyer spoke about how they got started with this collaborative project. They had heard that instructors had gotten together to share and create resources within their system. Barker explained that Open Maricopa is their Maricopa District initiative and resource sharing hub. This was not the first collaborative retreat facilitated by Open Maricopa. Changes in the introductory psychology curriculum at the national level also provided an initiative to develop new resources. The American Psychological Association Introductory Psychology Initiative has seven themes that the group revisited. Their meeting had two sessions, 3-hours long and one week apart. Each participant was going to develop two assignments. The assignment template was set up with instructions, key information, activity snapshot, activity description, and suggested subheaders all following APA objectives and Creative Commons licensing. The slides have a link to the Google Drive with the assignments. Beyer mentioned that they created an assignment overview and guidelines too. Beyer then described the timeline for their collaborative workshop. The district provided funding. They had a keynote and identified attendees. One month out, they sent an OER knowledge survey to gauge the level of background. Two weeks before the virtual workshop, they sent out APA IPI goals, course competencies for the district, basics of Creative Commons, agenda, and link to the meeting. The sessions included keynote, introductions, break, creative commons, and discussions. They also included time for sharing assignments and feedback. Post-event, they will meet again to learn bout the assignments. Beyer suggested checking in with participants and having an opportunity for peer feedback. It also seems they had frequent communication using a Google Group. They recommended more time to recruit faculty and provide a stipend. Beyer recommended longer sessions and more time between sessions to develop assignments. Barker mentioned that on a district level, they want to include more opportunities for get-togethers like this. This event sounds very useful and could help with planning some events we have in mind. The planning is not trivial, and I am guessing it would have to occur online or during the summer to maximize participation.
