I continue watching OERxDomains21 sessions and loving them! They provide happiness and lots of ideas. Tonight, I started by watching Orna Farrell , James Brunton, Eamon Costello, Caitriona Ni She, Matthew Waters, Cliona Olohan, Aleksandra Shornikova and Aodan Farrelly present about “Open Course, Open Textbook, OpenTeach” and how this team developed this project. Orna Farrell shared how the #Openteach project has received 20,000 unique visitors! Brunton talked about how they put together this project from a “bundle of ideas” to a “realistic doable course for busy academics.” Brunton described how they ran the course over several weeks and received good feedback on the course design. The course itself was built on Moodle and intended to help instructors form strategies for engaging students in synchronous and asynchronous online contexts. I saw several useful videos on the Resources page. The next phase of the project, after publishing some reports, is the creation of a PressBooks textbook that is easier to share than Moodle pages. It was nice to see how they used PressBooks to embed resources and share media. They have been creating a professional-looking book with all the rich resources (media, links) from the Moodle course. It was nice to see a PressBooks like this! I’ll have to keep an eye on #Openteach because they have’t publicly released the book yet.
In another session, Robin DeRosa, Martha Burtis and Dave Cormier talked about the ACE Framework I didn’t know about. The session entitled “A Look at Plymouth State University’s ACE Framework” featured the work by Plymouth State University’s Co-lab. I admire Robin DeRosa and always enjoying learning about what they do! They ACE framework was developed to support instructors during the “pivot” and provided a tour of ACE. Burtis gave the audience a tour of the framework and 18 practices. Adaptability, Connection and Equity are the pillars of the framework. The interactive framework has a format that includes videos to help instructors learn and explore resources. DeRosa talked about the “cruelty-free syllabus” and the webinar-like resources provided in the “slipper camp” (not a bootcamp!) they created. Everything is open-licensed. DeRosa talked about how the ACE Framework was designed for teaching during the pandemic, yet the Framework includes “good long term practices that can carry forward,” as DeRosa mentioned. Robin mentioned that the “Connected” section of ACE is about “thinking about engagement and the human connection […] that is one of the pillars of open pedagogy.” Burtis talked about the role of technology and the balance between ed tech tools and teaching: “we are the ones who have to make the critical choices about how we are going to enable those things…” and in the ACE Framework being technology agnostic was deliberate. During the question and answer session, a question was about how to get started with the ACE Framework. DeRosa mentioned that they included several pages and resources to get started with the Framework as well as a “train the trainer” model. Robin DeRosa ended by explaining that the materials they create will be made available. I love how their knowledge is shared and updated as new resources are developed and information from teaching better practices shared! The ACE Framework probably has resources we can use currently as we plan for a summer course and a “closer to normal” fall return.
