Tag: reflection

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Open Educational Resources Week – Thoughts

This week, we were challenged to consider the advantages and disadvantages of Open Educational Resources (OER). As someone who previously made my living from non-OER, I have been really torn about this topic. I found the readings this week helpful in adding to my knowledge on the topic and I got some new things to think about.

There is a lot that can be done with OER I think: maybe more than I thought could be done. The spirit of OER is more democratic and more in keeping with equity in education. It is not, however, how the world generally works today.

I have been thinking a lot during this week about how we can use OER in niche, necessarily protected areas, like nuclear security. OER methods can be used for facilitation, but the content could still be protected I think. I came across a podcast this week that talked about using a lot of open source tools in the monetization of products, which is where this thought came from. (PS – Mattermost is cited as a viable alternative to Slack).

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I Can See the Light

My initial post on leadership based on our group work identified the following top five attributes of leadership:

      1. Competent,
      2. Honest,
      3. Dependable,
      4. Straightforward, and
      5. Supportive.

I still agree with these.

This exercise was a good one for identifying our group dynamics and getting to know how this group would work together. I had worked with most of our members before in other groups, but this would be different. Each group or class has its own personality, which was one of the interesting things that I discovered when I did my interview for Assignment 1. That was good reinforcement for something that I had identified years ago in classroom management when I was teaching trades courses.

In my current role, I am not a teacher, nor a corporate trainer. Due to my place on our union local executive and now the Policy Health and Safety Committee (PHSC) in my workplace however, I have made myself known as a willing volunteer with a background in instructional design with which I can benefit the organization. I hope that this shows an ability to lead, without occupying a management level position. Based on the information I outlined in Assignment 3, I still intend to submit my plan for amending the harassment and violence in the workplace training in the upcoming fiscal year that starts on Friday. I hope to be able to deliver a quality project that engages my colleagues and improves our workplace overall. Planning based on research gives me hope that this change initiative won’t fail and we’ll be better for it.

And speaking of leadership…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfinvuRolR0

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Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now

 

It’s going to be interesting to look back on this post from time to time throughout the program and see how my opinions and knowledge have changed. The terms used comfortably by current MALAT students were a mystery to me this week and I am excited to learn what they are talking about. I was also challenged to update and expand on my land acknowledgement skills (Coolidge, 2021, 4:20-5:08), which led me to learn more about the peoples who stewarded the places I come from before I arrived.

I was surprised by the range of backgrounds of MALAT students, their disparate research topics, but how they use common theoretical frameworks and research methods.  Earl Einarson’s description of his delight in finding research results that he didn’t expect (Einarson, 2021, 16:38-17:05) after using working hard to find the right tool that would help him synthesize his research topic work showed me that there is a place for non-K-12 work in MALAT. This was surprising because I think I thought of research as being more staid and less dynamic and focused more on pure information transfer and I was concerned that I would be in a very small minority of non-K-12 educators. 

Reading through the projects posted on the Padlet pages gave me a broad overview of the type of research on which students are working. I was really intrigued by Owen Lloyd’s ARP presentation about Vocational Situated Learning where he describes how constructivism helps “learners develop new knowledge by making connections to their existing knowledge” (Lloyd, 2021, 2:24-2:30). Based on his description of his research and our communications on the padlet, I suspect that the use of Augmented Reality (AR) for experiential learning will be one of many new or adapted tools to better transfer Subject Matter Expert (SME) knowledge to learners in the future, especially in times where in-person learning cannot happen. 

Open Practice and learner engagement were ideas that I especially agreed with, philosophically and ethically. I find myself wondering how they could be implemented in the safety training space where I have more experience, given the closed (e.g. copyrighted material), for-profit nature of the industry. The broad definition of activities covered by “Open Practice” including “open pedagogy, open educational infrastructure, open research, open data, and open science” (Coolidge, 2021, 8:20-8:30) has challenged how I think about learning practices. To be able to remove financial barriers to experience for learners is exciting in an industry that is financially motivated and saturated with material developed for mass consumption and not for quality learning experiences. As for learner engagement, as Steary pointed out, a lot of regulatory required training is something workers “click through” in their required continuing education courses, even when it’s known that training can save lives (Steary, 2021, 9:05-9:44). The themes uncovered by Steary will be interesting to follow as he develops Best Practice Guidelines. Both Coolidge’s and Steary’s work challenged me to rethink the place that for-profit, “closed” learning has in adult safety learning.

References:

Coolidge, A. (2021, April 12). Open Education: what it is; what it does and its amazing impact! In E. Childs (Chair), MALAT Virtual Symposium [Virtual Symposium]. Royal Roads University, Victoria, British Columbia.  https://ca.bbcollab.com/collab/ui/session/playback

Einarson, E. (2021, April 12). How can we incorporate Indigenous Worldviews in the creation of online culturally safe learning environments? In E. Childs (Chair), MALAT Virtual Symposium [Virtual Symposium]. Royal Roads University, Victoria, British Columbia.https://bluejeans.com/playback/s/DBSzyH6DFF3XAsXArMml8VRRZCr0aGO9zv6SQUsy5ABuSGKWk8Dvadz4ogA3m7J7

Lloyd, O. (2021, April 9). Augmented Reality for Vocational situated learning. In E. Childs (Chair), MALAT Virtual Symposium [Virtual Symposium]. Royal Roads University, Victoria, British Columbia. https://youtu.be/4GdW0EJDR2o

Steary, D. (2021, April 16). Online Engagement of Paramedics: Best Practice Recommendations for Continuing Professional Development Design In E. Childs (Chair), MALAT Virtual Symposium [Virtual Symposium]. Royal Roads University, Victoria, British Columbia. https://ca.bbcollab.com/collab/ui/session/playback