Open Pedagogy as Open Student Projects
Sharing the End of the World: Students’ Perceptions of Their Self-Efficacy in the Creation of Open Access Digital Learning Objects
Sarah Hutton; Lisa Di Valentino; and Paul Musgrave
Authors
- Sarah Hutton, M.L.I.S., Ph.D. Candidate, University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Lisa Di Valentino, University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Paul Musgrave, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Project Overview
Institution: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Institution Type: public, research, land-grant, undergraduate, post-graduate
Project Discipline: Political Science
Project Outcome: student-created podcasts; research study
Tools Used: Audacity, LibGuides, Institutional Repository
Resources Included in Chapter:
- Suggested resource list
- Survey Instrument
2020 Preface
The course that this chapter is based on took place in 2018, well before the COVID-19 pandemic that occurred at the time of publication. The University of Massachusetts, along with other schools, closed its campus beginning in the Spring semester of 2020 and moved to online instruction and library services. While many of the library’s materials are available online, and services such as HathiTrust and the Internet Archive National Emergency Library provided digital versions of a wide range of print materials, there remained a huge gap in what students and faculty could access in the “new normal” of virtual education. More than ever, the need for open educational resources has become pressing. There is an opportunity, then, to engage students in the creation of open digital learning objects, such as digital textbooks, videos, podcasts, or study guides.
This chapter describes a case study of a course in which students were assigned the creation of podcasts about various topics related to Massachusetts history, which were to be made openly available on the Internet via the UMass Amherst institutional repository. This course is to be offered again in the Fall 2020 semester, only this time, it will be taught completely online. Further study is planned to investigate what is required to move a course like this to a virtual space (for example, how students will collaborate and how they will record and edit the podcast with limited or no access to the university’s physical technology), and how virtual education might impact students’ perceptions of their work and of their own abilities.
—Sarah, Lisa, & Paul
The End of the World (and the Start of a New Collaboration with the Honors College)
A public R1 doctoral university located in Western Massachusetts, the University of Massachusetts Amherst serves an undergraduate population of over 23,500. Around 3,700 of these students are part of our Commonwealth Honors College. Spanning the third and fourth years, the honors program includes two tracks, multidisciplinary and departmental, each with an honors thesis or capstone project. Honors faculty come from every discipline at the university. With the mission to create cu