12
Attention! This very special episode of the Teaching Hub is all about our intentions, and our intention to drag you into our intentions. So please, read as intently as you intend.
Engaging Teaching
Earlier this month, half of the Learning Technology contingent (n=1) of the Learning Design & Support Team attended the Open Education Conference in Richmond, Virginia. It is a conference where champions of Open Education meet to share their successes and failures in trying to open up educational practices and resources. And guess what? The people are very open and friendly and welcoming. This is a nice feature to have in people.
We mention this conference because that is where the nugget of an idea came from for a project we’d like to work on with you. The rest of the LDS Team members (n=4) were gracious enough to listen to the blathering on about this idea and accept it as a way to bring to life some of the big things we have all been working on. Here’s the nugget: Dr. Robin De Rosa (@actualham), a professor at Plymouth State University, produced an open textbook with her students. From this project, the students wound up with a free textbook to which they contributed. Can you imagine the feeling of pride and community that comes from being involved in a project like that? Well, we hope you won’t need to imagine for long. In other words, we want to produce Open Faculty Development Manuals/Texts with you and with our students. Here’s another example of an Open Textbook Project from the left coast, if you want to know more about it.
This is the engaging teaching section of the The Teaching Hub. We’ve never wanted it to be ‘all hose and no bucket‘ and just tell you what we think engaging teaching is. We’ve wanted to try to help get things started, but ultimately we want you to tell us. We want us all to show each other. This project aims to formalize just that. But not too formal, where’s the fun in that? The rest of this week’s Hub post digs deeper into his idea.
flickr photo by greenetrry https://flickr.com/photos/146322656@N03/30758039301 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
Learning Technology
We’re thinking we’d like to produce a digital and print version of the manuals, to get the best of both worlds. so here is a tool we may be able to use to make it look super slick:
Services for Students
The students have a bit of a horse in this race, don’t they? We’d like to get them involved, too. Meaning, we’d also like to publish a student version of the manual, so that they know where we are coming from when we implement some sound pedagogical practices in our classes. Maybe, just maybe, they will more quickly ‘get’ what you’re trying to do and buy into it more fully. That might be cool, huh? We promise the students that they will Learn, Belong and Become here at Fleming College. Well, the ‘become‘ part surely must mean that they become independent, adult, skilled, lifelong learners. This manual can help us make that happen for real.
Policies &