Enacting Open Pedagogy and Co-mentorship Practices with Graduate Students: 

A Collaborative Autoethnographic Study

Pamela Walsh, Cindy Ives, and Beth Perry, Athabasca University

Track: Evidence-based practices in teaching/ Volet: Pratiques de l'enseignement fondées sur des preuves

Type: Research presentation

Rationale for the study: As reflective practitioners we seek answers to questions that will help us become more effective online educators, in part by moving beyond a traditional discourse approach to teaching and learning. The goal of this study is to provide recommendations that may enhance practice by critiquing the teaching and learning strategies that we currently use with graduate students. Our critique is informed by the principles of open pedagogy and co-mentorship. Co-mentorship is a relationship in which participants learn from one another in a mutually beneficial way (Murdock, et al., 2013). Open pedagogy uses various strategies to promote collaboration, connection, diversity, and democracy in teaching and learning. As educators who enact open pedagogy, we aim to empower students, reduce the hierarchy in teacher-student relationships, and move from teacher-centred to student-centred practices (Baran & AlZoubi, 2020). Our study context is an online and open university.

Research questions: How do our learning and teaching practices support online graduate students? What educational practices do we use that are consistent with open pedagogy? What open pedagogical practices support co-mentorship in graduate student learning and supervision? What opportunities do we see for improving our open pedagogical practices and co- mentorship of graduate students?

Methodology: This is a practitioner and evidence-based study. Using collaborative autoethnography as our method, we are collecting data from critical self-reflection, dialogic conversations about our teaching and learning experiences and practices, and from review of related artefacts which may include our research journal entries, course assessments and learning activities, publications, and conference presentations. Collaborative autoethnography assumes that personal experience is imbued with social and cultural norms; therefore we critically examine our beliefs and practices. We record our individual reflections and collective conversations related to our research topic using the auto-transcription function of Microsoft Teams. Data analysis and interpretation are guided by thematic coding (Chang et. al., 2016; Saldaña, 2020). We have orientated ourselves to ethical guidelines recommended for collaborative autoethnographic research including how we implicate and represent ourselves and others (Adams & Herrman, 2020). Ethics approval for this study was granted by the Athabasca University Research Ethics Board.

References:

Adams, Tony E. & Herrmann, Andrew F. (2020). Expanding our autoethnographic future. Journal of Autoethnography, 1(1), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2020.1.1.1 

Baran, Evrim & AlZoubi, Dana (2020). Affordances, challenges, and impact of open pedagogy: Examining students’ voices, Distance Education, 41(2), 230-244. https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2020.1757409 

Boskurt, A., & Koseouglu, S., Singh, L. (2019). An analysis of peer reviewed publications on openness in education in half a century: Trends and patterns in the open hemisphere. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 35(4), 78- 97. 

Chang, H., Ngunjiri, F. & Hernandez, K.C. (2016). Collaborative autoethnography. Routledge. Kumar, S., & Coe, C. (2017). Mentoring and student support in online doctoral programs. American Journal of Distance Education, 31(2), 128-142. 

Murdock, J.L., Stipanovic, N., & Lucas, K. (2013). Fostering connections between graduate students and strengthening professional identity through co-mentoring. British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 4(15), 487-503. https://doi.org/10.1080/03069885.2012.756972

Saldaña, Johnny (2020). The coding manual for qualitative researchers (4th edition). Sage.

Open Educational Practice and a Website created by Students, for Students

Lauren Okano, Brittany Brennan, Kate Fagervik, Sukh Matonovich, and Marie Bartlett, Thompson Rivers University

Track: Learning experience design / Volet: Conception des expériences d’apprentissage

Type: Innovative teaching, technology or design technique

Name of the innovation: Open educational practice, WordPress, H5P

Type of innovation: Teaching and Technology

How the innovation works:

Through open educational practice, students choose their learning and creative activities, using open technology to build a resource. 

CURN (Canadian Undergraduate Research Network) is an emerging community supported by the office of Research and Graduate Studies at Thompson Rivers University (TRU), which is located in Secwepemcúl̓ecw on the unceded land of the Secwépemc peoples, on the interior plateau of British Columbia. 

For a number of years, groups of TRU students have been building a CURN website as part of their undergraduate research ambassador roles, adding to each other’s work every semester.

Since the start of the initiative, the objective has been to create a resource that would get students interested and engaged in undergraduate research. 

Designed as an open pedagogy project, student research ambassadors were given the autonomy to choose the format and the structure of the resource, decide which topics to include, what they wanted to learn from the project, and how to organize their groups and creative efforts. 

As subject matter experts, the research ambassadors have been candidly sharing their excitement, their doubts, and their discoveries. Questions as: Where to start? Is research for me? Is an ethics approval process scary? What can a research project look like? What if the research doesn’t go as planned? How can I find research opportunities? Will I want to do research looking forward? appear on the CURN website in a variety of innovative formats, including H5P elements, videos, and podcasts. 

Research and Graduate Studies administrators, instructional designers and educational technologists, media developers, intellectual property officers, and many more staff and faculty members assisted the students as needed. 

In this presentation, participants will:

1. learn about the project’s processes and timelines 

2. explore the CURN website 

3. discuss how this project may align with their professional interests

Repurposing Open Education Resources (OER) Courses in Sustainable Forest Management amid Global Pandemic: Lessons Learned and Future Implementation

Anil Shrestha, Hailan Chen, Na Zhong, The University of British Columbia;

Shiyi Zhang, Cao Long, Asia-Pacific Network for Sustainable Forest Management and Rehabilitation (APFNet); and Guangyu Wang, The University of British Columbia

Track: Partnering with Faculty and administration/ Volet: Partenariat avec le corps professoral et l'administration

Type: Innovative teaching, technology or design technique:

Name of the innovation: Collaborative approach in designing and teaching: Repurposed OER Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) online courses Amid COVID pandemic in Asia

Type of innovation: Collaborative approach in designing and repurposing OER online courses

How the innovation works:

A team-based approach was adopted to repurpose and deliver a suite of OER courses in SFM in response to COVID pandemic induced complete halt of face-to-face teaching and learning during 2020 in forestry universities in Asia. UBC Faculty of Forestry with support from UBC CTLT and in collaboration with over 50 instructors, teaching assistants, and educational support experts from partner universities in Asia, offered of repurposed OER courses to students in partner universities in spring and winter 2020 sessions. A course-running manager oversees the overall design and delivery of the courses. UBC CTLT provided central support on instructional and learning design to review the syllabus and detailed assessment descriptions and build the courses on consistent Canvas course design template to ascertain the quality design of the courses. Lead instructor led preparation of course content, detail syllabus and effective delivery of each course including training TAs and Co-instructors on online pedagogy making sure high quality interactive teaching and learning. TAs and Co-instructors from partner universities were responsible for facilitating the course including monitoring student’s progress, grading assignment, providing individual and group feedbacks. A course-running assistant provided technical support during course delivery. This collaborative effort reached out to more than 3000 students from 168 universities in Asia and South America enrolled in 12 repurposed instructor-led online courses. Each repurposed OER course was built in user-friendly CANVAS learning environment supporting maximum instructor-student and student-student interactions. Each OER course typically consists of weekly topics and related pre-recorded video lectures, open-access peer-reviewed reading materials, and various collaborative learning activities such as weekly group discussions, critical peer review, reflection, and assignments. During teaching, our practices have moved from content-based instruction to more learner-centered learning with student participation in discourse and co-creation of course materials guided by Bloom’s Taxonomy of the hierarchical ordering of cognitive skills from less complexity to highest complexity form of learning. With this approach, students learned about SFM, forest restoration, and governance issues, including open source GIS and remote sensing skills, and, most importantly, developed their critical analysis, writing, argumentation skills, and apply learned knowledge into practice to address various SFM issues in the region.