Making Sense of Open Education, Final Reflection

Image of desert with open door leading to a dock on a large body of water

Today is the last day of the Making Sense of Open Education Mini-MOOC hosted by Jenni Hayman. It has been a 15 day whirlwind tour of Openness! I wanted to go back to the beginning and review the Course Outcomes and see where I stand in relationship.

Course learning outcomes:
On completion of this open course participants will have expanded their ability to:

  1. Describe the value of open educational practices (OEP) in their teaching and learning contexts
  2. Give examples of appropriate open educational resources (OER) for their practice
  3. Describe user permissions related to each of the Creative Commons license types
  4. Find and curate high quality OER for a course or small project
  5. Connect with other practitioners interested in exploring use of open educational resources and practices in their teaching

These were not numbered in the course, I added numbers to make giving my response easier.

My response:

One: Open educational practices add value to my teaching by allowing me the opportunity to tailor my teaching to the students in front of me now by broadening my awareness of OER sources that can better meet their needs in terms of accessibility and affordability. Beyond the choice of materials, OEP also leads me to consider how students can co-create materials and be curators of learning materials and how participating in this is a better assessment tool and holds more long-term value for student than disposable assignments. Digital Tools give me and my students the opportunity to be creators and give us the opportunity to share what we are learning with others. Because I see value in OEP, I am inspired to take action and advocate for greater openness in others and in my own institution.

Two: Can I give examples of appropriate OER for my practice? Why, yes, I can. I posted a prototype of a unit I am building for my students. It includes chapters from a OER textbook, open source images, and a CC video.

Three: Can I describe user permissions? Yup, let me do so with a Creative Commons licensed image:

Graphic showing various Creative Commons Licences.

Creative Commons licenses by Foter (CC-BY-SA)

Four: Can I curate OER resources for a small project? I did! I collected OER resources on Reflection into a padlet in a recent post.

Five: Have I connected with other practitioners of Open Education? Sure did and will continue to do so. I outlined my growing PLN in a post exploring what my connections look like. I also create a post outlining how I began to use twitter as a tool for connecting.

The Making Sense of Open Education has been a tremendously positive learning experience for me and I encourage you, my reader, to check it out soon as it will be set up as a self directed learning opportunity on Open University soon.

Featured Image photo by santiagotorrescl95 on Pixabay

OER Remix Prototype – Academic Integrity

Overview of hands on a desk working on plan on paper.

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This is a prototype for a unit on Academic Integrity I am creating for my students and in response to both the Technologist Module for Ontario Extend and Day 12 of Making Sense of Open Education.

Here is my plan.

  • I want to adapt two excerpts from an OER textbook.
  • Add original video of my own.
  • Use CC licensed video and images from Unsplash.
  • Link to additional resources
  • Add self-test questions that I create.

Opening

Academic Integrity – The Honest Truth

View of lecture room with students listening.
Photo by John-Mark Smith on Unsplash

It is vital that students focus on the active process of learning, not just on how to get good grades. The attitude of some students that grades are the end-all in academics has led many students to resort to academic dishonesty to try to get the best possible grades or handle the pressure of an academic program. Although you may be further tempted if you’ve heard people say, “Everybody does it,” or “It’s no big deal at my school,” you should be mindful of the consequences of cheating:

  • You don’t learn as much. Cheating may get you the right answer on a particular exam question, but it won’t teach you how to apply knowledge in the world after school, nor will it give you a foundation of knowledge for learning more advanced material. When you cheat, you cheat yourself out of opportunities.
  • You risk failing the course or even expulsion from school. Each institution has its own definitions of and penalties for academic dishonesty, but most include cheating, plagiarism, and fabrication or falsification. The exact details of what is allowed or not allowed vary somewhat among different colleges and even instructors, so you should be sure to check your school’s Web site and your instructor’s guidelines to see what rules apply. Ignorance of the rules is seldom considered a valid defense.
  • Cheating causes stress. Fear of getting caught will cause you stress and anxiety; this will get in the way of performing well with the information you do know.
    You’re throwing away your money and time. Getting a college education is a big investment of money and effort. You’re simply not getting your full value when you cheat, because you don’t learn as much.
  • You are trashing your integrity. Cheating once and getting away with it makes it easier to cheat again, and the more you cheat, the more comfortable you will feel with giving up your integrity in other areas of life—with perhaps even more serious consequences.
  • Cheating lowers your self-esteem. If you cheat, you are telling yourself that you are simply not smart enough to handle learning. It also robs you of the feeling of satisfaction from genuine success.
Students gathered around a laptop
Photo by Štefan Štefančík on Unsplash

Technology has made it easier to cheat. Your credit card and an Internet connection can procure a paper for you on just about any subject and length. You can copy and paste for free from various Web sites. Students have made creative use of texting and video on their cell phones to gain unauthorized access to material for exams. But be aware that technology has also created ways for instructors to easily detect these forms of academic dishonesty. Most colleges make these tools available to their instructors. Instructors are also modifying their testing approaches to reduce potential academic misconduct by using methods that are harder to cheat at (such as in-class essays that evaluate your thinking and oral presentations).

If you feel uneasy about doing something in your college work, trust your instincts. Confirm with the instructor that your intended form of research or use of material is acceptable. Cheating just doesn’t pay.

Excerpt adapted from College Success by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.


Video – this is a rough cut of my video. I plan to clean it up and add design elements, closed captioning and a transcript.

The Value of Academic Integrity

Video by Irene Stewart, January 10, 2018


Plagiarism—and How to Avoid It

Plagiarism is the unacknowledged use of material from a source. At the most obvious level, plagiarism involves using someone else’s words and ideas as if they were your own. There’s not much to say about copying another person’s work: it’s cheating, pure and simple. But plagiarism is not always so simple. Notice that our definition of plagiarism involves “words and ideas.” Let’s break that down a little further.

Woman's hand writing with a number of papers on a desk.
Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash

Words. Copying the words of another is clearly wrong. If you use another’s words, those words must be in quotation marks, and you must tell your reader where those words came from. But it is not enough to make a few surface changes in wording. You can’t just change some words and call the material yours; close, extended paraphrase is not acceptable.

Ideas. Ideas are also a form of intellectual property. You may this idea in a passage that summarizes the original, that is, it states the main idea in compressed form in language that does not come from the original. But it could still be seen as plagiarism if the source is not cited. This example probably makes you wonder if you can write anything without citing a source. To help you sort out what ideas need to be cited and what not, think about these principles:

Common knowledge. There is no need to cite common knowledge. Common knowledge does not mean knowledge everyone has. It means knowledge that everyone can easily access. If the information or idea can be found in multiple sources and the information or idea remains constant from source to source, it can be considered common knowledge. This is one reason so much research is usually done for college writing—the more sources you read, the more easily you can sort out what is common knowledge: if you see an uncited idea in multiple sources, then you can feel secure that idea is common knowledge.

Distinct contributions. One does need to cite ideas that are distinct contributions. A distinct contribution need not be a discovery from the work of one person. It need only be an insight that is not commonly expressed (not found in multiple sources) and not universally agreed upon.

Disputable figures. Always remember that numbers are only as good as the sources they come from. If you use numbers or any statistics always cite your source of those numbers. If your instructor does not know the source you used, you will not get much credit for the information you have collected.

Everything said previously about using sources applies to all forms of sources. Some students mistakenly believe that material from the Web, for example, need not be cited. Or that an idea from an instructor’s lecture is automatically common property. You must evaluate all sources in the same way and cite them as necessary.

Bulletin board with notes and pictures.
Photo by Jo Szczepanska on Unsplash

Forms of Citation

You should generally check with your instructors about their preferred form of citation when you write papers for courses. No one standard is used in all academic papers. You can learn about the three major forms or styles used in most any college writing handbook and on many Web sites for college writers:

  • The Modern Language Association (MLA) system of citation is widely used but is most commonly adopted in humanities courses, particularly literature courses.
  • The American Psychological Association (APA) system of citation is most common in the social sciences.
  • The Chicago Manual of Style is widely used but perhaps most commonly in history courses.

Many college departments have their own style guides, which may be based on one of the above. Your instructor should refer you to his or her preferred guide, but be sure to ask if you have not been given explicit direction.

Excerpt adapted from College Success by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.


Understanding and Avoiding Plagiarism: Type of Plagiarism

University of Guelph Library, 2014. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License


Resources

To learn more, check out the Learning Portal. The Learning Portal shares resources from colleges across Ontario.

Academic Integrity – http://tlp-lpa.ca/research/academic-integrity

How to Cite – http://tlp-lpa.ca/research/citation


Unit would end with self-check or self-test questions to be developed.


 

This is my prototype of materials to remix into a new unit. I am considering combining these into one container although, I am not sure what technology would be best to put this together. I am also not sure if all these resources have creative commons licensing that can be combined. Finally, I am not sure that this would represent a complete picture of Academic Integrity or if I am missing content. If you would like to provide any feedback or suggestions, your ideas would be most welcome.

Day 1 – Making Sense of Open Education

I am participating in a 15 day MOOC on Open University called Making Sense of Open Education and part of the learning is an activity to complete for each day. This is my first discussion post entry, repeated here so that I can tweet it!


Happy Day 1 fellow Open Education Learners!

For my submission, I found a video about Open Education that explained how one might use OER to learn:

Why Open Education Matters

If this video does not play, please see Why Open Education Matters by Ope Bukola at https://youtu.be/cHQp33rbg5k

This video introduced me to two new resources:

Curriki and P2PU

What I want to learn:

I still feel that I am very new to Open Education and I would like to learn more about finding OER as well as understanding Open licensing. I want to learn about adapting OER and especially how material with different licenses can and cannot work together.

AND if I can find a few new friends along that way, that would be good too!


Featured Image is Course logo by Jenni Hayman licensed with a CC BY 4.0 International license

Applying the CRAAP Test

Focusing on OER textbook selection that I made for Porter’s Five Forces, I will apply the CRAAP Test in this post.

Evaluating the Industry in Mastering Strategic Management, 1st Canadian Edition (2014) by Janice Edwards on BC Open Textbooks.

Currency 

This textbook was published in 2014 on BC Open Textbooks and is based on Mastering Strategic Management by University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing in 2011. While this may be bordering on dated, most concepts of Strategic Management have not changed and Janice Edwards added updated Canadian content in 2014.

Relevance

The textbook covers expected models and concepts at the college level for introductory and Intermediate study of Strategic Management

Authority

Janice Edwards, Centennial College
Dave Ketchen, Auburn University
Jeremy Short, University of Oklahoma

A full description of the authors’ credentials are available on the Open Textbook Library Website.

Accuracy

I found the textbook to be free of errors and issues. On the Open Textbook Library, the original textbook was reviewed 7 times between 2013 and 2018 and received a rating of 4.5 stars out of 5.

Purpose

The purpose of the text is to education and inform students at the post secondary level on methods and models of strategic management including the analysis of business problems. This matches my intention and audience.

This post was created for an Extend Activity in the Curator Module.

 

 

 

 

OER for Porter’s Five Forces


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Teaching and learning with case studies in the area of Business has been a fascination of mine for some time. Recently, David Tell (@bdt53 ‏) and I have been debating creating an Open Education Resource on the case study method that could be used as a workshop or seminar for Business students at our college. With this in mind, I searched for Open Education Resources (OER) that might be used in this project.

My first attempts were fruitless. I started to large, seeking first if there was a seminar style resource already created. Recalling the suggestion to map out a strategy, I thought about what concepts or tools I would want to have as part of the seminar and turned my attention the Porter’s Five Forces.

Using this smaller piece of a case study seminar, I found:

One chapter in OER textbook: Evaluating the Industry in Mastering Strategic Management, 1st Canadian Edition (2014) by Janice Edwards on BC Open Textbooks.

One article: Boundless: “Porter’s Five Forces” from BUS501: STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT on Saylor Academy

An interview with Mike Porter on his Five Forces model:

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

One instructional video:

And two graphics or figures, one used as the Feature Image – Figure by MIT OpenCourseWare on Flickr  and a second more detailed figure also by MIT OpenCourseWare on Flickr:

4745487755_664668de2d_z.jpg

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