Amanda Coolidge - #OpenEd19 Keynote

Amanda Coolidge is the associate director of open education at BC campus and Canada she leads the provinces initiatives in open education from open textbooks to open pedagogy and with a team of eight other people who has worked across BC to enhance access for students amanda has a master's in educational technology and has had many years of experience as an instructional designer at various institutes universities across Canada amanda has worked in open education in Calgary Alberta Nairobi Kenya and in British Columbia as you will hear from her talk she has a very unique story of growing up in six different countries when Amanda's not at work she can often be found on the beaches and in the woods of British Columbia traveling with her family and their 32-foot 5th wheel RV and I had the pleasure of her being in Phoenix during one of our open IDI events and she's just dropped in she heard we were having this event came on in and I got to meet Amanda and I was like starstruck and so excited and then she I invited her to our panel on her vacation and she's like sure let me join you and meet your faculty and share my experiences which was so impactful for our faculty one really cool thing that she's doing next week which I thought was absolutely amazing she's very passionate about Jazzercise and she's going to be performing in the disneyland Parade next week with her Jazzercise team very cool please welcome me in joining my friend Amanda Coolidge okay so before I get started I just wanted to say something that I think is really important to talk about so I realized that some of you are concerned that this might be the final open education conference and some of you have even asked me how it feels to be the final keynote at the open education conference and I would like to say that I do not believe that this is the final in fact there have been many exciting conversations in the halls about what is next and where do we go from here with the founder of this event David Wiley is stepping down this is really up to the community now some of us gathered yesterday and David would like me to let you know that he was not one of those people who gathered yesterday afternoon to have this conversation and to ask what is next all of the results and we decided to take a first step by putting together a forum which you should be able to see on the screen and all of the results of the forum there there are questions that ask what is next and we're asking for the community to be able to provide some insight on this and if you have thoughts and some time please consider using the following form can you all see it okay so this is the forum so please take an opportunity to write down the URL or tweet about it because I think it's really important that we hear what everybody would like and now I will start my keynote in Canada we're in a period of reconciliation reconciliation is about establishing and maintaining a mutually respectful relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples and in order for that to happen there has to be awareness of the past and acknowledgment of the harm that has been inflicted an atonement for the causes an action to change behavior in this process we acknowledge the land on which we are situated and we give thankful respect to the land and its peoples in our acknowledgement we do not just pay tribute to the past but we acknowledge our collective place and responsibility for the future I'm going to talk a lot this morning about origin stories and in doing so I would like to start with the understanding of the origin of our place in space here and where we have been for the past few days for thousands of years the Odom yo varky Hakeem L Odom and Hohokam Nations have walked gently on the territories where we are based today and I am committed to honoring and respecting the first peoples and I thank them for their hospitality in addition I'm also going to talk about communities and collaboration and when I think about communities I'm often drawn to the power of the indigenous communities in British Columbia this piece of art titled pulling together was created by the First Nations artist LuAnn Neill and was inspired by the annual gathering of ocean-going canoes through tribal journeys the art is on the cover of each of BC campuses and digitization guides the open professional learning series developed to support the indigenous Asian and professional practice of institutions the artwork is intended to represent the connections each of us have to our respective nations and to one another as we pull together working toward our common visions we move forward in sync so that we can continue to build and manifest strong healthy communities with foundations rooted in our ancient ways please keep this in mind as we consider our own origin stories and how we as a community can pull together working toward our common visions I would also like to offer and I would also like to offer an acknowledgement of thanks to the program committee for the invitation to be asked to stand among so many mentors colleagues and friends it's really an honor to speak in front of all of you today and thank you to everyone who's made my family feel so welcome it's my son's second education open education conference and he's only seven and it's my husband's first so we all arrived here with our origin stories and lived experiences all of which provide insight into our cultures and our worldviews and my story will provide context for where my thoughts and ideas generate from this is a picture of me at 7:00 with traditional polish costume on truthfully I've never been comfortable giving my origin story because it always feels very hard to explain it's far from the norm and as a child and even as an adult I longed to belong I was born in Washington DC my father is American and was in the United States Foreign Service my mother is Canadian from Prince Edward Island and was a school board trustee a librarian a restaurant manager and took on many other Durer roles so you can probably guess where I get my energy from with my father's role in the Foreign Service we moved a lot as a family we lived in England Poland Pakistan Guatemala the United States and then I moved to Canada to start University in Nova Scotia growing up I attended schools that had over 40 nationalities represented across 200 students my upbringing taught me a few things to be adaptable to respect cultural differences and that there is an extreme unfairness a power to the privileged in our system while I may have been living overseas in developing countries I was also living in homes fully furnished with access to drivers cooks and people who did our laundry and I knew that on the other side of the gate to my home and beyond the walls of my international school lives were not privileged we lived in Poland during martial law a curfew was imposed the national borders sealed airports closed Road access two main cities restricted telephone lines were disconnected mail was subject to censorship and classes and schools and universities suspended I was living in Pakistan less than 39 percent of Pakistani girls attended high school in urban areas and less than 25 percent of girls attended high school in rural areas when it was time to apply for university and no this is not me at my application stage my first choice was Union College in Schenectady New York but even as a white middle class student I couldn't afford to attend I was awarded a scholarship that would cover one-third of the expenses but that was not going to alleviate what I saw as a future of financial burden I chose to attend Acadia University in Nova Scotia in 1997 when I started my first year the institution decided it would have what was known as the first laptop program for students when you arrived on campus you were given an ID card and an IBM ThinkPad and one of the innovative things that Acadia did was hire students to work with faculty to better understand how to use the technology in the classroom and to assist in redesigning courses alongside faculty so I decided to apply to be one of those students to co-create create courses and develop materials and I as I look back now I realize I probably was a little bit ahead of the game in open pedagogy I loved being a student instructional designer the full time employees taught me what I needed to know they instructed me in terms of what questions to ask how to be curious and how to interact with faculty and because of this experience I'm an extreme advocate for hiring students at our workplaces when I graduated I moved to Calgary Alberta and got a job with Mount Royal University as an instructional designer and my cultural background is the result of many cultures and while that sounds beautiful and lofty it is hard I always wanted to be from somewhere and when we returned to the United States when I was 16 I felt lost and my background did not fit in with the traditional suburban teen I longed for a sense of belonging in 2006 I moved from Calgary Alberta to Nairobi Kenya to work with the African virtual University the Open University and the BBC to create the first repository of open educational resources developed by African educators for African educators the repository tesa teacher education in sub-saharan Africa is for primary level educators is available in four languages and ranges in subject areas from English to life skills to science and I found my belonging in 2006 when I was first introduced to open education in Kenya I felt welcomed into a newly established community and I felt that the work I was doing was contributing to a greater cause I think many of us have found our sense of belonging to open education we've witnessed been a part of or are currently struggling with the in congruence of the status quo and our belonging in this field is a result of our want to do better I believe that the purpose of our work as educators as policymakers as system convenors is to improve access to education to make education affordable to the masses and not just the privileged few and most importantly to ensure our students are successful in can however the rising cost of post-secondary education is not improving success in Canada 320 undergraduates in British Columbia were asked how much they spent on textbooks in the last 12 months and the average was about $700 in 2017 in a survey of over 300 students in British Columbia 54% said they had not bought a textbook at least once due to cost 27 percent said they had taken fewer courses 26 said they didn't even register for the course because of the cost of the book and 17 said they had dropped or withdrawn from a course and textbooks are far from the only issue in British Columbia my colleague Krista Lambert Kandra conducted research on classes that require access to homework systems or digital publisher resources and found that students pay on average $92 per course for an access code similar findings were cited in a 2016 report by the student Public Interest Research Group the average cost of an access code sold sold sold that it means not bundled with a textbook was 100 dollars these access codes actually prevent access for our students article 26 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that higher education shall be accessible to all which is impossible when it's just for the privileged few the late Aaron Schwartz was a computer programmer writer political organizer and Internet activist his passing was a tragedy for the Commons at age 14 he helped to develop the RSS software that enables the syndication of information over the Internet at 15 he emailed Lawrence Lessig and helped to write the code for Creative Commons at 19 he was a developer of Reddit in 2011 Schwartz was arrested by MIT police on state breaking-and-entering charges after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked an unlocked closet and he set it to download academic journals systematically from JSTOR in his guerilla open access manifesto paper Schwartz writes those with access to these resources students librarians scientists you have been given a privilege you get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the let what rest of the world is locked out but you need not indeed you morally cannot keep this privilege for yourselves we need to do better the belonging I felt in open education in Kenya then led me to British Columbia Canada where I now lead the open education initiatives across the province I work for BC campus and the organization has been worth in open education since 2003 bccampus serves the entire province of British Columbia and our role is to work with the 25 public post-secondary institutions across the province in the areas of educational technology teaching and learning and open education we've been an organisation for 16 years and were primarily funded through our Ministry of advanced education skills and training and open education has received additional funding from the Hewlett Foundation we are collaborators innovators and system conveners our open education work began in 2003 when we started distributing grants to faculty to create and share openly licensed courses in 2012 our minister of advanced education announced that the province of British Columbia would receive 1 million dollars to support the development of open textbooks and since that time we've received another million dollars from the government as well as 250,000 dollars to create the first tuition free and zero textbook cost program for Adult Basic Education in North America and in April of this year we received 3 million dollars the largest investment in Canada toward making education accessible to all students through open education when our open textbook project began in 2012 we started with bringing in open textbooks from other collections we asked faculty to review the textbooks in the collection and we incentivize them with 250 dollars for each review as reviews came back there was a growing trend that indicated that many of the reviewers would use the open textbook if it was changed to include more Canadian examples and was in better alignment of the learning outcomes of their British Columbia courses we then put a call out for adaptations and using press books as our publishing tool we were able to work with faculty across British Columbia to adapt some of the open textbooks to meet their needs since the launch of the BC open textbook project in 2012 BC has say students more than 14 million dollars impacted more than 130,000 students and has a growing open textbook collection of more than 300 books and guides for post-secondary education from 2006 to 2008 when I was working on the Tessa project I witnessed educators creating content and adapting resources to localize them to ten country contexts curriculum in Sudan was translated to Arabic and used geographical examples from Sudan curriculum in Kenya was adapted for Swahili and English science experiments and curriculum outlines were adapted and localized so students and educators could use the materials available to them on the land in addition through collaboration the post-secondary institutions in sub-saharan Africa were printing materials from the Tessa website and delivering the curriculum to educators in the field through mail these institutions were not allowing a lack of an internet connection to stop them from impacting educators they saw that their role in furthering education of students across their country was to ensure that their materials were accessible and that their teachers would be able to impact students regardless of where they live and regardless of their connectivity this was the first project that I believe has successfully localized and customized content for students and educators so that they can see themselves in the curriculum and use the resources available in their context and read the materials in their language understand this if you understand nothing it is a powerful thing to be seen how many of your students see themselves and their own origin stories in their curriculum how many of your students struggle with instructions that is too disconnected from their own experiences dr. Christina Hendricks of the university of british columbia conducted research in 2017 titled the adoption of an open textbook in a large physics course in her survey she asked students what they liked most about the textbook their top response it was customized customization inclusion diversity accessibility are all under the umbrella of equity and isn't that what we're trying to do here create an equitable environment for our students to be successful new America nonpartisan nonprofit in Washington DC has been writing a blog series to explore the possibilities for creating and implementing inclusive learning materials with a focus on leveraging oh we are in one of her posts Subbiah Prescott explains that LGBTQ students are never taught material that reflects represents or validates their identity and as a consequence LGBTQ students are less engaged in school graduate at lower rates and face much higher rates of mental health conditions than their non LGBTQ counterparts California New Jersey Illinois and Colorado are now the first four states to require curricula in public schools to include identities and histories of LGBTQ people and people with disabilities and this is where the possibility of open textbooks live with these states sabio writes by openly licensing new textbook states could save money and share resources with other education systems across the country making it easier for schools everywhere to access high quality inclusive content Oh er also has the power to support content adaptation in ways traditional textbooks do not and with this new legislation these states are updating their textbooks for the first time in ten years and the content that goes into those textbooks may very well be used to teach students for another ten years Jess Mitchell notes if we aren't designing for inclusion than we are saying we are comfortable with a certain population of people not being involved and I am NOT okay with this for the first time it is possible that LGBTQ students will be seen in the curriculum imagine if every student regardless of race ethnicity gender religion and more could see themselves in the curriculum being used I shared with you my origin story it's time to ask your students there's Catherine Mayer the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation says that the idea that knowledge should be open and free is a radical challenge open as radical and then in the sense that knowledge should not be in the domain of the privileged few it challenges what comes before and the structures that have been built and our education institutions are full of structures we are asking institutions to change and when we ask people to change we're asking them to go against their sense of belonging of what their institutional culture is and has always been to best respond to change an orchestra change in our context it's time to ask what is the origin story in the cultural background of your institution how does it affect decisions made our open values evident in your institutional or your school districts vision or mission our community the open education community can often be fraught with the misunderstandings and critiques that are fundamentally based on the differing views of our origin stories for some the origin story of open education is either based on the open source software movement or perhaps a social justice movement or maybe even a Mormon agenda but we can actually see the roots of open education dating back to the 1960s and 1970s whereby it was a social movement response in Martin Weller's book battle for open he cites the launch of the open universities in the UK as a way to open up education to people who were otherwise excluded because they either lack the qualifications to enter higher education or their lifestyle and commitments meant they could not commit to full-time education open didn't necessarily mean free it meant easily accessible to the masses with the rise of the Internet and the launch of the creative common licenses this was where the opportunity to take the principles of open universities access to affordable education and apply an open license to curriculum to share remix revise and reuse myth learning materials in today's climate we represent and rightfully so the origin story of open education through numbers the total student debt in the United States stands at approximately 1.5 trillion dollars the Canadian federal government is using interest fees on student loans as a source of revenue that is projected to earn approximately eight hundred and sixty-two million dollars in just this last year 44 million Americans owe student loans the average Arizona student state debt is thirty-three thousand four hundred and eighty two dollars in British Columbia the student loan debt averages at twenty eight thousand dollars and when debt reaches ten thousand dollars student program completion rates drop from fifty nine percent to eight percent according to the Institute for college access and success bachelor degree recipients who were black who received Pell grants who were the first in their family to attend college and who attended for-profit colleges were more likely to default on their loans from buying a home to getting married and even having children an increasing number of young adults are putting off major milestones because of that one large liability Audrey Lord a black queer poet writes there is no such thing as a single issue struggle because we do not lead single issue lives student loan debt is not the result of tuition fees alone it includes books supplies tuition fees transportation costs room and board and other living expenses when we talk about access and affordability in education we are talking directly to the effect it has on student success whether you define success as student completion improve learning outcomes or retention bccampus communities are at the heart of the work we do my colleague Clint lalande wrote a blog post a couple of months ago about the open homework systems project we at BC campus are working on he wrote ultimately for any open education project to succeed and be sustainable it has to be about developing a community at the start of the open textbook project in 2012 we gathered librarians together to create the first open education librarians community in British Columbia the BC open education librarians is a supportive community to learn about open education practices together they seek to build support for librarians and faculty and advocating for the use of AR in their home institution by sharing knowledge --is and practices that impact higher education the librarians who make up this community have worked together to create libguides share best practices presented at multiple conferences and most importantly they have worked together to ensure that access to educational resource resources is unencumbered by ownership and cost we've also been excuse me we've also been very focused on a research community in British Columbia in 2014 we started the faculty Fellows Program which brings together instructors to engage in research that determines the efficacy of open textbook use in British Columbia institutions the fellows provide mentorship to faculty new to open textbooks through presentations consultations and conduct outreach activities in 2016 my team embarked on an ambitious project to bring the open Stax book into pressbooks so that all of you the Commons could easily edit adapt and customize the high-quality open Stax books to meet the needs of your students just this fall with the support of co-op students in the work of Laurier saath and Josie gray there are now 33 open Stax books available in pressbooks yeah that's great this work while beneficial to the BC community has had a profound impact on the entire open education community and when we have the opportunity to make works more accessible in the open community it benefits us all in British Columbia institutions interested in open education have started open education working groups these working groups have launched open publishing systems created open policies devised grant incentive programs hired students to assist in the adaption of textbooks hosted workshops and information sessions and delivered presentations to their institutional community the working groups are made up of students administrators faculty instructional designers librarians bookstore managers the Registrar IT and more open education effects and requires stakeholders from all areas of the institution as each person will have a different lens on how to move open education forward based on their perspective and lived experience with the institutional culture we see this outside of British Columbia as well with the open textbook Network which is a vibrant and supportive community that advances the use of open educational resources and practices through member organizations sparks open education leadership Fellows Program is another example it's an intensive professional development program to empower library professionals with the knowledge skills and connections to lead successful open education initiatives that benefits students and in K through 12 we have seen communities grow and gather through the go open initiative which is a community of state and district leaders collaborating to build knowledge and use AR to transform teaching and learning these are high impact communities that are comprised of people that see the work of others in their network as integral to their ability to achieve impact Mary Burgess BC campuses executive director has transformed the of support for communities specifically when it comes to inclusive practices at our events for our community to thrive and feel welcome each member must feel supported which is why at our BC campus events we offer free childcare for parents who seek both professional development and financial support we offer scholarships to instructors and staff who would not otherwise be able to attend due to the lack of professional development funds at their institutions and if you're with a student wishing to attend one of our events your registration is free we also have a code of conduct because we are dedicated to providing a harassment free event experience for everyone gathering a community together can be easy ensuring the community feels supported and functions on the realm of possibility and not fear that is where the work is I bring up these origins stories of open education because I believe that each of you has come to this community for reasons based on your own origin story it could be your response to access to affordability to content creation pedagogy technology publishing open source and whether it is because of the technology or the social justice reason you are here and that is what matters but what I am concerned about is that the open education community we have built is divided because we have lost our fundamental goal of why we sit in this room and that is to enhance student success through accessible education now we're going to take a little bit of detour to Iowa my team's laughing here so they know exactly where I go with this one so in the lead-up to the 2006 Democratic primaries Dan Pfeiffer Obama for America national communications director told his team if you can win Iowa then everything else was possible according to Johannes Abraham the Des Moines field organizer part of the training was that they set expectations like look we're going down in the National hols and those don't matter Iowa is the key to everything David Plouffe the national campaign manager said from the very moment Barack Obama started talking about running for president to the moment he announced what crystalized was a belief that we needed to win Iowa and that was a really our only chance so every decision was how does this help us win Iowa and if the answer is that it doesn't then we don't do it but what is our Iowa I believe that our Iowa as a community is to ensure our students are successful in their learning through accessible education and if we are going to win Iowa that is make learning accessible to each student in every classroom then the only way I see that happening is through open education open resources open science open data open source open access open while community is the noun collaboration is the verb for open education initiatives to be sustainable we must collaborate with each other in this room and with others not in this room I hope that over the course of the few days you've been able to make connections and identify collaborations where they would work to make our community stronger and more sustainable based on a decade of research developing detailed case studies on a range of successful networks Janeway's Gilliam and Norris silver of the University of California Berkeley identified a common set of patterns that are essential to effective collaboration one such pattern that has resonated deeply with me is build constellations rather than lone stars that is build a larger system to develop on the mission and not to become the market leader at BC campus our primary focus is to support the post-secondary institutions in British Columbia as they adopt adapt and evolve their teaching and learning practices to create a better experience for students we achieve this through a supportive approach to advanced pedagogy's a focus on impactful practice and collaboration with partners in British Columbia and around the world when I was prepping for this keynote I asked a few people in the open education community what message would you all like to hear from me and all of them said I'm paraphrasing a bit how bccampus has been able to collaborate with so many diverse partners I really believe that art we've been successful with our collaboration because of our core values open sharing access accountability quality respect we have consistently built constellations and not lone stars we know collaboration is hard but we see collaboration as a cornerstone of sustainability to the open movement so I want to share with you a few examples of how we have collaborated and why we all have to stop tweaking in silos at BC campus we've used this sprint model to create both open textbooks and ancillary resources in 2015 my colleague Clint and I were part of the first open textbook sprint we brought together five geography faculty from four institutions for four days to plan and draft a nearly 200 page open textbook for British Columbia regional geography faculty were supported by a librarian a graphic artist facilitators and BC campus staff which permitted the faculty to focus on their subject matter expertise this effort produced a local an open textbook that served a local need which has since been adopted at several BC institutions and we took a similar approach when several BC psychology faculty identified that the absence of a question Bank was inhibiting the adoption of a newly adapted Canadian edition of an open textbook for introductory psychology so in this case 17 faculty from six institutions came together for two days to write in peer-review nearly 1,000 of multiple-choice questions and the result is that five out of six institutions adopted the open textbook within the year this type of collaboration has also seen success at open stacks where each year they host a creator fest they bring together the open stacks user community to collaborate and put knowledge into practice instructors develop ancillary resources like test bengts problem sets and enhanced PowerPoint slides this sprint model reduces individual workload results in the production of a higher quality resource and instantly provides inter-institutional credibility of the oer in 2014 I worked with Tara Robertson now at Mozilla formerly with the Center for accessible post-secondary education resources and sued owner of canosa in college to create the BC open textbook accessibility toolkit the reason for this collaboration was that because after creating all of the open textbooks in our collection the concern was how do we allow our work to be both open and accessible we began asking ourselves about true access for all students including students with visual disabilities where are we providing a textbook that could be in fact be used by the students on day one and allow them to feel a sense of belonging in the classroom at the end of 2014 we contacted the disability service coordinators at partner institutions to find student participants with print disabilities to evaluate PC open textbooks the participants were asked to look at five chapters from the library and provide their evaluation and this worked really well but we started to notice that some of the students were responding to some questions and some were not responding to some questions so we decided to take it further and bring them in for a half-day focus group so we were able to see them reading and accessing the materials on their different devices based on the student feedback we were now able to make our own textbooks more accessible and we now have an employee Josie Grey dedicated to inclusive and accessible design on our open education team the Reba's community is an amazing example of collaboration it's a dedicated platform for creating and publishing open textbooks Reba's provides oh we are projects with publishing guidance support forums a contributor marketplace and a dedicated discussion space their most recent publication introduction to philosophy had 35 collaborators collaborations can also happen in ways that may seem counterculture to the open education movement collaborations in partnership with for-profit entities such as lumen learning or nonprofits partnering with for profits in the case of open Stax is a lie program and you know what I believe that is ok it is ok because while they may be using different funding models they are working towards the same Iowa to ensure students are successful in their learning through accessible and low-cost education successful collaborations can also result in profound policy changes at the University of British Columbia there is now inclusion of language recognizing open in the institution's tenure and promotion guide oh we are now listed as a type of evidence that candidates could present for evaluation which provides a way for faculty to get formally recognized for engaging in Oh a our activities this only happened because of a collaboration between the teaching and learning center and the Students Union this would never have happened without collaboration in addition to institutional collaborations we've also been involved in interprovincial and global collaborations in 2012 we're in the open textbook project was launched Mary Burgess made it a point to reach out to leaders in the field those who were doing the work testing the waters and making waves in open education the 20 people gathered at the table represented 14 different organizations including openstax US PIRG right to research coalition creative commons lumen learning 20 million mines Washington State and eCampus Alberta since that time we have continued our efforts of collaborating to pay it forward by supporting pressbooks sharing publishing best practices with the open textbook network sharing our BC open textbook collection with Manitoba and Ontario and partnering with lumen learning open Oregon and Washington state to host the Cascadia open education summit when we collaborate we invite stakeholders into the process early as a partner and not late as a judge while it is true that successful collaborations can be hampered due to challenges such as people communication and competition we collaborate because the goal is to improve student learning outcomes and to ensure students success and we know that alone we cannot accomplish this task our greatest resource is the relationships we build in our community through collaboration origins stories matter every person has the right to learn and every person has the right to feel a sense of belonging in their classroom and correct ulam share origin stories ask others there's ask your students how their origin story is reflected in the curriculum and we need to also be asking our institution what their origin story is its culture its response to change which will inform us how it will respond to the radical challenge of open and we know the data we know that student loan debt is debilitating and students face choices that aren't logical meal or books open education is the response to the origin story of Education as a privileged good to make these cultural shifts I ask that we step back and we remind ourselves of why we do this work how do we achieve our Iowa how we move forward has to be through collaboration find others working on similar projects look across institutional structures and across borders be curious look for alternative solutions to complex problems because education is not a single issue struggle which means there's multiple strategies to bring to the table as I look into the future of Education and in particular open education systematic and sustainable change is about working together sharing knowledge and tweaking outside of our silos because together we can achieve success for our students thank you [Applause]