Volume 6, Number 1, 2022 COVID-19, Online Instruction, and Open Educational Resources

EN:

This teaching reflection, co-authored by two librarians and three instructors, offers a case study in collaborative assignment design and argues for the value of both collaboration as an instructional model and digital exhibitions as open educational resources. It explores how the transition to remote curating, learning, and teaching prompted by COVID-19 occasioned changes in how we curated exhibitions, on the one hand, and developed learning opportunities for students, on the other hand. Focused on a digital exhibition of nineteenth-century scrapbooks and the integration of scrapbooking—as a hands-on activity and a topic of scholarly inquiry—into three courses across two disciplines (English and art history), it also provides a model of how librarians and instructors might collaborate on assignment and coursedevelopment and scaffold such collaboration into assignment and course design. The reflection includes assignments and rubrics as well as examples of students’ work. It concludes with a series of recommendations for librarians and instructors who wish to collaborate.

EN:

The COVID-19 pandemic caused many post-secondary institutions to close abruptly in early 2020, and instructors were expected to transition to remote online instruction with little notice. For many instructors, hastily recorded lecture-capture videos alongside digital slides became the default mode of sharing instructional content. This sudden shift to video-based instruction was a significant challenge but also presented an opportunity to develop some instructional videos as open educational resources (OER). This paper outlines two case studies from the University of Saskatchewan in which a mix of OER and class-specific, closed-content videos were designed and integrated into remote learning environments. In designing these videos, we focused on technical design elements and accessibility, ability to reuse and share, and student engagement. Both cases, one in veterinary microbiology and the other in music research methods, followed similar strategies for creating multiple types of video content for the course, focusing on four distinct types (labs and demonstrations, guest interviews, lectures, and course information). Choosing to develop and share some of this video content as OER allowed us to expand the use of these learning objects beyond the online classroom. We discuss our considerations for making some videos open, including novelty of the content, reusability, copyright, privacy, and demands on instructor time. We also provide an introduction to our production process and practical tips, including planning, audiovisual production, editing, accessibility, and sharing platforms. The COVID-19 closures made 2020 an unexpectedly challenging year for students and instructors, but the necessity of moving instruction online prompted us to focus on supporting students in this new environment and helped us contribute to the growing body of OER.

EN:

Teaching in higher education in the Netherlands was affected, as in most other parts of the world, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper reflects on how two courses were taught and experienced by students during the 2020–21 academic year in the MA Media Studies: Digital Cultures at Maastricht University. It particularly focuses on how the integration of open educational resources into the course design, what we call a third pedagogic pillar, contributed to the success of the two courses and students’ positive learning experience.

EN:

This teaching reflection examines how “reading together” was fostered in synchronous and asynchronous online environments in two undergraduate creative writing courses through participation in a virtual book club. In the first course, prior to the pandemic, students had the option of meeting in person or via Zoom while we read Daisy Johnson’s Oedipus Rex retelling, Everything Under, for the book club. In the second course, during the pandemic, students had virtual synchronous and written participation choices while we read together Jessica Anthony’s political satire, Enter the Aardvark, with the author visiting in two sessions. In both cases, the goals were consistent: to get students reading as writers; to foster intrinsic motivation through personal choice; and to satisfy students’ desire for community connection while still accommodating personal schedules and geographical location. A virtual book club lets students read on their own schedule and in their own space, but still share their experience and observations with peers over greater distances (and time zones) than would otherwise be possible.

EN:

In the 2019–20 academic year, I redesigned a course on the classics to make both the texts and the context in which they were taught more accessible for and relevant to the predominantly female students of Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame. The course was re-centered on the dialogue between the ever-evolving and diverse cultures within Greece and the Roman empire and surrounding regions such as Egypt, Ethiopia, and Persia; issues caused by slavery and economic inequality; conceptions of gender roles and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and migration and citizenship; the troubling appropriation of classical motifs and texts by fascist groups in the twentieth century and some alt-right groups and sexual predators in the twenty-first century; and on recent initiatives meant to demonstrate the diversity of both Greek and Roman cultures through documentary, artistic, and archaeological evidence (particularly in the digital humanities and in museums and libraries).  I also wanted to make the course close to zero cost for students and to shift to digital texts which lent themselves to interactivity and social scholarship. Our librarian, Catherine Pellegrino, obtained multi-user e-books for modern reinterpretations of classical works still in copyright. A LibreTexts grant enabled the co-authors of this article—the course instructor (and lead author) and two paid student researchers—and a team of summer-employed student collaborators to edit, footnote, and create critical introductions and student activities for various key texts for the course. Many of these texts are now hosted on the LibreTexts OER platform.  Beta versions of enriched OER texts and activities were user tested in a synchronous hybrid virtual/physical classroom of twenty-five students, who were taking the course (HUST 292) in the fall semester of 2020.

EN:

In this teaching reflection, co-authored by an instructor and a teaching assistant, we consider some of the unanticipated openings for deeper engagement that the “pivot” to online teaching provided as we planned and then delivered an introductory course on Indigenous language documentation, conservation, and revitalization from September to December 2020. We engage with the fast-growing literature on the shift to online teaching and contribute to an emerging scholarship on language revitalization mediated by digital technologies that predates the global pandemic and will endure beyond it. Our commentary covers our preparation over the summer months of 2020 and our adaptation to an entirely online learning management system, including integrating what we had learned from educational resources, academic research, and colleagues. We highlight how we cultivated a learning environment centered around flexibility, compassion, and responsiveness, while acknowledging the challenges of this new arrangement for instructors and students alike. Finally, as we reflect on some of the productive aspects of the online teaching environment—including adaptable technologies, flipped classrooms, and the balance between synchronous and asynchronous class meetings—we ask which of these may be constructively incorporated into face-to-face classrooms when in-person teaching resumes once more.