Tag: design

Open Education

Getting Started with Copyright, Fair Use, The Public Domain, and Creative Commons

Laura Pasquini

There are no shortages of articles, resources, videos, and ideas found online to support our educational planning.  With the vast amount of ways to create and disseminate learning materials, it is critical to appropriately share, curate, remix, and adapt educational content. In open education, it is important to understand how to attribute and identify copyright, fair use, and intellectual property.

Flickr image c/o Langwitches

In gathering resources for my courses and to encourage appropriate attribution as my students to create, this is a quick overview and definitions of copyright, fair use, the public domain, and the creative commons.

Copyright

The Basics of Copyright 

[Video; 6:19 minutes]This is an introductory video in copyright law, specifically about how to share copyrighted material at work while still respecting the rights of the content creators. Will you require permission before using materials? Do you ask permission before using protected content?

This is an introductory video in copyright law, specifically about how to share copyrighted material at work while still respecting the rights of the content creators. Will you require permission before using materials? Do you ask permission before using protected content?

  • Copyright law applies to all works, including print, media, and electronic mediums
  • Protected: Books, magazines, online articles, songs, screens plays, choreography, art,  software, work, software, podcasts, and photos
  • Not Protected: Ideas, facts & data; government items
  • Know the facts about copyright, not the myths
  • Get permission if required (when in doubt get permission)
  • Just because you found it online, & it is publicly available does not mean it is free to use
  • Not sure? Just ASK! Legal counsel at your workplace or an information professional (in the College of Information) or at the UNT Library for advice.
  • UNT Copyright Resources https://copyright.unt.edu/
  • CLEAR Copyright Guide for Instructors http://clear.unt.edu/copyright
  • Electronic Frontier Foundation: Teaching Copyright Resources 

Flickr image c/o Horia Valarn

Fair Use

Fair Use from copyright.gov:

“Fair Use is a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances. Section 107 of the Copyright Act provides the statutory framework for determining whether something is a fair use and identifies certain types of uses—such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research—as examples of activities that may qualify as fair use.”

Specifically, there are four requirements for fair use of materials:

    1. The purpose is for nonprofit, noncommercial educational use (typical cases).
    2. The nature of the copyrighted work is consistent with the proposed use.
    3. The amount and substantial of the original work involved some small uses can be considered an infringement, that is, a small portion involves the core idea in the copyrighted work.
    4. The effect of using the copyrighted work is not likely to deprive the copyright holder of sales or market interest.

Public Domain

The “public domain” relates to creative materials or works that are not protected by intellectual property laws, including copyright, trademark, or patent laws. These materials are owned by the public, not an individual author, artist, or creator.  Public domain materials and work may be used without obtaining any permission; however, no one is permitted to claim ownership for it. More information about the Public Domain, “Collective Works,” and when copyright expires can be found at the Copyright & Fair Use Website via Stanford University and Teaching Copyright via the EFF.

 Creative Commons  

Wanna Work Together? from Creative Commons on Vimeo. Creative Commons copyright licenses and tools allow for content to be shared beyond the traditional “all rights reserved” setting and decide on the best form of attribution for their work. The goal is to refine how copyright works and allows content creators to CHOOSE if they want to retain copyright while letting others copy, distribute, and make use of part of their work. You can decide what the copyright is and how others may use your photo, music, or works. Creative Commons licenses provide:

“everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The combination of our tools and our users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law.“

To enhance your learning, training, and/or presentation materials, you may want to find creative commons and public domain images, videos, music, or media. Certain websites, such as Flickr Creative Commons, even offer users content with specific attribution for use. There is even a Creative Commons Search to aggregate even more content to share, use and remix, including media, images, video, audio, music, photography, and web resources. Besides Flickr, there are a number of other helpful sites to locate Public Domain or Creative Commons images. Additionally, there are ways to attribute and provide CC by licenses via other online accounts including YouTube, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Vimeo, Archive.org, and your blog or website.

Want to learn more about Creative Commons and Open Educational Resources (OERs)? Check out UNT CLEAR‘s Creative Commons Guide and the UBC’s OER Accessibility Toolkit.

#OLCInnovate, Learning Technologies, Reflections

The #OLCinnovateSDS: Our Re-Cap of the Plan, Design, & Pitch at OLC Innovate 2016

Laura Pasquini

The inaugural OLC Innovate (#OLCInnovate) conference brought over a thousand educators, EdTech-innovators, and learning designers to New Orleans. This year was the inaugural Solution Design Summit (SDS) in which diverse teams of institutional stakeholders, campus partners, and EdTech innovators came together to solve learning challenges. Nine teams were selected to participate in the summit and pitch their learning solutions.

About the Solution Design Summit

Following OLC Emerging Technologies conference (2015) ideas from the “Teacher Tank,” we wanted to know, “How can we use the pitch format to design a solutions-based space for teams to work on solving a learning problem?” What resulted was the 2016 Solution Design Summit.

The SDS call for team proposals required participants to submit a learning challenge and a proposed solution to be worked on by an interdisciplinary team. The nine selected SDS teams then produced a 2-minute video trailer to describe their project. You can watch the 2016 SDS Video Trailers on YouTube or review the full SDS program here: http://bit.ly/olcinnovatesds16

Design Thinking Is A Process

During the Summit, a 3-hour pre-conference working session, the teams identified critical success factors for their learning solutions, gathered feedback from external stakeholders, and used design thinking to refine their “pitch” presentations. During the #OLCInnovate conference, teams delivered their 10-minute pitches in one of three concurrent sessions. The SDS pitches were evaluated by a panel of invited judges and audience participants.

OLCinnovateSDS_2016_Montage

The SDS challenges

The Solution Design Summit asked teams to work on increasing learner success in one of the following four areas: personal and adaptive learning; professional learning and development; the impact of open learning; or choose your own learning challenge.

Listed below are the nine SDS teams. Click on any of the titles to find out about each SDS team’s challenge and solution:

And the Winners are…

The 2016 SOLUTION DESIGN SUMMIT WINNING TEAM is . . .

OLCSDSWinner

Image mashup c/o Tony Dalton from the SDS Muhlenberg College Team

Creating Pathways to Digital Peer Leadership in the Liberal Arts

Team members:  

  • Lora Taub-Pervizpour, Associate Dean for Digital Learning, Professor of Media & Communication at Muhlenberg College
  • Kathy Harring, Dean of Institutional Assessment & Academic Planning, Professor of Psychology at Muhlenberg College
  • Sean Miller, Manager of Media Services at Muhlenberg College
  • Thomas Sciarrino, Manager of Instructional Technology and Digital Learning at Muhlenberg College
  • Anthony Dalton, Digital Cultures Media Technician, Digital Media Design Lab Instructor at Muhlenberg College

Summary: Like many liberal arts institutions, Muhlenberg College is exploring the role of the digital in our mission, goals, and practices.  We believe that digital spaces, pedagogical practices, and tools can amplify our liberal arts mission and values, and support deep relationships between teaching and learning, appreciation for diverse ways of knowing, and an education that prepares students for citizenship and lifelong learning. At the heart of our student-centered environment is a nationally recognized peer-mentor model.  Our goal is to create an innovative peer education model that empowers students to develop the relationships, skills, and competencies the need to excel as leaders in digital learning contexts.

Kudos to the COMMUNITY CHOICE award for….

If You Build It, Will They Come?

Team members:  

  • Tracy Stuntz, Instructional designer, lead LMS trainer at California State University, Fresno
  • Jean-Marie Venturini, Instructional designer, lead LMS trainer at Otis School of Art and Design
  • Rex Bartholomew, New Model Development Administrator at Toyota

Summary: The challenge we’re facing is faculty/client attendance at non-mandatory (but needed) training events is low. The focus is on reasons for faculty/client lack of attendance, and how to reach and motivate participants.

Thank You To All Who Played In the Solution Design Sandbox!

A big thank you to the invited stakeholders, judges, audience members, and the SDS planning team who supported this program. Kudos to ALL the SDS teams for your amazing pitch presentations! By asking teams to work on a solution before meeting together and then creating iterations of their work, we know that this type of conference project proposal was not simple. We hope each team received valuable input, feedback, and considerations to bring to their institutions and companies. This was the first year of the Solution Design Summit, and we hope to see a similar track at OLC Innovate 2017 and anywhere educators, designers, and ed tech innovators gather at a conference.

Thanks and much love from the #OLCInnovateSDS: 2016 SDS Planning Team,

Collaboration, Conference, Learning, Professional Development, Reflections, Research

Innovation for Learning: Submit Your Ideas for the #OLCInnovate Solution Design Summit

Laura Pasquini

I have been thinking about innovation for a while. What does innovation mean to you? How does “innovation” play into your world of work and learning? The word INNOVATE feels very much like a buzzword when it comes to learning. It may even be as a prime contender found on one of my #edtech bingo cards used for education meetings and conferences. Now the word, innovate, has been placed as a conference title and I agreed to support the planning for this event => Online Learning Consortium (OLC) Innovate. These facts only means I have been reading and reflecting even more about innovation and what this term means. Here are my current ponderings and ideas.

pondering_innovation

Flickr photo c/o Missy Scmidt

A number of organizations are increasingly being influenced or impacted the eagerness to “solve” problems with technology. Last year, George Steele suggested the book, The Innovators, in a conversation about the culture of change in higher education (a HUGE topic I will save for another blog post). This was a well-timed referral and read for me. Isaacson (2014) describes how groups of individuals ingeniously cooperated to innovate in the real world. Say what? Tell me more!

Thinking, designing, and employing innovation for learning is complicated. The story of the collective successes (and failures) of many innovators need to be shared, and continually drafted as there are “far fewer tales of collaborative creativity, which is actually more important in understanding…how today’s technology revolution was fashioned. It can also be more interesting” (Isaacson, 2014, p. 1)

Although The Innovators shares the history of computing, technology, and the Internet, and it really spoke to my inner collaborator and WHY I dabble in the applied inquiry to understand more about online/blended learning technologies and workplace L & D. The collaboration emphasis resonated throughout this text, and I do believe that “no one individual…has truly achieved anything alone.” I concur.

By definition, we always appear to be “innovating” in learning, right? With formal education institutions (K-12 and higher education), professional associations, and learning organizations there seems to be a tension of how to balance innovative ideas or approaches due to structural, pedagogical, and workforce challenges in the real world. We want to be innovative, but sometimes our organizations or “the system” rarely allows this process to unfold with constrictions of our job portfolios/functions, institutional divides, or designated project timelines. As Martin Weller put aptly put it: “the rhetoric for the need for innovation is rarely backed up by practice that will encourage it.” Let’s change that narrative. Why don’t we try to play with a few innovative ideas and concepts together?

For OLC Innovate, there are a few new (I won’t say innovative, just yet) program features that are atypical of a traditional conference format. One of the goals the #OLCInnovate steering committee set out: Let’s have less “talking head” presentations (education sessions, lectures or plenary talks), and more conversations, fun social happenings, places to share, and opportunities to solve REAL problems for online/blended/F2F learning. <<Segue>> THAT being said, here’s a new feature of the #OLCInnovate program I hope you will consider:

The OLC Solution Design Summit (SDS)


Video trailer production credit to Kyle Johnson

The general call for program proposals is now closed (with the peer reviews completed, expect to see the full program online next week); however the call for TEAM Proposals is OPEN for the OLC SDS until February 10, 2016 [Deadline Updated to extend the call for proposals on 1/26/16]. Thanks to the 2015 #et4online unconference banter, the OLC SDS Team (Mike Goudzwaard, Patrice Torcivia, Kyle Johnson, Adam Croom, & Michael Atkisson) decided it was about time to offer a program feature that was less about product and more about process. Together we carved out space in the #OLCInnovate schedule to offer a space for design thinkers, tinkers, and leaders to assemble in order to propose and solve challenges we encounter in learning (in K-12, higher education, and industry-L & D), such as:

As we know innovation takes time and it is a team process. For this CFP we have a broader timeline for this program and we and different expectations for this call for submissions. We are not looking for an end solution. Our team is more interested in WHO is at your interdisciplinary team table and the potential problems you want to work on together. Solutions might appear, but regardless this will be shared opening before, during, and after the #OLCInnovate 2016 conference ends:

Before the Conference

  1. Prospective SDS participants submit a challenge proposal by February 10, 2016: Abstract about the problem, team, and potential solution.
  2. Acceptance notifications will be sent out to teams by February 16th. [Confirm acceptance of your team by 1/22]
  3. Those SDS teams with accepted challenges will submit a solution pitch video for public review on the OLC Innovate 2016 website, by March 11, 2016 (due March 4th).
  4. Experts and OLC Innovate attendees will be invited to view and comment online to provide feedback on the video pitches March 21 – April 1.
  5. SDS teams will meet via an online web conference for 30 minutes to debrief and plan before the with the SDS facilitators in early April, before the #OLCInnovate Conference.

During the Conference

  1. SDS teams participate in a two-part pre-conference workshop session the morning of April 20, 2016. This will involve sharing the challenge and potential solution.
  2. Building on the feedback from the pitch reviews before, the design-thinking workshop on day 1, and comments from the workshop (via educators, edtech experts, researchers, exhibitors, and other SDS teams), you will further develop your challenge statement and solution design “pitch” to present during a concurrent session.
  3. SDS teams will present their solution in a 15-minute (10-minute presentation & 5 minute Q & A) time slot during an OLC Innovate session for all conference attendees.

Post-Conference Winning Team Benefits

  1. The winning SDS team members will each receive a one-year OLC Professional Membership (limited to a maximum of 5 team members). Current OLC members would receive a 1-year extension to their existing OLC Professional Membership.
  2. The winning SDS team members will receive complimentary future OLC 2016 or 2017 conference registration (limited to a maximum of 5 team members, not applicable to OLC Innovate 2016).
  3. The OLC Team will engage the winning team in a conversation of how best to showcase their solution through OLC.  Examples may include a webinar, membership dashboard interaction, OLC social media promotion, etc.

Now that you know the details, I encourage and instigate ALL of you to REVIEW the Solution Design Summit CFP and SUBMIT your team application NOW! Please feel free to share with your colleagues, and instigate innovation among your peers as well. Do you have questions about the OLC SDS? Email our team: sds@onlinelearning-c.org or follow up with either Mike or me. Thanks!

References

Isaacson, W. (2014). The innovators: How a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

EdTech, Learning Technologies

Checklist: Selecting Technology for Learning

Laura Pasquini

With so many possibilities for digital learning, selecting media and technologies for appropriate course instruction is a very complex process. Although there are a wide range of options in the ed tech realm, pedagogical considerations should always come first. Instructors should reflect on the learning objective and desired outcomes for their subject matter before identifying technological applications for the course.

The SECTIONS model, developed by Tony Bates (2015), is a pedagogical framework for determining what technology, specifically how this technology will be appropriate for instructional approaches. This might include identifying and determining pedagogical characteristics of text, audio, video, computing, and social media. With this framework, Bates (2015) asks five critical questions for teaching and learning for technology and media selection:

  1. Who are the learners?
  2. What are the desired learning outcomes from the teaching?
  3. What instructional strategies will be employed to facilitate the learning outcomes?
  4. What are the unique educational characteristics of each medium/technology, and how well do these match the learning and teaching requirements?
  5. What resources are available?

In thinking about the interplay of technology and learning, higher education courses will need to consider how this design process is developed. In this book chapter, Bates shared an alternative approach to the ADDIE model for instructional design – Learning + Technology Development Process Model (Hibbitts & Travin, 2015).

Learning + Technology Development Process Model (Hibbitts & Travin, 2015)Regardless of the model for learning design, it will be important to assess how technology will impact the pedagogy. The SECTIONS model is an effective framework to best inform instructors when deciding what media or technology to use for face-to-face, online or blended learning courses:

  • Students
  • Ease of use
  • Costs
  • Teaching functions (including the affordances of different media)
  • Interaction
  • Organizational issues
  • Networking
  • Security and privacy

I would encourage you to utilize Bates’ (2015) Questions to Guide Media Selection and Use, to support your learning design when consider technology adoption for teaching. This open, shared educational resource will provide you with a broader reflection on issues and considerations for your digital pedagogy. Here is an abbreviated checklist for selecting technologies for learning I adopted for a learning module. It was developed for faculty who would like to consider the broader issues for teaching with technology, and how to navigate this course planning process for digital/media inclusions.

Checklist: Selecting Technology for Learning

STUDENTS

  • Review accessibility mandate or policy of your institution, department or program.
  • Determine demographics of the students and appropriateness of technology.
  • Consider student access to technologies, both off campus and on campus.
  • Determine digital skills and digital readiness of your students with learning expectations.
  • Justify students purchases of a new technology component (if needed) for learning.
  • Assess prior learning approaches & how technology can support student learning.

EASE OF USE

  • Select the technology for ease of use by instructor and students.
  • Identify technology that is reliable for teaching and learning.
  • Verify the technology set up, maintenance and upgrade are simple.
  • Confirm the technology provider/company is stable to support hardware or software use.
  • Outline strategies to secure any digital teaching materials you create should the organization providing the software or service cease to exist.
  • Locate technical & professional support, both in terms of the technology and with respect to the design of materials.
  • Determine technologies to best support edits and updates of learning materials.
  • Outline how the new technology will change teaching with to get better results
  • Assess risks and potential challenges for using this technology for teaching and learning.

COST & YOUR TIME

  • Consider media selection by the length of time and ease of use during course development.
  • Factor the time it takes to prepare lectures, and determine if development of digital learning materials will save time and encourage interaction with students (online and/or face-to-face).
  • Investigate if there is extra funding for innovative teaching or technology applications; if so, determine how to best use that funding for learning technologies.
  • Assess the local support from your institution from instructional designers and media professionals for media design and development.
  • Identify open educational resources for the course, e.g. an open textbook, online videos, library page of articles, or other potential open educational resources.

TEACHING & LEARNING FACTORS

  • Determine the desired learning outcomes from the teaching in terms of content and skills.
  • Design instructional strategies to facilitate the learning outcomes.
  • Outline unique pedagogical characteristics appropriate for this course, in terms of content presentation and skill development, specifically for:
    • Textbook, readings, or other online text materials;
    • Audio, such as podcasts, streaming audio from news, etc.;
    • Video, such as slide presentations, lectures, tutorials, and screencasts; and
    • Social media, such as blogs, wikis, microblogs, photo sharing, curation, etc.
  • Plan learning aspects that must be face-to-face (in-person or online).

INTERACTION

  • Identify the skills for development and interactions that are most to determine the best type of media or technology to facilitate this learning.
  • Determine the kinds of kinds of interaction to produce a good balance between student comprehension and student skills development.
  • Estimate the amount of time the instructor will be interacting personally or online with students, and the type of medium for this interaction.

ORGANIZATIONAL ISSUES

  • Determine institutional support in choosing and using media or technology for teaching.
  • Identify if the institutional support is easily accessible, helpful, and will meet the needs for the learning technologies for the course.
  • Determine if there is funding available to “buy me out” for a semester and/or to fund a teaching assistance/support to concentrate on designing a new course or revising an existing course.
  • Locate institutional funding or resources for any learning technology or media production.
  • Review the standard technologies, practices and procedures for teaching and learning, to verify requirements for utilizing institutional technology resources, i.e. the learning management system, lecture capture system, etc.
  • Determine if the institution will support trying a new technological approach to learning, and will support innovative media or digital design.

NETWORKING

  • Outline the importance for learners to network beyond a course, i.e. with subject specialists, professionals in the field, and relevant people in the community.
  • Identify how the course or student learning can benefit from networking and learning from external connections.
  • Determine the appropriate network and/or social media space to integrate for your learners to network with each other and connect with external community members.
  • Integrate these networking mediums with standard course technology.
  • Delegate responsibility for its design and/or administration to students or learners.

SECURITY AND PRIVACY

  • Determine the student information you are obliged to keep private and secure.
  • Identify the institutional policies for security and privacy for teaching & learning.
  • Outline potential risks and challenges of using a particular technology where institutional policies concerning privacy could easily be breached.
  • Identify who at your institution could best advise you on security and privacy concerns, with regards to learning and teaching technologies.
  • Itemize the areas of teaching and learning, if any, available only to students registered in the course.
  • Identify the types of technologies to best restrict or limit access to course materials (if any) for my registered students.

Interested in reviewing your own learning design further? DOWNLOAD the Checklist: Selecting Technology for Learning

Reference:

Bates, A. W. (2015). Chapter 8: Choosing and using media in education: The SECTIONS model. From Teaching in a Digital Age. A Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/

Hibbitts, P. D., & Travin, M. T. (2015). Learning + technology development process model.

FashioningCircuits

#FashioningCircuits Takes On Design Your World STEM Conference

Laura Pasquini

Last weekend, I volunteered at the Design Your World – North Texas STEM Conference for Girls. This is the second year running for this conference, which was created to introduce and engage young girls to the STEM (science, technology, engineering & math) fields. I spent last Saturday on campus at SMU working with girls (ages 9-11) and sharing how coding, electronic circuits, and fashion intertwine with our fearless workshop creator/leader, Dr. Kim Knight (@purplekimchi). Girl power!

Design Your World fun with the #fashioningcircuits

Initially I joined in the Design Your World fun to document and take notes about the  #FashioningCircuits workshop, course, and research — but really how could I resist crafting my very own LED circuit headband with moustaches. REALLY?!?! This workshop introduced girls to the wearable Arduino Lillypad, and how to include this technological hardware in your fashion design.
Getting directionals from @purplekimchi for my #fashioncircuit

It was a fun and productive day. I really enjoyed working with the Girl Scout Troupe from Denton (Holla!) who wanted to learn how fashion connects to technology design, historically and in application. Not only did I earn my “Product Designer” badge (YES!), I also learned what these young ladies thought about working with technology, circuits, coding, and more:

My product designers from Denton Bella, Leah & Lilly. #fashioningcircuits #stem #girlpower

After getting to the end product — the blinking LED lights on the headband — all the girls felt a great sense of accomplishment and satisfaction for the day. It was a pretty cool project, after all. For me, I had a few personal takeaways from the workshop experience, and interacting with the participants:

  • Sometimes when you learn and try new things — you will not succeed. We all had a number of mistakes, but we learned from them and fixed errors to get to the end product.
  • Get a strategy and tip from those around you. Whether it’s how to thread the electric thread chord or stitching, you can learn from all levels.
  • These girls were not aware the barriers or even the lower number of females in the STEM fields. That being said, this might be the first time they learned about the fields of computer science, engineering, and more.
  • At this age, most girls believe that anything is possible.
  • “Girls work better together” (said my group) specifically with regards to collaboration, listening, and helping each other problem-solve.
  • My ladies thought that it was “much quieter without boys” and the said boys are more competitive.
  • Many of the girls were interested in learning more about computers, coding, circuits, electricity, and how things work in general as a direct result of interacting and designing in this workshop.
  • While completing the conference evaluation, my  group had to ask a parent what “box to check” for ethnicity. I liked this. It reminded me that institutions and educators put labels on things they don’t need to.
  • Keep exploring. Keep learning. Even this workshop schooled this ME… a self-acclaimed creative, smart kid. It reminded me to always keep the challenges coming.

Are you interested in learning more about this cool workshop? Want to connect to Fashion Circuits to learn about technology & design? Check out the Fashioning Circuits course taught by Dr. Knight at UT Dallas, follow @FashionCircuits on Twitter or track on the hashtag #FashioningCircuits for different happenings. I will continue to play with fashioning circuits every now and then to collaborate and contribute to Kim’s upcoming book, Fashioning Makers and Counterpublics: Critical Making and Public Humanities. Stay tuned for more maker and fashionista magic.