Wednesday, June 05, 2013 at 08:00 AM

Hotel Monaco in Denver, CO

June 5-6, 2013

Hotel Monaco, Denver, Colorado
Meeting Sponsors: Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative and Lumen Learning

The Open Education Leadership Summit brings together academic leaders from colleges and universities to define a path forward for how open education can strengthen student success. Join us for this workshop-style event to learn about the current policy environment and what’s working in open education today. Share best practices and explore the challenges, opportunities and strategies for pursuing effective open education initiatives.

Who should attend?

The meeting agenda is tailored for college and university presidents, provosts, deans, department chairs and other academic leaders from institutions that are actively engaged in, exploring or planning open education initiatives.

Meeting Highlights

• Meet leaders in education policy who are guiding systemic change in education
• Learn from leaders who are using of open education to affect college affordability and student success
• Glean insights to guide planning and execution around your institution’s open education initiatives
• Network with colleagues who are making progress in open education, and identify opportunities to collaborate in areas of joint interest
• Receive the Open Education Action Plan 2013, a planning piece that summarizes meeting findings, including issues, priorities and strategies to move open education forward

Reserve Your Place Now

Thanks to grant funding from the Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative, there is no registration fee for the 2013 Open Education Leadership Summit.  However, attendance is limited. Please RSVP by clicking here. For more information, contact kim.thanos@lumenlearning.com.

The Kaleidoscope Open Project is an endeavor to design, reuse, and redesign courses through a community of professors with a range of expertise.  This allows the opportunity to “build on the shoulders” of others by doing significant intellectual work on teaching and learning, much like what is done in research. This process increases the likelihood of real breakthroughs in teaching and learning employing a continuous improvement approach via a faculty community.

You can read the full blog post here.

At the start of the [Kaleidoscope] project, all I could really grasp was replacing the expensive textbook I was using with high quality, peer-reviewed, free materials called OER. It seemed obvious that OER was good because it saved students money. The true gift, however, was Kaleidoscope’s model in utilizing OER. It extended beyond the freedom from the textbook: it was in the opportunities to collaborate cross-institutionally, understand the value of sound course design, and use empirical data instead of a hunch to make meaningful change.

Ronda’s full post is well worth the read. Thank you, Ronda!

We would we pleased to include experiences from other project participants as well.

The Kaleidoscope open course designs bring open educational resources (OER) together to create a complete, open course design for general education courses.  These open resources eliminate textbook cost as a barrier to student success. More importantly, they provide faculty members the freedom to revise, remix, reuse and redistribute the course materials.

Our vision is to create effective, granular assessments in each of the Kaleidoscope course designs that will allow us to make very targeted improvements to the Kaleidoscope open materials that will improve student learning. We will also tie the assessments to deeper learning outcomes where appropriate.

The assessment workshops will bring together faculty leaders from each discipline to work closely with assessment experts to evaluate and improve the Kaleidoscope course designs. The assessment approach developed in the workshops will also be included in the design of twenty additional Kaleidoscope course designs in 2013 and 2014.

Each workshops will focus on specific disciplines.

Biology, Chemistry, Geography, Business

Date: February 13 – 14, 2013

Location: Cerritos, California

Education, Math, Psychology, Reading and Writing

Date: February 26 – 27, 2013

Location: Boston, Massachusetts

The workshops are open to all. Please contact us if you would like to attend and we will provide more information.

Prior to and during the conference, please share your experience and research with open pedagogies in the comments for this blog.

Please share your resources and experiences.

During our meeting in Vancouver on October 19, David Wiley will facilitate an investigation and discussion of new approaches and their potential use by faculty members. Prior to and during the conference, please share your experience and research with open pedagogies in the comments for this blog.

As a starting point, David included a segment on Open Teaching in his Introduction to Openness in Education course.

Please share your resources and experiences.

Steering Committee Meeting (invitation only)

Tuesday, 12:30 p.m. – dinner at the Fairmont Hotel, Moresby Room

Kaleidoscope Pitch at the OpenEd PitchFest

Tuesday, 3:45 – 5:00 p.m. in Room C300. Come hear David Wiley and Ronda Neugebauer explain Kaleidoscope and how new partners can become involved.

Kaleidoscope Session Presentation

Thursday, 2:30 to 3:15 p.m. in Room C680 HSBC Hall. Charles Snare, Amber Gilewski, Howard Miller, Ronda Neugebauer, and I will present the Kaleidoscope institutional adoption approach and the faculty collaboration experience.

Post-Conference Workshop

Please see the full agenda below.

Thursday, October 18

Robson Square Room C400

4:30 – 4:45 p.m.         Welcome and Introductions                                  Kim Thanos

4:45 – 5:15 p.m.         Project Update                                  Kim and Steering Committee

We would like to share an update on Thursday so that those leaving on Friday have the opportunity to provide feedback, but due to the meeting time we will not have deeper discussion of the plans until Friday morning. If you are not available on Friday, please take time to share feedback and thoughts either online or with a steering committee member prior to Friday morning.

5:15 – 6:30 p.m.         Faculty Updates

• Psychology: Amber Gilewski
• Math: Zsuzsa Kozmane-Fejes
• Writing: Elizabeth Ellington and Ronda Neugebauer
• Freshman Seminar: Howard Miller, Virginia Coleman-Prisco, Emily Seibert
• Geography: Crystal LoVetere

Please plan 15 minutes for presentation and discussion. Plan to share a brief update on your experience teaching the Kaleidoscope course, and identify one to three opportunities to improve your course, your Kaleidoscope experience, or the program in general.

Dinner

Friday, October 19

Fairmont Hotel, Lion’s Room

Breakfast will be available in the room at 8:00 a.m.

8:30 – 9:30 a.m.         Kaleidoscope Project Discussion

We will discuss and gather feedback on each of the elements of the Kaleidoscope plan.

9:30 – 10:45 a.m.       Workshop: Open Pedagogy

The open education movement has seeded new pedagogical approaches that benefit from open sharing among students, faculty members and broader communities of interest. David Wiley will facilitate an investigation and discussion of new approaches and their potential use by faculty members.

Prior to and during the conference, please share your experience and research with open pedagogies.

10:45 – 11:00 a.m.     Break

11:00 – 12:00 p.m.     Workshop: Open Learning Technologies

Beyond content, there are many tools, platforms, simulations and collaboration tools that support learning and sharing. Kim Thanos will facilitate a discussion about the range of new tools and the approaches to incorporate them in effective learning experiences.

Prior to and during the conference, please share your favorite open learning technologies, and your experiences using them.

To my knowledge, the science, math and business faculty teams have all identified OER that support the learning outcomes of their courses.

We have encountered challenges in the area of humanities. This challenge is not surprising. In the sciences there is a base set of facts that are taught in the courses. This factual content is openly available. Many different authors have provided an expression of the content using a range of materials and licensing models. In the humanities the expression itself is the object that we seek rather than the facts or content behind the expression. We cannot identify an OER for a Ray Bradbury short story, or for the writings of Malcolm Gladwell. This creates a challenge where these expressions are a core element of the curriculum.

With this in mind I am proposing a set of guidelines. I have published this for immediate use, but also to generate discussion so that we can refine and improve this as we learn. Thank you to both Cable Green and David Wiley for providing significant input to this process. Our guidelines are very similar to those used by the Washington Open Library Project.

Category One – first preference

Whenever possible, we will use open educational resources with explicit open licenses. We have a strong preference to download the materials and bring them directly into the course rather than linking to them.  Where we cannot download the openly licensed content, we will link to it from within our course designs. We may also create a print solution for openly licensed content.

Creative Commons  (CC) provides a helpful guide for the attribution of CC licensed materials.

Faculty members have used several creative approaches to incorporate this type of content. Jaqui Cain, from College of the Redwoods, has developed materials by adapting a fictional work that is in the public domain. Daryl O’Hare, from Chadron State College, and Susan Hines, from Delta State University, have incorporated several of their own writings in their course.  Please share any additional ideas as well.

Category Two – second preference

We will link to content that is not explicitly marked with an open license if the materials have been posted by the owner/creator using a delivery mechanism with the express purpose of open sharing of the material. Specific examples include YouTube videos, TED videos, and public blogs. We will not download and embed this content in the course designs without explicit permission from the content owner. 

Please send a list of all materials that falls in category two to Kim Thanos. We will contact the owner and verify the license status, or seek permission for use.

Category Three – only when other options are exhausted

Where copyrighted material is required for the course we will seek copyright clearance from the content owner. If we cannot get clearance, we will purchase the items with a preference to permanently acquire the content rather than a time-based use.

It is important to note that this is a last resort. In every case we will first work with you to try to identify OER sources.

Course Design

• Please begin with the learning outcomes, and the assessment of those primary outcomes
• I have created a Google doc that includes the outcomes, major assessments, midstream assessments, learning activities and content elements. We will use this worksheet to drive the data analysis that will provide you with very useful data about what your students are doing and what impact it has on the achievement of learning outcomes. Please use this as you are designing the course. You can find your template under the Course Designs tab on this website.
• We have assigned an instructional designer assigned to your course. Please take advantage of their expertise and support. Contact Kim if you have not hade contact from your instructional designer.

Open Content

• You may include content that contains any Creative Commons license.
• You may include content that includes an explicit permission to openly access, share, and distribute (YouTube videos, TED videos, etc.).
• You may NOT use content that is openly available on the Internet in violation of existing copyrights.
• If you are struggling to find open content for a specific learning need, please contact Kim. I can assist with additional resources.
• If we complete an exhaustive search and cannot find OER of sufficient quality we will need to document that and report it to the granting agencies.
• If there is quality open content available but you prefer your existing copyrighted content, we still cannot use it for the purpose of this grant.

Assessment Process

• Nancy Pawlyshyn has agreed to act as our assessment lead for the projet. She is available to review the assessments of the learning outcomes and the mid-stream assessments. She will also guide out approach to the rubric-based assessment.
• To ease implementation we are adding some flexibility in our use of the VALUE rubrics in the first phase of the grant. Please work with Nancy to determine how best to incorporate rubric-based assessment in your course design.
• We have committed to include at least one online assessment for each learning outcome.
• We will track and analyze all online learning activities. The more that students do in the online environment, the more information we can give you about the impact of their activities on their learning.
• Please consider including very frequent low-stakes assessment activities. If there is a reading activity that is important to the learning results, consider beginning class with a three-question comprehension quiz. Every time you add a midstream assessment we will get a snapshot of the student that will assist in improving performance.

In addition to the commitments in the document the group agreed to a project timeline. The key initial dates include:

• July 1, 2011 faculty teams will have the learning outcomes and associated assessments complete.
• August 1, 2011 faculty teams will complete all course designs in preparation for delivery of Fall courses beginning August 15.
• October 28, 2011 the Kaleidoscope project will hold its next face-to-face project meeting.