Participating in open pedagogy this summer provided me with an opportunity to reflect on myself as an educator, a peer and a student. I recently finished my Master of Public Health degree and found that I learned the most from case studies. I also observed that many students did not buy their books, even when the course was based on discussion of case studies from resources that were not openly licensed. For this reason, I wanted to focus on the design of openly licensed case studies.
For my open pedagogy project, I chose to design a case study with an interdisciplinary focus to use in a new course: Introduction to Public Health. Because public health is by nature intersectional, I wanted to introduce students to public health approaches to infectious diseases in the context of history, while incorporating the contributions of other areas of study. In my dreams, the case study is a scaffold on which we can incorporate theories, frameworks, and perspectives from other disciplines so that the resource can be adapted to use in different classroom settings. To build the first case study I collaborated with Dr. Rosemary Whelan, an associate professor in the Biology, Chemistry and Math department at Albertus Magnus. This experience was great because I was able to receive content and feedback from an educator who already uses open access resources in her courses and engages in high impact practices in the classroom. We decided to use the Soft Chalk platform for several reasons. Soft Chalk is a platform we are both familiar and have used in many other courses. It allows the instructor to design lessons with activities and questions that link easily to the assignments and grade book in Canvas and Blackboard. Soft Chalk does require an instructor to have an account (free during a trial period only), but once the material is created, students can access it freely. Content created on Soft Chalk can be available as openly licensed material under a creative commons license.
For the design of the first case study, I followed Mary’s advice to search for already available openly licensed content. I was fortunate enough to find a wonderful lesson on public health approaches to infectious diseases, which is the topic I wanted to develop. Because this content was licensed under a Creative Commons attribution-non-commercial-share alike 4.0 license, I was able to use most of it in an unaltered form. I took the sections that were relevant to my lesson and used as is. I designed the learning objectives and authored the case study on the 1916 NY polio epidemic. The case study was then incorporated into the already existing lesson. Using Soft Chalk, I divided the content into pages and added short answer questions throughout to keep the students engaged and encourage reflection and critical thinking. This will also allow me to use the lesson as a graded assignment in my course.
In addition to the case study, I wrote a course description to use in my syllabus to let students know that I will be using open pedagogy approaches in the course. Contribution to the development of the case study and critical analysis of case studies from our book have been incorporated to the course as part of the grading criteria.
The student feedback was immensely helpful. I was worried about using Soft Chalk as a platform, but students really liked it and found it easy to use, even if they were using it for the first time. The students thought the case study was relevant and a great way to present the information. They did comment on some sections that may be too long and suggested the assignment/lesson reads more like a textbook. I should incorporate more pictures and/or videos. One student reviewer suggested to have the lesson/case study narrated, so that it is accessible to students with a visual impairment. That was a great suggestion! The students also mentioned that it would be great to have more information on the polio epidemic and more prompts for discussion. There are two areas where I plan to ask the students to contribute. They can do a bit more research on the NY polio epidemic and fill-in the holes. They can also contribute with a bank of reflection/discussion questions, which was the original intent.
This experience has been fantastic for me. I have learned a lot, but I am also grateful for having gained a community of scholars that are passionate about education and who will become collaborators. I hope we can keep this going!
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