Group Admins
Description
Through the use of gamified digital tools like Kahoot (https://getkahoot.com) and free and open source software like Pressbooks (https://pressbooks.com), we are introducing university faculty to open textbooks and to the open access education movement, and showing them that creating their own open educational resources doesn’t have to be scary. An instructional designer and a librarian share campus outreach strategies that convey the value of OER for creating a more accessible educational environment for our students. In a fun and customizable workshop, we introduce faculty to our university library hosted installation of Pressbooks, and give them hands-on time to create content and edit a book about Canada’s local bears (including celebrity bear, Winnie!). After careful evaluation, we have selected this specific approach to meet the needs of our faculty, who are easily intimidated by technology.
Since our goal was to build enthusiasm for the topic, rather than formative evaluation, Kahoot was selected over more feature-heavy products, like Polleverywhere, for its simple interface and anonymous quizzes. We selected Pressbooks because it is built off WordPress, which is already available at our university, and thus easy to support. Finally, we have found that faculty respond well to humour, and to having the chance to play while learning about open technology in a non-academic context. With a population of almost half a million bears across Canada, bears are something of a national animal—we’ve found the topic gets faculty enthusiastically working together on editing their sample book, their fears of technology long forgotten.
References
Chabeli, M., 2008. Humor: A pedagogical tool to promote learning. Curationis, 31(3), pp.51-59.
Huss, J.A. and Eastep, S., 2016. The Attitudes of University Faculty toward Humor as a Pedagogical Tool: Can We Take a Joke?. Journal of Inquiry and Action in Education, 8(1), p.3.
