Students' Perceptions of Their Self-Efficacy in The
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OPEN PEDAGOGY APPROACHES: Faculty, Library, and Student Collaborations Edited by KIMBERLY DAVIES HOFFMAN and ALEXIS CLIFTON https://tinyurl.com/OpenPedApproaches Open Pedagogy Approaches, edited by Kimberly Davies Hoffman and Alexis Clifton, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. Published July, 2020. SHARING THE END OF THE WORLD: STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF THEIR SELF-EFFICACY IN THE CREATION OF OPEN ACCESS DIGITAL LEARNING OBJECTS Sarah Hutton, Lisa Di Valentino, and Paul Musgrave Authors • Sarah Hutton, M.L.I.S., Ph.D. Candidate, University of Massachusetts Amherst • Lisa Di Valentino, University of Massachusetts Amherst • Paul Musgrave, University of Massachusetts Amherst Project Overview Institution: University of Massachusetts Amherst Institution Type: public, research, land-grant, undergraduate, post-graduate Project Discipline: Political Science Project Outcome: student-created podcasts; research study Tools Used: Audacity, LibGuides, Institutional Repository 8 | SHARING THE END OF THE WORLD: STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF THEIR SELF-EFFICACY IN THE CREATION OF OPEN ACCESS DIGITAL LEARNING OBJECTS Resources Included in Chapter: • Suggested resource list • Survey Instrument 2020 Preface The course that this chapter is based on took place in 2018, well before the COVID-19 pandemic that occurred at the time of publication. The University of Massachusetts, along with other schools, closed its campus beginning in the Spring semester of 2020 and moved to online instruction and library services. While many of the library’s materials are available online, and services such as HathiTrust and the Internet Archive National Emergency Library provided digital versions of a wide range of print materials, there remained a huge gap in what students and faculty could access in the “new normal” of virtual education. More than ever, the need for open educational resources has become pressing. There is an opportunity, then, to engage students in the creation of open digital learning objects, such as digital textbooks, videos, podcasts, or study guides. This chapter describes a case study of a course in which students were assigned the creation of podcasts about various topics related to Massachusetts history, which were to be made openly available on the Internet via the UMass Amherst institutional repository. This course is to be offered again in the Fall 2020 semester, only this time, it will be taught completely online. Further study is planned to investigate what is required to move a course like this to a virtual space (for example, how students will collaborate and how they will record and edit the podcast with limited or no access to the university’s physical technology), and how virtual education might impact students’ perceptions of their work and of their own abilities. —Sarah, Lisa, & Paul SHARING THE END OF THE WORLD: STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF THEIR SELF-EFFICACY IN THE CREATION OF OPEN ACCESS DIGITAL LEARNING OBJECTS | 9 The End of the World (and the Start of a New Collaboration with the Honors College) A public R1 doctoral university located in Western Massachusetts, the University of Massachusetts Amherst serves an undergraduate population of over 23,500. Around 3,700 of these students are part of our Commonwealth Honors College. Spanning the third and fourth years, the honors program includes two tracks, multidisciplinary and departmental, each with an honors thesis or capstone project. Honors faculty come from every discipline at the university. With the mission to create curriculum for the engagement of honors students in broad inquiry and the creation of new knowledge, instructors are able to design intensive and creative courses. Paul Musgrave, Assistant Professor of Political Science, is one of these faculty members, one who shares a joint appointment between his home department and the Honors College. As the library liaison to the Honors College, Sarah Hutton, Head of Student Success and Engagement in the University Libraries, provides instructional and research support to honors faculty and students, and sits on the Faculty Senate Commonwealth Honors College Council (CHCC). This council advises the Honors College Dean on all academic matters relating to the administration of the college, and includes subcommittees that focus on specialized topics. Hutton additionally serves on the subcommittee dedicated to program approvals. As in other colleges at the university, every new course goes through an approval process, wherein a panel of reviewers reads through a proposed syllabus, along with plans for course management and materials. This subcommittee then works with each individual faculty member to make any necessary changes prior to final approval. While reviewing a batch of courses in Spring 2018, Hutton noticed a particularly interesting course, Politics of the End of the World, proposed by Paul Musgrave. The course emerged from a long-developing research interest: theorizing the importance of apocalyptic recognition and denial to political life. While some bureaucratic and political systems aimed to make the apocalypse a possibility (as with Cold War-era nuclear weapons development), other end-of-the-world scenarios (such as climate change) have routinely failed to evince any effective large-scale political actions. Turning the end-of-the-world concept into a practicable course, however, proved challenging–how could an instructor ask undergraduates to research events that were so big, complex, and difficult toategorize? c As part of a separate yearlong workshop, Musgrave had also developed an idea for a different course based around producing a podcast series. Adapting the podcast series idea from that course, he solved the problem conceptually: a podcast could more easily function as a group project, which would allow for cooperation and division of labor, helping students grapple with the somewhat nebulous and undirected nature of research. Working in four groups, the students would create four 20- to 25-minute podcast episodes. These episodes would describe how Massachusetts society reacted to the possibility of, or the belief in, the end of the world across different scenarios and time periods. The part of Musgrave’s proposed course that caught Hutton’s attention during the review was the final project assignment: “Your final project will involve you working in teams to develop an episode of a podcast series about the End of the World, and it will be released to the public” (Mugrave, 2018). 10 | SHARING THE END OF THE WORLD: STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF THEIR SELF-EFFICACY IN THE CREATION OF OPEN ACCESS DIGITAL LEARNING OBJECTS This podcast assignment clearly aligned with several of the Libraries’ strategic objectives and activities,1 which presented an opportunity for deeper collaboration. Following a committee course review session with Professor Musgrave, Hutton scheduled a meeting between Musgrave, herself, and Public Policy and Law Librarian, Lisa Di Valentino. In addition to serving as library liaison to Political Science, Legal Studies, Public Policy and Administration, and Government Publications, Di Valentino specializes in copyright, intellectual property, fair use and user-generated content (UGC). With Musgrave, Hutton, and Di Valentino working together on this course, opportunities arose to explore new directions. From the start, the course was structured to incorporate multiple elements in collaboration with the Libraries, starting with media production workshops and support sessions (e.g. recording using Audacity) for the students in the Libraries’ Digital Media Lab (DML).2 We then facilitated consultation between Musgrave and our Scholarly Communications group for content-hosting in the institutional repository.3 Most importantly, Di Valentino worked with Musgrave to provide one instructional session (75 minute class) for these students covering open access and Creative Commons licensing, all within the context of their discipline, political science.4 This collaboration, structured around a specific ourse,c offered an opportunity to communicate the Libraries’ rich set of resources and services to both Musgrave and his students, neither of whom had much awareness of the DML, though course collaborations are a well-established practice in the DML. One of the missing pieces of course collaborations, which may lend to a lack of awareness by faculty, is the preservation of student scholarship and projects following the completion of the course. During initial conversations, Hutton and Di Valentino learned that Musgrave intended to use these openly published podcasts as learning objects for future iterations of the course. While students were aware of and had consented to having their work published openly online, it was not yet clear how deep the conceptual and ethical understanding of issues surrounding the use of open content was amongst students. In addition to seeing an opportunity for collaboration in supporting the instructor and students through the successful delivery and completion of this class, we saw an opportunity to take a closer look at how the creative production of learning objects shared in the public domain impacted students’ perception of how well they had learned the course content. Our hypothesis was that students would be more motivated to learn with a course structured around 1. Digital student scholarship, supported by Digital Media Lab (DML); advocacy for open access publishing, Creative Commons licensing, and teaching