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Empowering students: student roles in the co-creation of open education and harnessing the potential of AI to create open textbook chapters.�

MYFEST WORKSHOP

Glenda Cox

Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching, University of Cape Town

August 2024

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Workshop outline

Introduction

Part 1: Open education practice and student co-creation roles (10 minutes)

Activity 1: First steps: reflection time (5 minutes)

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Part 2: Case studies: building students’ sense belonging (10)

Activity 2: Power dynamics (20)

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Part 3: The importance of attribution and recognition in (open) education practice (5)

Discussion (10)

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Closing comments

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Glenda Cox

GOGN pic

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4

28 703

STUDENTS

4 928 staff (1 184 academic and 3 744 professional, administrative support and service staff).

University of Cape Town

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Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4D)

Disclaimer

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Initiated as a three-year (2018) research, advocacy and implementation project funded by the Canadian IDRC, following in wake of Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) and other CILT open education initiatives.

Now an institutionally funded UCT initiative.

Glenda Cox

Principal Investigator

Michelle Willmers Publishing & Implementation Manager

Bianca Masuku Researcher

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Part 1:

Open education practice and student co-creation

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What is Open Education?

Open Education encompasses resources, tools and practices that are free of legal, financial and technical barriers and can be fully used, shared and adapted in the digital environment. It maximises the power of the Internet to make education more affordable, accessible and effective. �(Source: SPARC)

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What is an open textbook?

  • An open textbook is a digital, freely available collection of scaffolded teaching and learning content.
  • An open textbook is published under an open license.
  • An open textbook has affordances for engaging students in collaborative, inclusive authorship, quality assurance and publishing approaches.
  • An open textbook has affordances for integrating multimedia and third-party content, thereby enabling a wide range of epistemic representation.

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Open educational practices

“Open educational practices (OEP) is a broad descriptor of practices that include the creation, use, and reuse of open educational resources (OER) as well as open pedagogies and open sharing of teaching practices.”

(Cronin, 2017)

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Social justice as a framework to understand the potential of open education

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“At the heart of the open educational resource movement is the intention to provide affordable access to culturally relevant education to all … in a manner consistent with social justice.” 

(Hodgkinson-Williams & Trotter, 2018)

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In the course of this workshop …

You will be building the foundation of a framework for student co-creation activity.

Use this guide to capture details relating to your context as we progress: framework

  • Understanding of the relationship between open education and open textbooks

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Class involvement approach in co-creation

  • Whole class
  • Part of the class
    • Selectively invited
    • Open invitation

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  • Before the course/textbook production process
  • In the course/textbook production process
  • After the course textbook production process

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Propose relevant material to be used in the textbook

Propose

Typeset pages for the textbook

Typeset

Design quizzes and multiple-choice questions

Design

Assist with editorial, technical, curatorial and administrative aspects

Assist

Test content to make the textbook more understandable and accessible

Test

Review to eliminate expert blind spots

Review

Collaborate with staff and peers to bring their culture into the content

Collaborate

Author

Co-editor

Proofread text to ensure consistency, correct grammatical errors and format references

Proofread

Translator

Design book concept and approach to layout

Student roles in open textbook co-creation initiatives at UCT

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Activity 1: Reflection

  • Bringing in students (reflect)
  • What is your approach in terms of:
  • Context/why are you doing this?
  • Class involvement approach
  • How would you include students?

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See the Open Textbook Student Co-Creation Guide for pointers to aid your reflection

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Student co-creation of open textbooks (or other OER)

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A synthesised framework to illustrate student partnership projects �(adapted from Bovill, 2019)

Catherine Bovill from the University of Edinburgh has written extensively on co-creation in teaching and learning.

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We used her categorisation to think about co-creation and to develop models of co-creation with students to produce open textbooks

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Collaborative open textbook production models

Aim: Provide open textbook creators with sustainable models of production that manifest “parity of participation” as the just end point of social justice

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DOT4D context: Four models of open textbook production reflecting varying levels of students and colleague collaboration

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  • Participatory/Engagement Model
  • Participatory/Engagement and Co-Creation Model
  • Co-Creation Model
  • Co-Creation/Partnership Model

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AFFIRMATIVE REMEDY

TRANSFORMATIVE REMEDY

None

Participatory design

Engagement

Co-creation

Partnership

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UCT open textbook authors in DOT4D grants programme and models study

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“Because there is a lot of input from students themselves, students have been seen to be more engaged in the content. We have tried to bring students in, flatten the hierarchy and create from within.”

Professor Michael Held, Department of Orthopaedic Surgery 

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First approach to DOT4D

"I would like to use ChatGPT to create initial chapters, then have students review and also add images to it. 

I would like to generate 5 to 10 MCQs and re-write each chapter with the ChatGPT/student combination.

May I ask you, if you have advice on how to reference this and if this is legit reg open access licence? I don't want us to get in trouble later with copyright, etc." 

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Students working with ChatGPT

  • Critical AI digital literacy skills in three areas: prompt crafting, fact checking and referencing, and paying attention to ethical and legal issues such as consent and licensing of images sourced for the open textbook.
  • Two approaches: 
    • One student did preliminary online research and found textbooks that had information on their specific chapter topic before initiating the prompting process. They then copied relevant information from the textbook into ChatGPT to create the chapter draft.
    • Three students let ChatGPT do its own research to create the initial chapter draft based on the prompt and then undertook multiple rounds of refinement (13 in Robyn’s case).
  • Engaged medical consultants in wards as expert reviewers for quality/accuracy

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Lecturer’s perspective �(quality assurance and critical digital AI literacy)

The students took on the fact checking process without any guidance and the lecturer expressed that he was “really surprised to have all these checks and balances … without me or without us actually telling them what to do … they came up with it themselves”.

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Challenges experienced by the lecturer

  • He felt he was 'winging it’ and would have liked a framework for prompting
  • ChatGPT was a 'double-edged sword’ … although it was much quicker to produce chapters, the quality was not better (he thought it would be...)
  • He was not sure how to assess the student's work – he used the existing SSM rubric and adjusted it to give the most marks for attention to process and engagement with ChatGPT

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Part 2:

Co-creation and building students’ sense of belonging

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Belonging

Image by Buru Koleli for OBIx Fine Arts

Belonging is about an emotional attachment, feeling-at-home, in a safe space (Yuval-Davis, 2011, p. 4)

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Principles based on an ethics of care, mutual trust and respect.

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In HE it would mean being an intrinsic part of the system, with social connections, interactions with peers, staff and curriculum and breaking down barriers to foster student's emotional engagement with their learning (Le Roux & Groenewald, 2021).

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AT UCT co-creation of open textbooks gave students a sense of value and being part of a department

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Student co-creation

Institutional culture: support or Clash?

Academics with open values

Time, collaboration slows down the process

Control versus trust and respect

Students as mentors, guides, agency

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Power dynamics

Aspects of (in)justice and (un)belonging cannot be discussed without the recognition of traditional power dynamics.

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Parity of participation (social justice) is difficult to achieve and traditional power differences between lecturers and students still exist and are difficult to resist without a culture of partnership and ambitions of being equal members within the university.

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Co-creation and the student/lecturer power balance (examples from UCT)

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Tilting of power

Author 1 included the whole class but admits that there was 'structure'. Students were given a template that was edited. Students had little agency to be creative or make decisions about their curriculum.

Author 2 had selected excellent students. His approach was 'free form' but they had specific roles. Bovill argues that these few students are already super-engaged and this results in exclusion.

Shifting of power:

Author 3 approach was to invite students into co-creation, getting 'buy-in' and have students move between categories (Bovil's-we showed him) towards co-creation as being the ultimate. He was humbled by the student's expertise and gave them agency

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Activity 2: Break out rooms�on power dynamics

See the Open Textbook Student Co-Creation Guide for pointers to aid your reflection: https://bit.ly/3Y2U7Vi

Sharing power is an important aspect of belonging. And that belonging is important in terms of student success.

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  • How do you feel about giving students power in the co-creation of education materials?
  • What are your thoughts on what this means for their sense of belonging?

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Part 3:

Recognition and attribution in co-creation

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Why is attribution important?

  • It is a fundamental aspect of scholarly practice and an evolving skill.
  • It tells the readers where information is taken from.
  • It provides perspective and credibility to the work.
  • Through attribution, the creator can receive credit for their work.
  • Paying attention to attribution contributes to a virtuous cycle which is based on respect for the creator. (“The currency of recognition.”)

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Ways of recognising and/or rewarding student participation

Marks for coursework

Financial compensation

Other compensation �(e.g. food, t-shirts, paraphernalia)

> Consequence: Status (“fame”)

> Consequence: Belonging and a sense of agency > academic success

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Attributing student contributions

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In a world where so much content is openly accessible on the internet, attribution (source) remains the one of the most powerful forms of acknowledgement … and reputation/brand is everything.

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Discussion

  • What are your concerns?
  • What are you excited about?
  • What kind of help does the institution need to provide?
  • What are the obstacles or opportunities you envision around different class involvement approaches?

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See the Open Textbook Student Co-Creation Guide for pointers to aid your reflection

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  • Part 4:
  • Creative Commons, attributing student contributions and engaging with citation and attribution of LLM-generated content

Closing comments

and ideas?

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Bovill, C. 2019. Co-creation in learning and teaching: the case for a whole-class approach in higher education. Higher Education 79:1023-1037.�Cox, G., Masuku, B.,& Willmers M (2022a) Sustainable open textbook models for social justice. Front. Educ. 7:881998. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2022.881998�DOT4D. 2021. Open Textbooks in South African Higher Education: Action Brief. Cape Town: Digital Open Textbooks for Development. Available at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BFNLHPRcPP1f94GyR9EiZ98HKKu54f1/view?usp=sharing �Cox, G., Masuku, B. & Willmers, M. 2020. Open Textbooks and Social Justice: Open Educational Practices to Address Economic, Cultural and Political Injustice at the University of Cape Town. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 1 (2):pp. 1–10. Available at: https://open.uct.ac.za/handle/11427/31887 

Fraser, N. (2005). Reframing justice in a globalizing world. New Left Review, 36, 69–88. Retrieved from https://newleftreview.org/II/36/nancy-fraser-�reframing-justice-in-a-globalizing-world

Le Roux, A & Groenewald, E 2021. The elusiveness of a sense of place-belonging: One student's struggle on a diverse South African campus.Issues in  Educational Research, 3 (3): 854-870.�