Week Fourteen, Fall 2019

Engaging Teaching

Teaching tips & more!

Open Up

This edition of The Teaching Hub is a day late because the author had the onerous task of attending the Open Education Global Conference last week. So why not use this week’s hub as a way to report back on what happened at the conference? Okay!

First off, what’s open education? As per usual in academia, its definition can be hotly debated, but in general, there are two parts: First are open educational resources (OER), which are learning materials free to access, keep, share, revise, and build upon. The other side of the coin is open educational practices, which are teaching and learning practices enabled by the open sharing of… teaching and learning practices! To be concise, open education is sharing.

Learning Technology

Using the technology without it using us.

Go fetch some of these PhET simulations

On day two of the conference there was a keynote that highlighted a fabulous set of the aforementioned Open Educational Resources. Award–winning ones at that! The talk was entitled “Advancing Science and Math Education Worldwide through OER: Lessons Learned from PhET Interactive Simulations“. They have a set of 153 freely available simulations that can help students master concepts and ideas in all kinds of science and math topics in a safe environment. For free. FREE! Each of them take PhET about 600 hours to create. Here’s a short video about the simulations if you’d like to see more.

Trickle Down

Stuff to tell your students!

Open Education Influencers

Your students might get warm fuzzies knowing that the Open Education Conference kicked off with a keynote by students discussing how Open Education has helped them and how they have helped influence the growth of Open Educational Practices at their own institutions. It was entitled “Students: Storytellers and Creators of Their Own Open Futures.” You can read their entire script here. They shared it because, you know, open education!

Inner Workings

Helping you navigate the inner workings of the college

UNESCO Recommendation

This section is usually reserved for college-level inner workings, but today we share a new inner working for the whole world. UNESCO has a few different levels at which they can influence what goes on around the planet. Their top level is a ‘convention’ like the Geneva ones, but only one step down from there is a UNESCO recommendation. And just in time for the conference, UNESCO adopted the Recommendation on Open Educational Resources as a key step in achieving UN Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education for all. Seems like a pretty big deal!

Keeping it Professional

Professional Learning Opportunities

Virtually Connect to More of the Open Education Global Conference

If you’d like to see and hear a little more about what people were talking about at the conference, you can watch people talk about just that on this recording of a Virtually Connecting meeting from the conference. Also have a look at just how comfy lecture hall seats can be. If you watch this during lunch, you can call it a self-made lunch ‘n’ learn and add it to your professional learning journal!