5 Student As Creator + Curator: Transformative OER Pedagogy through Student Research in Excel

Background

What’s more motivating than being able to create your own adventure? Many students arrive with incredibly valid ideas, dreams and energy, having navigated necessary paperwork, prerequisites, and orientations to start their higher-education learning. In response, we can create environments that are meaningful for their learning. Specifically, we can utilize pedagogical designs as they have a higher likelihood of being transformative.

Characteristics of Transformational Pedagogies

Personally meaningful: Unfortunately, students in higher education commonly participate in what they would consider transactional activities, such as course assignments, discussions, or other elements that do not provide reusability in their design. Putting students in a creator/curator role spurs navigational skills, agency, and a reason to bring forth ideas, dreams and energy. Asking students to be creators/curators allows them to be entrepreneurial and to offer up micro bits of learning, much like they would in real life. We all have those moments where we need to curate information to suit our needs. “The best curators know how to find what is best by immersing themselves in a niche area while also making surprising connections between ideas in seemingly unrelated worlds. Curators find specific excerpts that are relevant now but also timeless. They can explain the purpose, the context, and the necessity of what they are citing.” (Spencer)

Self-sustaining: Translating practice into something useful, like Excel skills, makes this work far more relevant to students. Scaffolding of Excel skills teaches students sustainable learning techniques. ACRL Frameworks from a literacy standpoint can offer an incredible perspective about nuanced environmental, social/human and economic considerations that supports information seeking, informs literacy and supports sustainable learning. Not only are information analysis skills important, but they are also necessary life skills that students need to sustain their finances, mental health/wellness, academics, career development, housing, food security, community building, inclusion/equity, technology access and more. Students developing self-sustaining skills relates to increasingly popular ideas in higher education, such as the ethics of care, informed practice, humanized teaching, and universal design. These all begin from a shared prioritization about student success, followed by students being able to sustain themselves. Student learning outcomes could include these thoughtful pieces.

Depth and resonance: The assessment activity shared below will emphasize the depth and resonance that can be gained through repetitive research activities that allow students to sincerely respond to academic assignment content rather than reacting transactionally. Far more meaningful are those moments when intentional presence is allowed to be accounted for in student labor. The concept of a practice loop establishes a set architecture for original content. In this case it is a micro-lesson plan. By doing so, the student is allowed to focus on reuse, curating content that already exists openly and freely, thereby releasing the burden of original content creation as the sole activity. The student can be, within the architecture, curating what they need, see, and experience in the moment.

Local challenges

The Academic Senate for the California Community Colleges has made it clear that the activities establishing, supporting, and developing OER use across the system are important and valued. Surely, this encourages faculty to look at specific need areas. Very much necessary to student labor is that students need to use Excel; however, resources such as tutorials are generally not provided. Taking this into consideration, stand alone Excel courses should provide content that can be reused. This supports student intentionality far beyond the course level. Excel is a specific “problem or need” worthy of design attention, which requires openly licensed content and courses that teach students how to build media literacy skills.

When research methods are taught as a skill loop, practice can be burdensome. If students can utilize simple research skills effectively when information needs arise, they are far more inclined to know where, when and how to use these skills in everyday life. Barring the need for explicit research skills, through this approach students will see general research skills as integral to their lives. Similarly, Excel skills can be approached as secondary, co-curricular, or remediation skills. Faculty may choose to integrate these skills in the curriculum, utilizing specific data and skills. Other faculty may default to covering content, ignoring the skills necessary during class and leaving this for students to research on their own. Student sustainability and labor considerations are ever emerging in how they are integrated in any given course. Many students encounter challenges when completing assignments that utilize Excel and other statistical software in courses where the content, not the software, is the focus. The challenge becomes even deeper when student populations may not have been exposed to the software, creating challenges for instructors who feel they must take on this skill as a curricular element. Students can also sincerely suffer when the curricular element is not present, thus adding to their already lengthy list of labor for any given semester. Faculty often assume that digital native students have these skills, leaving gaps that negatively impact student labor.

However, independent work builds confidence that can then result in more intentional practices.

The Assessment Task

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Who: California Community College Students at Shasta College in Redding, CA with additional campuses for rural students.

What: Excel 10 for Windows I, Excel 11 Excel for Windows II, Excel 12 Excel for Windows III

When: Course offered each semester, via 8-week model, sporadic as to if offerings follow linear model of Excel 10, 11, 12. Students may take courses out of order.

Where: Online format, via Canvas learning management system.

Why: This pedagogical method represents a practice loop, done many times, with different skills learned during each loop.

How: Students utilize any resources available to create/curate a micro-lesson. A resource list of popular organizations and media is provided. Simple links are used as citations. Ease of use/reuse is emphasized.

Grading: Grading is largely based on labor – did the student create a topic, did the student curate content, and did the student reply to fellow students?

Materials Utilized: GCF Global, Excel Lessons, created by the Goodwill Community Foundation.

Assignments are scaffolded towards discussions. Student assignments encourage the use of OER materials provided in the course. Tutorial lessons are completed via practice Excel workbooks, while following screen steps.

Discussion Instructions: This week, and each week you will create a micro-lesson discussion post for yourself and for fellow students. The idea here is to use open, freely available content. This allows you to use multiple forms of representation in your materials. These could be items to read, watch or listen to. As well, you are encouraged to think about representation overall, finding content from diverse Excel voices. You will all bring your unique perspectives about the workplace and what it looks like today based upon your background, experience, and the information you have gathered along the way to get here. All of that will help you in this course.

Here are basic places to look for Excel content. Check out the Microsoft Office Excel Blog. This displays posts from industry experts on the topic of Excel.

• Check out the Microsoft Excel Daily News. This displays current posts, articles from Microsoft.
• Check out the Microsoft Office Excel Tutorials. This displays current tutorials.

This course encourages the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) programs, such as ChatGPT. The use of generative AI programs aligns with course learning outcomes, critical thinking, and creator/curator elements. When using generative AI programs, you must utilize critical thinking overall with a reverence for intellectual property. Please, engage in fact- checking, and use citation methods listed in the course.

Posts must be at least (4) sentences in length, to receive credit. You must also comment on at least (1) other student post. Look through all the interesting content posted, you can even “like” a post and let us know why. Each week you will need to find new content to use. This emphasizes reading other student posts, as well. You may not use the same content that another student has already used. Hopefully – we will end up with all kinds of tips, tricks and effective uses for Excel.

For this discussion – complete the following elements in preparation of your post: 

1. Research Excel and find content – read, watch or listen to content that relates to the concepts we are learning this week in Excel. This could be content that is relevant to you in life/work and can be reused later, or content that you find interesting and want to share with your fellow students. For each resource used, copy the original link to the content, and add it to your post.

2. Create a micro-lesson and post it to this discussion for your fellow students.

a. Pretend that you are the teacher here, explaining the technical aspects, how it is useful, why they could check it out. What did it teach you about Excel?

b. Explain whether you will you use this information and why or why not.

c. Develop an understanding of intersectionality that supports work with data, and in Excel specifically. Reflect upon your own positionality and how race, gender, sexuality, disability, etc. may impact your work in Excel. How do these elements impact how you interact with and perceive data? Explore the inclusive and diverse elements that make up data, data collection and analysis. Consider Excel design and use of color for accessibility and access. Analyze ways in which identity and inequalities impact data analysis.

3. This discussion is meant to use the ACRL Frameworks for Information Literacy – An explicit look at ACRL Frameworks offer a deeper understanding of how information seeking, during this activity/discussion promotes student information literacy.

• Authority Is Constructed and Contextual – non-dominant, popular sources are encouraged.
• Information Creation as a Process – student discussion requires creating a micro-lesson.
  Information Has Value – curated content adds value to fellow student experience/understanding.
• Research as Inquiry – research is iterative, as is translated to Excel information seeking here.
• Scholarship as Conversation – sustained discourse creates new understanding/learning.
• Searching as Strategic Exploration – Excel provides one example that can be applied to life.

Student Benefits

Student agency: By utilizing these frameworks to design assignments, students’ agency, hope and advocacy can emerge. The act of creating something for others to use and curating something with value serves both the collective and the individual. As a creator and curator, understanding and implementing the concept of “do less harm” offers up meaningful avenues for considering the world around us – even Excel.

Development of perspective: Students may find that self-reflective analysis leads them to examine their own positionality and how they represent it within the materials they curate. Intersectional awareness gives us the tools to find a “do less harm” path in data collection, use, analysis, reporting and representation. While this is an aim of the assignment, student understanding of these points deserves ever revised descriptions to support this work, especially as it explicitly relates to Excel. The topics below may come up in replies or feedback but could be further emphasized with additional content curated for the course overall. Drawing out nuance becomes a critical path in any course and needs to be written, discussed, created and curated. For example, some of the following ideas become competencies for students:

• Develop an understanding of intersectionality that supports work with data, and in Excel specifically.
• Reflect upon your own positionality and how race, gender, sexuality, disability, etc. may impact your work in Excel. How do these elements impact how you interact with and perceive data? Explore the inclusive and diverse elements that make up data, data collection and analysis.
• Analyze ways in which identity and inequalities impact data analysis.

Authentic work: The possibility exists here to completely tailor creator/curator efforts towards content that serves students directly. Many of the students in this course are coming back to school, creating new careers, currently working part or full time, running small/large businesses, and more. They express direct needs when it comes to Excel skills. The time and energy utilized here does not become an extra assignment only fit for the bin when it is completed. As well, students use the same tools (Google, ChatGPT, other AI, other tools) that they have on the job or at home. Meeting them where they are provides a sense of familiarity, while progressive scaffolding of content requires them to look to other places, explore business content that relates, or look to industry models for their workplace. This form of “networked learning” supports our current reality – all of us can create, curate, and share new information. As standard as it seems, students only have access to various data sets, databases and other academic resources while paying tuition. This practice loop runs students through the skills learned in their GCF Free tutorial while encouraging them to create/curate a lesson. It also puts them in an environment where nothing is hidden, with no teacher standing at the front of the class with an expert perspective. They now can sit with colleagues, with agency and with information seeking skills that have value to those around them, practicing what reuse/renewable elements exist in the assignment. Sitting together as colleagues, just as they would out in the workplace, with the opportunity to utilize vulnerable human moments and tangible technical skills. If reuse, or renewable assignments are created in this environment students will gain agency by creating something fellow students will use and curating content that they find valuable. This process can serve both the individual and the collective overall.

Development of critical thinking skills: Thoughtful consideration about what students are learning and how it relates to their lives starts at the design stage of courses. In the case of Excel, these critical thinking skills are necessary when they sit with fellow colleagues or supervisors and try to triage best methods for utilizing Excel.

Communication Skills: Students participating in this discussion will surely develop online/digital communication skills as they progress throughout the semester. With multiple attempts at the same practice loop, feedback is provided by the instructor on points that students find valuable, or that stand out as interdisciplinary. Sharing and communicating the transfer of information from one space to another becomes an added benefit of the discussion. It is in this way that students truly hone the ability to create lessons that tell a story, curating resources that can be used in explicit circumstances.

Conclusion

Creators and curators exist in a world far beyond academic level assessments. This model demonstrates relevance for students, while facilitating their self-awareness and ability to contribute meaningfully to the scholarly conversation in the course. It also aims to create information that serves humanity and curate a world where “do less harm” is fully integrated into our own understanding of the systems we see in front of us.

References

Spencer, J. (2020, April 12). Our Students Need to Be Curators. Medium. https://medium.com/@spencerideas/our-students-need-to-be-curators-3908fd7f8d67