Student-Centered OER Anthology Creation as Response to Online Learning

In the summer of 2020, I was offered a three-credit fourth-year honours seminar course entitled “Victorian Ghosts” to be offered in September of that year. This was one of only a small handful of Victorian courses at the research university I was working at and I had had my eye on it for a while. At the time I received the offer, the university had already decided the classes for Fall 2020 would be hosted predominantly online so I knew what I was designing towards.

The Challenge

Although I had designed this course in my head before, I now had to put it into an alternative format. Knowing how late single-course contracts can sometimes come in, I was lucky to have a couple of months to design this course—on the flip side of the coin, however, I only had a couple of months to design the course, for the first time, in a pandemic, and with my three- and five-year-old children home 24/7.

In my initial imaginative planning, I had envisioned setting this course around archival work. The short-form of Victorian ghost stories provided a great opportunity to easily see editorial choices and changes from manuscript to print. It also offered the prospect of tracking changes as the stories were reprinted across different newspapers and magazines and, in many cases, into collections and anthologies. With everyone at home, however, I needed to reprioritize. As Smith and Hornsby (2020, 2) argue, when engaging in pandemic pedagogy, we are prone to redesign based on how we understand ourselves as educators and how we teach our disciplines: “if we privilege active learning where students are more self-directed with multiple sites of engagement, we will seek to translate that into an online space as we aim to create discussion groups, adopt many formative assessment techniques and seek to mix synchronous and asynchronous approaches.” As an educator who wished to continue having active learning central to his classroom, I gave myself three foundational aims when designing this course:

• Keep it at zero-cost: Students already go into an extraordinary amount of debt to attend higher education and during my time at York I had worked with many students who were working and supporting families; any materials or resources I wanted to utilize to make this course come to life needed to add no additional financial stress onto my students. While this is a priority always, this was specifically important in that moment as many people had lost jobs in Ontario due to COVID-19.
• Build an asynchronous and synchronous community: With closed borders in different areas of the world and lives upended in many different ways, I wanted to create a course that allowed students to collaborate across time and space without the need to be at their computer/phone at a specific time—a flexible setup that allowed all students to participate around their own needs.
• Provide students with transferable skills: As many of these students were entering their graduating year, I wanted to give them a project that could be used in portfolios or mentioned in resumes and cover letters to illustrate some of the skills they had gained over the past three plus years of study.

The Solution

A number of years ago I gave a workshop on open pedagogy and open educational resources (OER) where participants attempted to reimagine their classrooms through an experiential learning lens whereby students became active agents in the creation of class material and content. I thought this would be the key for redesigning my COVID classroom. Rather than just use OERs, what if I—to borrow a metaphor from Mike Caulfield—allowed open pedagogy to drive the car.

One of the benefits of working in the nineteenth century is that much of our primary material has entered the public domain. While that does not translate to accessible copies of work, it can make finding free-to-use copies of our material easier than in some subjects of English Literature sub-disciplines. After completing a literature review of Victorian ghost story anthologies, I found that many were out of print, hard to find, unaffordable, or a combination of all three. Anthologies, however, offer annotations and critical apparatus not found with primary material that can be invaluable for undergraduate study. They offer students a guiding framework to engage critically with the texts and place them into larger contemporary and scholarly contexts. Which led me to my guiding question: what if the students themselves created their own open-access anthology of Victorian Ghost stories?

Please note, I am not claiming that this was an original idea; it stemmed from my interest in OER textbooks and, specifically, reading about Dr. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra’s Winter 2018 graduate class in Digital Publishing in the Literatures of Modernity program at Toronto Metropolitan University and their creation of an annotated edition of Clemence Housman’s The Were-Wolf (1896) for COVE.

I initially looked into COVE for this project but it did not fit what I needed at that time. COVE is an invaluable resource, but I did not have the time before the course began to delve into it sufficiently, so I had to find a solution that could include some on-campus support. Therefore, I reached out to our English subject librarian who connected me with our digital scholarship librarian. I outlined my plans and the digital scholarship librarian provided some fantastic options that they would be able to support. Based on the needs for the course, I landed on Scalar and started delving into the platform. Scalar, an authoring, editing, and publishing platform that’s designed to create born-digital scholarship online, is free (which supported my desire to keep costs down) and open-source (which supported my commitment to open access research).

Story Selection

In the meantime, I had been reading and re-reading hundreds of Victorian Ghost Stories—during movies, nap times, and bedtimes as my children were home from daycare and school due to the COVID-19 pandemic—and started to prepare a list that spanned the 1850s–1900s.

Originally, I had planned for the students themselves to search for the ghost stories they wanted to work with. Searching for the stories themselves would have given them an opportunity to scour Victorian periodicals and see these stories within their publication context. Recognizing that digital archives can be a data strain, that not all students have equal access to reliable internet, and learning that students had worries about entering a fully-remote semester, I removed that requirement and created a pool of stories they could select from.

From my lengthy list of stories, I then had to narrow down what I could find in a text-based format that could be used in Scalar. Although I was able to find many copies of the texts in the public domain, many of the files were blurry pdfs or in other ways not usable for the project. I was somewhat disappointed to end up with thirty stories for the twenty-one students enrolled in the class. This disappointment stemmed from a feeling of not really allowing open pedagogy to drive the course; yes, students would narrow down those choices and create the critical apparatus, but having a small pool of stories was not too far removed from handing them a pre-created anthology, OER or otherwise. That said, I still feel that this was the best decision based on the extenuating circumstance of the pandemic, but I would likely adjust the anthology co-creation assignment in any future iteration of the course to give the students more control over finding the stories themselves.

Through a combination of student choice and a virtual randomizer, students were assigned to a group of stories that had been split by decade. Each group was then left amongst themselves to select which stories they wished to include and who would be assigned to each of those selections. To help this process, I provided brief summaries of the stories—of about 50 words (very brief!), like you’d find in the TV Guide or on Netflix, nothing to give away any twists and turns.

Intermission

By the time the course launched, I had already exceeded the contracted hours for the course. As this was a single course, I didn’t have the prep time or research time that may be embedded within full-time tenure-track, tenure, or limited term appointments. So, while I am sharing my story illustrating how I managed to embed a project like this within a 3-credit course, it is important to point out I did so by volunteering my labor. This was my choice, but speaks to the working conditions of many contract faculty members across Higher Education (and beyond). Innovation and experimentation take time that we lack and are not compensated for.

Introduction and Annotations

Each student was responsible for creating an introduction to their given story and a series of annotations. The introduction needed to offer a short summary of the story (about 150–250 words) and then a critical interjection into the text and/or claim about a major theme pulled from discussions and asynchronous micro-lectures in the earliest weeks of the course. They were then responsible for a minimum of five annotations covering any category:

• Unfamiliar words
• Literary, historical, folkloric, religious, and classical allusions
• Proper names
• Geography
• Motifs

Many students only submitted the required five annotations, while others took additional time to create many more. Informal feedback from the students indicated that the process of creating annotations forced them to engage with the text in a new way, reading deeper and more broadly, and they lost track of just how many annotations they were writing!

As these were upper-year students in English literature, they were familiar with edited works—by the likes of Broadview or Norton—but none had experience creating them. I invited librarians to join the class to guide students in two ways: 1) the English-subject librarian helped students navigate where they could find the necessary information to support the five annotation categories using our online resources, and 2) the digital scholarship librarian introduced Scalar and provided students with their first glance at what the platform can do.

To support the creation of the introductions and annotations without assuming prior knowledge of digital publishing or computer literacy, I created a five-page step-by-step guide on how to navigate and use Scalar. I wish to stress, however, that students were informed that none of their grades would be determined by their ability to use Scalar and that we were learning the program together and, as such, would likely experience some minor (or major) hiccups. For example, one student found a completely different way of creating annotations in the platform that remained invisible to everyone but myself and the student, which we were able to troubleshoot and rectify.

Workflow

Once students created their introductions and annotations, I was then responsible for publishing the work publicly. I had severely underestimated the time that this would take, especially as I was already working above and beyond the contract. Due to Scalar’s publishing workflow, there are multiple steps from “draft” to “published” but I did not want to add too much logistical work for the students. I worked with the digital scholarship librarian to fix a few workflow issues I found but was left needing to navigate multiple stages of the Scalar workflow for each annotation. Even though it was simple work (once I got used to it), it still required so much time, something that I would need to account for if I was to ever offer a similar assignment—especially if teaching courses under temporary contracts.

In the meantime, students added their critical apparatus to the anthology and then I made their anthology live. Until this point, students had only worked on the back-end of the anthology. When I showed them the finished product, I was greeted with surprised responses of delight as they had not envisioned how their work would look.

In feedback collected after the course ended, students shared that the project was a “little daunting” at first because they had never worked on a similar project (specifically, Scalar) but were “very impressed” with the final product. Sixty percent of students claimed they were going to use the project on future CVs and portfolios and the remaining forty percent were considering the same.

Closing Remarks

Overall, I am pleased that I pursued this hybrid applied learning project in this course and provided these undergraduate students with a new experience at the end of their degrees. If I were to offer the course again, I would—as mentioned earlier— have students more involved in the collection of the stories. That said, I do not regret the concessions made in 2020—it was important to respond to the realities of student learning conditions during a global pandemic. An applied research project like this one takes a lot of time for students; they need the time to reflect, think, and learn, while also developing skills with new technologies. Therefore, should I have the chance to offer a similar project, I believe it would benefit from being a full-year, six-credit course. I would give students more time for archival study, with time to learn the platform in semester one and then time to create the anthology in semester two.

If you are interested in reading more about the course, the full syllabus is available in the V21 syllabus and handout bank.

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