Challenge Six: Creation and Curation

What it is:

The Creation and Curation competency involves using technology to enhance digital learning opportunities. By experimenting with various technologies, we can create and curate accessible digital materials for specific audiences and purposes. When creating your own digital resources, design for inclusion and integrate strategies to enhance accessibility — as we explored in the Ethical and Legal Considerations challenge.

Creating or curating existing materials requires that we understand and respect intellectual property rights in digital spaces. This includes being familiar with copyright licenses when using and sharing the work of others. In this challenge, we will explore copyright licences, which will allow you to make informed and ethical decisions about how and where you share your own work or the work of others.

Why it is important:

In the Information Literacy challenge, we discussed the importance of evaluating the information that we interact with. The Creation and Curation challenge focuses on developing our skills around appropriately gathering, selecting, and organizing the information we’ve evaluated. We do this by carefully curating content for our specific environments and thinking about how we share our own work with others. Understanding copyright licences allows us to ethically adopt and adapt existing resources, which can save a lot of time. Creating materials and licensing them openly to share with others provides everyone with greater access to innovative, current, and low-cost resources.

Examples:

Listen to art historian Andrea Korda talking about the role of the instructor as a curator of resources, drawing on her experiences using and creating open educational resources (OERs) during a year of remote teaching: Curating Course Materials: Lessons Learned from Using Open Educational Resources for Remote Teaching (video, 20 minutes)
Walk through a step-by-step process of finding and selecting open educational resources (OER) to use in a derivative work, choosing a Creative Commons licence, and applying the licence to the work: Creating OER and Combining Licenses Part 1 (video, 5 minutes)

Multimedia Activity

The following image with hotspots, adapted from the work of Christopher Lister, has been modified to illustrate a simplified view of how the Information Literacy, Creation and Curation, and Communication and Collaboration competencies work together to form a cycle of consuming, curating, collaborating, and creating.

Learning Activities

1. Learn it for yourself

Nowadays, there’s an abundance of educational resources available online. Using what already exists, as opposed to making your own materials from scratch, can save time and effort. A good place to get started with digital curation and creation in your classroom is through open educational resources (OERs). Please read chapter 1 of The Open Pedagogy Student Toolkit, The OER Landscape, and watch the video at the end to gain a broad overview of what open education and open educational resources are and why they are important.

Now you might be wondering how OERs can be used in the classroom. The BC Open Educational Librarians suggest “adding an existing resource that someone else has already created (adopting). Or if you feel even more ambitious, take an existing OER and tweak it to match your specific needs (adapting).” This requires an understanding of the different kinds of open licences to know how OERs can or cannot be used. Please watch What Are Creative Commons Licenses? (video, 2 minutes) to learn more about how Creative Commons licences work.

2. Incorporate it into your teaching practice

Now it becomes very important to think about how you gather these educational resources and curate them for specific uses in your classroom. This way, you can avoid a long list of resources that students have to sift through. As you will see in the H5P slides below, “Digital curation for teaching involves transforming a collection of resources into instructional content.” The goal is to include resources in your course that are well curated, directly relate to the learning outcomes, and are framed with information that help illustrate why they matter.

The following activity walks you through the five C’s of digital curation, which will prompt you to think about how you collect, categorize, critique, conceptualize, and circulate learning resources in your own courses. When going through the 5 C’s of Digital Curation for Teaching H5P slides, have in mind a course you teach. Use the slide prompts to reflect on whether your current curation approach aligns with the five C’s.

Create a brief reflective post that captures your current curation process and whether you would make any adjustments to your process after learning about the five C’s. Here are a few prompts that can serve as inspiration for reflection, as needed:

Where do you search to locate materials for your course? Have you connected with the library at your institution?
How do you differentiate between “need to know” and “nice to know” resources in your course? Do you clearly mark “nice to know” resources as additional resources so it’s clear that students can browse them if/when they have time?
How do you briefly introduce each resource to create a connection between it and the learning outcome(s)? (For example, “The following video discusses ____, which illustrates the idea of _____ from last week.”) Or, if this is an area you want to work on, how will you approach it moving forward?
How do you set an action for students to complete when engaging with a learning resource? (For example, “Jot down one takeaway from the video that will be shared in a small group activity during the next class.”) Or, if this is an area you want to work on, how will you approach it moving forward?

You might also consider working with your teaching and learning centre to:

Review effective course design strategies to ensure your resources are organized appropriately to support student learning
Design learning activities that allow students to demonstrate their learning in creative ways (For example, instead of having students write an essay on a topic, perhaps they can create a video, an audio recording, or a poster. This allows students to demonstrate their learning in creative ways using a technology that is accessible to them.)

3. Teach it to students

Teach students about copyright licences so they understand which OERs can be freely adopted or adapted using What Are Creative Commons Licenses? (video, 2 minutes). Instructors and students can use the Licence Chooser to determine which Creative Commons licence is appropriate for their work.
Revise the Take & Teach Presentation or Poster assignment template from Excelsior University and customize it to include your institution’s specific resources. The assignment will help students prepare a teaching poster or presentation about a topic using openly licensed resources.
Curate a list of resources for your course or specific assignment that includes links where free photos can be obtained. For example, Thompson River University’s Intellectual Property Office shares a list of Free Photos.