Introduction (00:07):
Hello and welcome to OEG Voices. OEG Voices. OEG Voices. OEG voices. A new podcast bringing to you, the voices and ideas of open educators from around the world. OGE Voices is produced by Open Education Global, a member-based, nonprofit organization to foster the development and news of open education globally. Learn more about us at oeglobal.org.

Introduction (00:29):
There's much to take in at a global level. We hope to bring you closer to how open education is working by hearing the stories of practitioners told in their own voices. Each episode introduces you to a global open educator, and we invite you to later engage in conversation with them in our OEG Connect community.

Alan Levine (00:57):
Here we are again for another episode of OEG Voices, a podcast from Open Education Global. I'm your host today, Alan Levine, and I'm very pleased to have my colleague Una Daly here. Hello, Una, how are you today?

Una Daly (01:10):
Hey, Alan, doing great here. Sun is shining, but it's cooler today. We're in the 80s.

Alan Levine (01:15):
And we'll get to the weather also, but the reason we're doing this because right now we've got the nominations open for the 2021 Open Educational Awards for Excellence. And we think it might help people to hear voices of people who won in the past, but also we want to recognize them as well and give them a chance to share their projects again to our audience on the podcast. So, I'm really eager today, we're talking to Michael Mills and Shinta Hernandez from Montgomery College in Maryland, and they were recognized last year with an Open Education Award in the Open Pedagogy category for their work on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, they're Open Pedagogy Fellowship. And I'm just really excited to hear about this as some of the work that Una and I are doing, trying to get more people interested in figuring out how to do open pedagogy and what a great example. So hello, Mike and Shinta. Can we just do a little bit of tell us who you are, where you are, and what you do sort of thing?

Michael Mills (02:13):
Sure. Thanks, Alan. Thanks, Una. It's good to be here. I'm Mike Mills. I'm vice president of E-Learning, Innovation, and Teaching Excellence at Montgomery College.

Shinta Hernandez (02:22):
Hi, everyone. I'm Shinta Hernandez. I'm Department Chair of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice at Montgomery College.

Alan Levine (02:29):
Excellent. Can you tell us a little bit about Montgomery for people who haven't looked it up yet or aware?

Michael Mills (02:33):
Sure. We are located in the DC Metro Area, Montgomery County. We have three campuses. We have about 55,000 credit and non-credit students of rather large institution. And we, like everyone else, are wrestling with the pandemic and the remote learning, but I think our faculty and our staff and students have really handled this well. But I know a lot us are looking forward to getting back to campus.

Alan Levine (03:01):
Yeah, it's not a quiet summer, right?

Michael Mills (03:03):
It is not a quiet summer and last summer wasn't quiet either, but everyone has really pitched in and has done a remarkable job. And I know we're a better institution as a result of it.

Alan Levine (03:16):
Excellent. And I know you're both co-founders of this project of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Open Pedagogy Fellowships. What's the origin story of this?

Michael Mills (03:26):
Go ahead, Shinta. I'll let you tell the bit history of it.

Shinta Hernandez (03:30):
Absolutely. So, the origin of it goes this way. A couple of years ago, and I think it was maybe 2017 at the Open Ed Conference in Anaheim, California, Mike and I attended Cable Green's United Nations Sustainable Development Goals workshop. And it really had nothing to do with open pedagogy. It was just on the UN SDGs and it was informative, it was inspiring. So just like any conference, Mike and I would finish up and we would travel back. And we thought to ourselves and we spoke to each other about how wouldn't it be great if we had the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals coupled with Open Pedagogy. And we did our research, we talked with several people and we realized that there really wasn't anything like this in the world, at least not documented and not at scale. And so when we got back to Montgomery College, we started brainstorming about how could we provide this kind of opportunity to faculty fellows.

Shinta Hernandez (04:28):
And shortly thereafter, we created this fellowship at the time, just from Montgomery College. We want to start in-house first and see how that goes. And so, the fellowship itself is designed to be interdisciplinary. Faculty are paired up in to either teams of two or three. And at the time, because it was only Montgomery College and we are a multi-campus institution, one of the requirements was that faculty has to be paired up with somebody who is not from their campus, so not from their discipline and not from their campus. And it's a summer fellowship so the summer fellowship meant that we would meet over the summer, required meetings, and they would get a lot of knowledge on things like open pedagogy. What is that and why is it so important? What are the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals? Why is the interdisciplinary connection so important?

Shinta Hernandez (05:14):
And they received a lot of support and knowledge on those components and other components as well, including creative comments, what is that? What does that mean? What does that look like? Fast forward. We were at another Open Ed Conference the following year at Niagara falls, and Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani came up to us and said, "Wouldn't it be great if we partnered with you all? And, of course, Mike and I were just astonished, we were excited, we were welcoming of that opportunity. And from there, there was an international collaboration board. Mike, I don't know if you want to continue with how it is today.

Michael Mills (05:43):
Well, thanks Shinta. And let me just follow up on Rajiv's comments, and we've always admired Rajiv in his role in Open. And so, to have someone who we looked up to and really admire come to us and say, "We want to be part of this," and I think we had to pinch ourselves a little bit and say, "What have we stumbled on here? Because it really, as we look back, it's a simple marriage, right? The SDGs and Open Pedagogy. There isn't anything magical about it. We just took two concepts and pulled it together. So after our summer of working with KPU and having our faculty team with their faculty, Shinta and I were presenting at an Achieving the Dream Teaching & Learning Conference, a representative from Maricopa Community College came up to us after the presentation and said that she was impressed and wanted to participate. So, this past summer, we had Maricopa along with Kwantlen and Montgomery. And then this year, Pima Community College is joining us and several other British Columbia Community Colleges, Langara College and Thompson Rivers University. And I think I got them all, Shinta.

Shinta Hernandez (07:09):
The Community College of Baltimore County [crosstalk 00:07:11].

Michael Mills (07:10):
Oh, right, right. CCBC. Someone in our backyard. And so we have seven partners this summer in this international collaboration, and we're really excited about the possibilities moving forward. We also have a number of institutions who have expressed their interest, several of whom are shadowing us this summer with hopes of joining next year.

Una Daly (07:35):
Wow. That is really exciting. And I remember hearing about Maricopa last year because, of course, Maricopa is such a huge system within the Phoenix area serving something on the order of 200,000 plus students a year. So, of course, we work closely with them, but I haven't heard about all of your new folks. So that is really exciting.

Shinta Hernandez (07:57):
Yeah.

Una Daly (07:57):
I mean, as you grow this and scale it, how do you coordinate? I'm curious because you've got training and I'm assuming you're sharing some of that training, but you as the leaders may be still holding a lot of the weight of making this happen.

Michael Mills (08:13):
Well, Shinta and I laughed about it because when we first started this, of course the summer work, and then we might have started in January or February prior to the summer. And now, it's basically a year round endeavor because we have the workshops in the summer, but then we're working with faculty to deploy the renewable assignments that are created in the fall. And then, there's a faculty showcase or faculty-student showcase in the spring. And then, we start the process all over again, but the person who's really there in the brunt of a lot of the work and the coordination is Shinta. She handles much of the organizational aspects of it.

Shinta Hernandez (08:59):
And interesting that you asked that question, Una, because just a couple of days ago, one of the members of the Maricopa System jokingly said, "As this gets bigger and bigger, this could actually turn into a full-time job for you, Shinta." And so, I giggled because I can see that happening.

Alan Levine (09:16):
Oh, you're still smiling though. I can see that, which is cute.

Shinta Hernandez (09:19):
I'm still smiling. I enjoy it. It's been great.

Alan Levine (09:23):
Can you maybe come back to what is the process that happens? So, you have to introduce faculty to Open Pedagogy, and we're very interested to hear how you make the case for that new tie into the SDGs. And then what is the [inaudible 00:09:39] of the faculty in these teams as they're developing?

Shinta Hernandez (09:41):
Well, I guess we can start with the timeline that begins right around Open Ed Week. That's when all the institutional partners would put out their call for applications. So all of the institutional partners would get their websites ready, make sure that we have a somewhat consistent application form. And also during this week is when we do presentations all around the country, all around North America really, so that future fellows might get a chance to learn more about open pedagogy and learn more about the United Nations SDGs. Because what we have found is that in some cases, in many cases, we have faculty who know open pedagogy really well, but not the United Nations aspect or who know the United Nations aspect really well but not the open pedagogy aspect. Very few come in knowing both really well. And so that's what these presentations are designed to do.

Shinta Hernandez (10:27):
Then, we have applications due by the end of March, early April, we make a decision. Each of the partners make a decision by the end of April on who gets selected for that particular summer cohort. Then, all throughout this time, though, the leadership team meets monthly, if not more. We certainly communicate via email regularly, but we meet monthly. The summer meetings begin early June, and we meet pretty much every week throughout the month of June, and then again in August. We give faculty fellows a break from meetings in July so that they can work with their faculty teams to coordinate, to come up with these renewable assignments, and do other things that are related to the fellowship. Throughout the fellowship, they are given all of these resource [inaudible 00:11:08] support in helping to create these interdisciplinary renewable assignments. And so, we just had our kickoff meeting last week.

Shinta Hernandez (11:16):
We have another meeting this Thursday, and then a third meeting the last week of June, where they will be getting all of this information. And then, as Mike pointed out, in the fall, they are to deploy their renewable assignments. And throughout the fall semester, they get assistance from each of their institutional representatives on things that they might need or want or things that their students might need or want as the students do the projects. And then, we have a student showcase in February, typically, where a select number of students will co-present with their faculty members. So this is a great opportunity, we think, for the students to shine. Often, we hear a fellowship where only the fellows shine, and we don't get to hear the students themselves and see their products. In this particular fellowship, we get to see the students also present on their work.

Alan Levine (12:00):
Can you expand a little bit? I mean, we know, I think, in a lot we know about assignments. What sort of the thing that makes that... What makes something renewable versus not?

Michael Mills (12:09):
Alan, that's a good question. And our faculty fellows, a lot of them, have not heard of the term renewable assignment. So we approached it in a way that gives examples of assignments that have a life and can live on past a student end of time in a particular class. And one of the ways we demonstrated this early on in our first cohort was bringing a group of students into the fellowship and letting them tell the faculty very frankly what types of assignments they did not like. And to a person, it was research paper. We just don't find value in them if, at the end of the semester, there's no continuation.

Michael Mills (13:01):
And we approached the renewable assignments from the standpoint that students become agents of change and, tied with the SDGs, they can become agents of change in their own community. Getting faculty to understand that this really is a partnership with the student, it takes time, but the faculty eventually get there. And we've had a number of faculty tell us that once they've created these renewable assignments, they question how they ever did their coursework without these types of assignments deployed. So it's been a real good experience working with the faculty, but seeing the response from the students is just phenomenal because students have never, for the most part, had these opportunities either.

Alan Levine (13:52):
I bet it's been changing. Can you give us some examples of the types of projects that stand out for you as examplers?

Shinta Hernandez (13:59):
Sure. I'll give one that we often use because we've been able to keep in touch with this student and have seen her at Montgomery College. And also, she has just recently graduated from the University of Maryland. So, this particular student was in a class of a faculty member who was in our very first cohort. And this is a Spanish instructor who was paired up with a chemistry instructor, and so they are actually good friends. And so when they paired up, they actually told us they don't know how to pair up Spanish with chemistry. They were struggling up until the very end of the summer. And we said, "You, guys, will get it. Here's some resources, you'll get it. Something will click." And, lo and behold, something did.

Shinta Hernandez (14:40):
So one of the assignments, they got deployed in the Spanish class particularly, was that the students had to watch a documentary on recycling, and they were given a list of documentaries. And in these documentaries, as you can imagine, had very science heavy facts, right? And the assignments itself was that each student needed to do something in the community and it could be something hands-on, it could be PR-related, or it could be communications-related, but they had to do it in Spanish so that it could get distributed to a Spanish-speaking community or a Spanish-speaking country.

Shinta Hernandez (15:09):
Well, here's a student who presented at the very first student showcase and she presented to us her product, which was a brochure in Spanish that had a lot of very science-heavy facts in it, which I think in most brochures, first of all, probably don't go into that great of a detail, but also the Spanish it was designed so that it could be posted on the Internet, it had license, openly licensed, and it could get distributed to a wide range of communities and countries, really.

Shinta Hernandez (15:38):
And when the student presented at the students showcase, at the very end, she said this assignment changed her career trajectory. And so many people in the audience, their jaws dropped because you don't really think of an impact of an assignment in that way, right? And in this case, it really changed her career trajectory. She said that she wanted to work for a communications department within the EPA or something along those lines, whereas before it was just communications. But now, she has become so much more involved with the environmental aspect of things that it really has opened her eyes to a lot of different things. And now, she's a graduate from the University of Maryland in public relations, and I can't remember what else was her secondary major or minor, but we can tell that the assignment itself certainly had an impact on her.

Michael Mills (16:25):
We have another team and it was a biology faculty member paired with a sociology faculty member, and they were looking at something related to the food distribution and the biology of that. This particular student, his assignment was to look at iron deficiency anemia and the different types of foods associated with that. And he took his hobby of glass blowing and created two models, one of an anemic person and one of a non-anemic individual. And he demonstrated this by talking about what the red blood cells represented in these glass-blown projects. And he told us at the end that it was an assignment that he will never forget. And when we hear something like that, that's really what this whole fellowship is about because we've all been in classes, we've all taught classes where we know when the students leave those assignments that we give are quickly forgotten. And so, for a student to tell a faculty member, "This is an assignment that I'll never forget," is really empowering.

Una Daly (17:42):
I've heard another term, besides renewable assignments, which is legacy assignments. So not only for the student to reuse as they go forward in their education or their career, but also many faculty are now looking to their students and asking if the student will openly license that so that they can share it with next semester students. I have a quick question if I can ask when I hope it's quick, but so I don't know how you pair up these teams. I mean, it sounds like the Spanish and chemistry one sounds like, "Oh, my gosh." I mean, people don't come in saying I want to work with, or maybe they... Do they come in saying who they want to work with or you kind of pair them?

Michael Mills (18:24):
We pair them, but they identify what SDG they're interested in. So we pair them by SDG or try to. We ask them to identify a couple of SDGs so that we can get a good mix of SDGs and the interdisciplinary teams.

Una Daly (18:43):
Okay. And then for the students, I'm assuming the students are enrolled in one of the courses or the other, not both, but there must be some co-teaching going on there because of the nature of these assignments. How does the interdisciplinary piece, how does that get implemented?

Shinta Hernandez (19:01):
There isn't necessarily a co-teaching per se because the faculty teams are actually at different institutions and that is another requirement. So you have to be from a different discipline and a different institution, but the interdisciplinary part of it happens during the summer when they get to know one another, they get to know each other's pedagogies, their disciplines. We build in team times into each of our meetings, so that the faculty teams have a space and place in time to talk about and brainstorm and inspire one another from each other's experiences. And we leave it very open. We leave it open in the sense of we want them to be creative and how much of each of their disciplines will go into the assignments. As long as there's both disciplines presented there or represented there, we leave it up to them to be creative in that context.

Shinta Hernandez (19:54):
So it really at the end, it's... And I think that's why the faculty team at the beginning of the very first cohort struggled a little bit because this is their first time going outside of their comfort zone. Typically, in higher ed, we work a lot in silos. We work a lot in our disciplines, within our departments, within our institutions. But here we're saying, no, you got to try something new because we are sure that magic will happen after a while of inspiring one another and brainstorming with each other. Again, we leave it very open for them to decide how much of each discipline is represented.

Alan Levine (20:29):
Are they mixing between? Are you having some Montgomery people work with Langara? I mean, you're going across institutions too.

Michael Mills (20:37):
Yes, we-

Alan Levine (20:39):
That's beautiful.

Michael Mills (20:39):
... as part of the fellowship, they are not allowed to work with anyone at their own institution, so we pair them. We just have a spreadsheet and we start matching up. There's no formula per se. It's all eyeball, but we have had tremendous success. We have seen faculty across institutions, different disciplines, presenting their work at different conferences. And it's pretty phenomenal to watch the magic happened because it's not evident when we first start, as Shinta said, the faculty are not comfortable working in that space. And so, once we acknowledge that, we are very open that this isn't something that you're used to, and we understand that, but just stay with us. We promise you at the end, you will see the magic, and they do. We have not had anybody, at least that I know of, complain at the end that this was not a good experience because they see the value in it from a student perspective.

Alan Levine (21:49):
I can tell you this is impressive because I started my career at Maricopa, and it was hard to get people at Glendale Community College to work with Mesa Community College, so that's quite an achievement. How many fellowships do you have in total running this year?

Una Daly (21:59):
That was my question.

Shinta Hernandez (22:01):
Well, we have summer fellowship, just one fellowship per year. And this year, we have grown to 45 faculty fellows, whereas-

Alan Levine (22:08):
Wow.

Shinta Hernandez (22:09):
... in the very first year when it was just Montgomery College, I think, Mike, 10 or 11 fellows?

Michael Mills (22:12):
Yes, somewhere around there, right.

Shinta Hernandez (22:14):
Yeah. So, we're very pleased to see the growth of the number of fellows, which of course also implies that the number of students who do these assignments and who go out there and become agents of change in their communities has also grown. I think last year we hit about 3000 students, I believe.

Michael Mills (22:29):
Somewhere around there. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Alan Levine (22:32):
Is there a place that people go to sort of see this collection of assignments and outcomes and the presentations?

Michael Mills (22:38):
We are in the process working through the Kwantlen press books or developing a press books that institutions can use and look at model assignments, look at our processes, and what we're doing to create the fellowship, the history of the fellowship, but also some examples of assignments and then links to different repositories. Each institution is going to have a repository on its own, where they're going to put all of their assignments. The press book will be the cream of the crop of the assignments.

Shinta Hernandez (23:20):
And the meeting that we had, which is our second meeting, this coming Thursday, the fellows will hear a couple of presentations, but then we're also both in a workshop in which they'll get to see what it means, what does it look like, what does it entail to develop one of these renewable assignments? And then during their team time, they'll get an opportunity to actually get their hands dirty on how to create something like that.

Una Daly (23:40):
Obviously, you're all doing this virtually. So when you say team time, it's Breakout rooms and Zoom?

Michael Mills (23:46):
The first year we did it when it was just Montgomery, of course, we met face-to-face. The second year when it was with KPU, it was also virtual, except that the groups at KPU and the group at Montgomery were all in one room. And I think we look back now and think, "How silly that was. Why didn't we just have everyone virtual?" which has really been beneficial as we've expanded. Having a large group get together in one location that just doesn't seem feasible anymore.

Una Daly (24:18):
Wow. Especially because you're going across boundaries like that. I wanted to ask a little bit about future plans because the interest keeps growing year after year, and I'm imagining there might be some states that might want to take this on from a state- or system-wide perspective.

Michael Mills (24:36):
We just, this past week, have had some email exchanges with the SUNY system about getting involved. We've also had some international communication. There are some colleges, universities in different countries that have expressed interest, and we've been pretty consistent in the fact that we want institutional partners while we love the individual faculty to do this work in their classes, it just becomes much easier if we have a single point of contact at an institution, which is why something like the SUNY group would really work well.

Alan Levine (25:17):
Are you ready for crazy growth? You've already gone probably far... You've probably went farther than maybe you expected them?

Shinta Hernandez (25:24):
Definitely, yeah. I don't think Mike and I would envision this type of growth so quickly too, but we are happy.

Michael Mills (25:32):
Yeah. Are we ready for crazy growth? I don't know, Alan. If it could get any crazier than what we've experienced in the sense that Shinta and I were not planning on any of this. When we left Anaheim that first year, it really was something that we just thought of confining to Montgomery College. We really didn't have any expectations or experiences or plan for growth. And so, when we had KPU reached out then Maricopa and then the partners this year, it really took on a different significance for us. So yeah, anybody who is interested in joining, we're more than happy to have come and take this journey with us.

Shinta Hernandez (26:15):
And I'll also add that social media has added to that crazy growth. I mean, it's been a wonderful professional development tool because through social media, through Twitter, specifically, either Mike or myself or others, who are on the leadership team who have Twitter accounts, would post some things about what's going on with the fellowship. And it's created a lot of interest from institutions that we never would have imagined reaching out to us to talk about this. And so Mike and I specifically have done individual presentations or to get presentations together to institutions who've learned about our work through social media or through the websites, wherever, and said, "We want to learn more about this fellowship. Do you mind doing a presentation for us at our institution?" So we've been doing a lot of that as well.

Michael Mills (26:58):
And as horrific as COVID has been, one of the things that we've benefited from are all these conferences going to a virtual format. So we've been able to present at conferences that we would have never been able to get to physically, and that's been a tremendous help and has really piqued the interest of a variety of individuals.

Alan Levine (27:22):
And I'm pretty sure we're going to hear from you at the OE Global Conference coming up in September.

Michael Mills (27:27):
We've put a number of different proposals in for sure at different conferences.

Alan Levine (27:34):
Well, it definitely applies to the theme of this year's conference. So, I fully expect to see you both and, hopefully, maybe some student voices in there as well that would be wonderful.

Una Daly (27:44):
Just wanted to say what visionaries you two are. I mean, it really speaks to what two inspired people with a great idea can do.

Alan Levine (27:51):
And says a lot about you can get an idea from someone else at a conference or social media or anywhere. And you can say, like, "What if we did this?" And that's the possibilities as you're demonstrating with this award-winning project clearly speak to that.

Michael Mills (28:05):
Well, I think Shinta would agree, all the credit goes to the faculty and the students who took the chance on us and the fellowship because it really is to their credit that they took this crazy idea and said, "It's worth trying in our classroom." And then, not only is it worth trying in the classroom, it's worth letting the students take ownership of their own learning and their own project. So, all the credit goes to the faculty who have been involved in the past and the faculty who are going to be taking part in the future.

Shinta Hernandez (28:40):
And I'll also add, again, going back to the faculty and their work, we have heard from faculty who participated in either the first or the second year who continue doing these renewable assignments, and they just tweaked it and evolved it along the way. And in some cases, figure out a way to incorporate the COVID issues into their renewable assignments to make it even more relevant. But we appreciate certainly those faculty fellows who continue to utilize the information, knowledge, and the skills that they learned from this fellowship and engage their students in these ways.

Una Daly (29:12):
So you've changed their teaching practices in an ongoing way, speaks for itself.

Alan Levine (29:16):
There's a lot to be said for that. Anything else that you want to tell our folks about this experience that we should share?

Michael Mills (29:23):
Other than the fact that we welcome any institution that's looking forward to helping their faculty change their teaching practices and try something a little bit different that, we have no doubt, students will embrace.

Shinta Hernandez (29:40):
And I know Mike will say the same, but we are certainly very honored and humbled to receive the Open Pedagogy Award last year. It has generated greater interest for sure.

Alan Levine (29:46):
Well, without a doubt, even knowing about it beforehand and now hearing from both of you, it's more than well-deserved for what you've achieved for participants, for faculty, for institutions. So thanks again for spending some time, and we look forward to sharing it more. Thank you both for tapping in today, and thank you, audience, for listening to this episode of OEG Voices. This is our podcast that we're producing.

Alan Levine (30:10):
We'll have some featured over Mason's Music. I like the title, it's called Joyful Meeting, which describes this meeting by us today by an artist named Crowander, and it's found in the Free Music Archive, licensed under Creative Commons, attribution-noncommercial license. So you'll find this episode in the next couple of weeks at our site voices.oeglobal.org. And we hope you engage in some follow-up conversations with Shinta and Mike in our OEG Connect space.

Alan Levine (30:35):
And anybody out there, if you want to share your open education work, suggest a future guest, a project, just let us know. And because the OEG now are open for the next year cycle, we hope that you get a chance to get a nomination then, and we could be speaking to you next year. So thank you, Mike. Thank you, Shinta. Thank you, Una.

Michael Mills (30:55):
Thank you.

Shinta Hernandez (30:55):
Thanks, Alan.