In the ongoing wake of Covid-19, post-secondary students across the globe face major barriers, from financial insecurity to anxiety and loneliness. Co-designed and co-created by students, Liberated Learners is an open resource which supports new post-secondary students to thrive. Liberated Learners is a large, interinstitutional collaborative project by students, faculty, and staff at Trent University, Brock University, Seneca College, University of Windsor, McMaster University, Cambrian College, and Nipissing University, in Canada. It is a comprehensive and dynamic guide which supports learners with everything from video production and personal finance, to sleeping habits and imposter syndrome. It is split into four modules: The Learner – about study habits and motivation, The Technologist – about understanding necessary tech tools, The Navigator – about time management, wellness, and navigating your program/institution, and The Collaborator – about working with others, allyship, self-advocacy, and networking. It breaks the overwhelming experience of becoming a post-secondary student into digestible bite-sized bits.
What is unique about this resource is that it was created for learners by learners. It is filled with student’s voices and speaks authentically to the student experience because it was co-created at every step of the process in collaboration with paid student co-designers and was directly inspired by student lived experiences.
To begin the project student designers hosted a design sprint and collected stories of struggle in higher education from learners around the world. These international submissions spanned the globe. The student design team labelled them “wicked problems.” These stories are the heart of Liberated Learners, and the modules were inspired by, designed, and built-in response to these stories, holding student voices at their core. Students in the Seneca College Music program also created the original ‘beats to study to’.
Explore more about this award…
Podcasts from Open Education Global
As part of our putting the podcast on the road series we recorded this episode at the podcast studio of Terry Greene, Senior E-Learning Designer at Trent University Online in Peterborough, Ontario. Terry is host of Gettin’ Air “The Open Pedagogy Podcast” that each week features a conversation with practitioners of “technology-enabled and open learning practices in Post-Secondary Education.”
Terry describes himself as an “Enthusiast for digital, open pedagogy.” In addition to his work at Trent University, he is teaching an Instructional Design course at Lambton College.
The Gettin’ Air show was an inspiration for OEG Voices and Terry has been part of the OE Global circle, having earned a 2019 OE Award for Excellence for his Open Learning Patchbook projects and also a previous presenter at OE Global conferences. I had collaborated with Terry on the eCampusOntario Ontario Extend (for faculty) which was an impetus for Liberated Learners (“how to learn with style”) a multi institution, student led project the Terry organized. We will talk much about this fantastic project in the show.
Mainly this was a chance to turn the microphone tables on terry and interview him on his own show. This episode will also appear soon as a Gettin’ Air episode.
Let’s get some air with Terry. And we were joined by his adorable daughter who herself attended the OEGlobal19 conference in Milan.
Web Sites Links and Quotes for Episode 41
“[Course building at Trent University] is the opportunity for many people to work on them and gave a lot of people the chance to taste the creation of open educational resources. Then we are proud of it, we promote it in webinars. Every time we build a course we are trying to infuse the use of OER that are out there.”
Terry Greene on his work at Trent Online
- Learning Nuggets (Terry Greene’s Blog)
- Gettin’ Air Podcast
- The theme song “Gettin’ Air” by Calgary band Chixdigit
- VoiceEd Radio
- Opportunity to review pre-release versions of books:
- Martin Weller’s Metaphors of Ed Tech (Gettin’ Air episode)
- Hannah McGregor’s A Sentimental Education (Gettin’ Air episode)
- Audrey Watters’ Teaching Machines (Gettin’ Air episode)
“For anyone listening I think it’s great, I hope they get to know all these people, take these great ideas and run with them, and hopefully get some inspiration from the work all these people are doing”
Terry Greene on Gettin’ Air
- The Liberated Learner Project
- Wicked Problems (“the wicked problems that learners face every day”)
- Liberated Learner Chill Beats (music to study by created by students at Seneca College)
Ontario Extend was designed for empowering educators to teach in modern digital age. Lena Patterson, then project director at eCampusOntario always said we should do this for students some day.. This was one of the projects we got to do this under an eCampusOntario grant, with involvement from seven universities– it is a mirror image of Extend. Because the original was ‘by educators for educators’ we wanted to re-create that having it ‘by learners for learners.’ We got to hire students as co-designers. We used Wicked Problem to allow students to identify the content to be included in the modules all that help students to become more independent online learners.
Terry Greene on the Liberated Learner Project
- The Open Patchbooks (2019 OE Award For Excellence in Open Pedagogy)
- Institute for Emerging Leadership in Online Learning (Online Learning Consortium)
- The SUNY Online Course Quality Review Rubric (OSCQR)
“I hope we can build real robust online options that will add to the flexibility of the experience… I hope she will have the choice to do it in a high quality environment in person or off or both, and where there’s less of a stigma about online being lower quality.”
Terry Greene on what he hopes his daughter’s university experience will be like.
Since Terry’s theme song is licensed for use only on VoiceEd radio, we found our own open licensed music for this episode in the Free Music Archive, a track called
Free As Air [Original mix]by mildtape & Ebsa licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.
The Gettin’ Air logo was created by Bryan Mathers / Visual Thinkery licensed likely CC BY-NC and hopefully used with permission by Terry Greene.
The introduction was created with the OEG Voices Mixer featuring voices of Gardner C, Terry G, Maren D, Lena P, Nicole N, Judith S, Ajita D, Jöran M-M, Werner W, Lori-Beth L, and Clint L(learn how to add your voice to the mix).
- The Making of The Liberated Learner (Terry Greene’s Learning Nuggets blog)
