Do you have readings you’d like to make available to your students online?
Sharing in Canvas: If you are sharing a journal article or book chapter from outside of the Touro College Libraries databases with your class this semester, you may need to get copyright clearance to include the material in your Canvas course. This applies to electronic and scanned materials. The Libraries are available to assist you with determining whether you need to secure copyright clearance, and, if you do, with requesting permission to share. Please contact Marina Zilberman for more information.
Fall Semester 2021 officially kicked off in full swing August 23rd at the School of Health Sciences in Central Islip, housed with the Touro Law School. This new semester brings to students a chance to either continue their excellence or turn over a new leaf and start the path toward excellence that is found in the hallowed halls of Touro. Speaking of halls, a brand-new building awaits the School of Health Sciences students who were previously housed at the now defunct Bay Shore location.
Elisheva Berenstein, Librarian, School of Health Sciences
Where were you born?
I was born in Brooklyn, New York and actually attended Touro College in the mid 1990s.
Where else have you lived?
I have lived in Rochester, New York for over 25 years and have just moved back to the Far Rockaway area.
What languages do you speak?
While I am a native English speaker, I am proficient in Hebrew and can speak, read and write in it.
What fields have you studied and/or degrees have you earned?
I have an MLS in Library Science from State University of New York at Buffalo as well as NYS Teacher Certification in Library. I have a BS in Business Management from SUNY Empire State College. I am a certified Medical Transcriptionist as well. I have taught in the classroom, to grades ranging from kindergarten to college.
What is the part of your job that you enjoy the most?
Teaching students the research and information literacy skills that will help them be successful. Nowadays, you always need to figure things out. Once a student knows how to find the relevant information, there is no limit to how far they can go!
What do you think will be the most challenging part of your job?
Marketing and outreach! Having students realize what a great help libraries and librarians can be in helping them excel in their studies. From learning to how to find relevant information to citing research correctly, librarians and library are treasured resources that need good PR.
Your ideal vacation?
Taking my family touring in Europe (England, France & Italy) for a week and then going to Israel and living like a native in Jerusalem.
Any hobbies?
I like to dabble in many things, so I am concurrently working on a diamond art painting of an elephant and a paint by number of the Western Wall. I also like to keep my freezer well stocked with desserts, so I bake weekly. My favorite thing to make is lemon biscotti and grape sorbet.
Favorite food?
Anything with chocolate 😊
Tell us one thing about yourself that most of us probably don’t know.
I can juggle! I currently juggle with balls and am working on juggling with pins.
Image credits: portrait courtesy of the author. Librarian avatar by Bitmoji.
Contributed by Elisheva Berenstein, Librarian at the School of Health Sciences
Open Pedagogy is not new. Open Education was popular in the 60s and 70s—though maybe in a slightly different context. But because of the more recent Open Pedagogy movement, and specifically because of the Open Education Resources (OER) movement, Open Pedagogy has re-emerged and become a tool to improve teaching and learning. Numerous interpretations of Open Pedagogy exist but before we delve any deeper into Open Pedagogy, we first need to quickly review the definition of Open Educational Resources (OER), as the two of them are intricately connected to each other.
Simply put, OER are free to access; free to reuse; free to revise; free to remix and free to redistribute. These are the 5Rs that are essential to keep in mind when we talk about Open Pedagogy.
Graphic by Kirk Snyder, OER librarian at Touro Libraries, licensed under a (CC BY-SA 4.0) creative commons license.
Open Pedagogy (Open Ped):
An expert in Open Ped, Robin DeRosa (2018) defines it as an instructional approach that engages studentsin using, reusing, revising, remixing, and redistributing open content. Based on the definition of Open Educational Resources above, we now understand that by open content she means openly licensed material which due to their 5 rights can be easily and freely incorporated into teaching and learning.
***Note that there is a lot of material on the internet that are free to watch, listen to, and read, but they are not necessarily free in the sense that one can use and reuse them without copyright permission.
Open Educational Resources and Open Ped pioneers, Wiley and Hilton (2018), define Open Ped as “the set of teaching and learning practices only possible or practical in the context of the 5R permissions which is when you are using OER”. In other words, Open Ped is teaching and learning through OER or simply put, an “OER-enabled pedagogy”.
The Renewable Assignment:
On his blog, called, “improving learning” David Wiley talks about killing the disposable assignment. Those assignments that both students and faculty complain about, those that in his words, “add no real value to the world—after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away.”
Wiley instead recommends creating renewable assignments. These are assignments that would be impossible without the 5 permissions granted by open licenses, but they will provide students opportunities to spend their efforts on valuable projects beyond the classroom. To give you an idea, here are a few examples of non-disposable assignments.
Create or edit Wikipedia articles
Create or co-create assignments/exam questions/test banks
Create or modify syllabus/learning outcomes/grading policies/ rubrics
Open Syllabi—students become responsible for filling out the syllabus
“How to videos/tutorials” in any medium using OER—(e.g.) students explaining difficult course topics to other students
Create an anthology using public domain literary text (include marginalized authors & plurality of voices)
Student-designed renewable websites:
For this last example, an instructor said that instead of student posters piling up in the garbage can at the end of each semester, she asked students to pick a topic and then create a website by using Google Sites which is free through their school (from NEHB webinar on Open Pedagogy, April 12, 21). The content that student created might not be perfect, she added, but many times the projects roll over to the students of the following semester and they continue until the project gets perfect.
Moreover, students learn to use an open technology platform, such as Google Sites. There are also WordPress, Twitter, YouTube, flickr, and Wikipedia to name a few other public platforms used for Open Ped assignments. Not only do students learn about creating, using, and remixing OER in Open Ped assignments, they also learn, among other things, about contributing their collaboratively produced knowledge publicly through these platforms. Which in turn makes them to learn about how such platforms work and how information gets distributed.
And while teaching in a collaborative, contributive, and student-centered method sounds authentic, liberating, and innovative; educators must note that teaching through Open Ped carries a few risks as follows:
Students are the copyright holders of their projects, so they need to know about different licensing options, and how they can license their own work, if interested in sharing. Also, educators need to make sure to give students the option to opt in or out if they do not feel comfortable with sharing their projects publicly. As such, privacy issues can be a concern and some experts in Open Ped recommend FERPA waivers to avoid any data privacy infringements. Additionally, taking out individual students’ names and instead using a group name that can be shared by the team is also recommended since online bullying can become an issue as well.
In the end, though many of us librarians are not teaching complete courses, Open Ped can be a great way to teach information literacy and critical thinking. Librarians can get involved with OER and Open Ped by clarifying intellectual property, licensing, and copyright issues just as they can talk about evaluating diverse information that vary in creation and dissemination.
So, if this short piece intrigued you to take advantage of OER and Open Ped assignments and ideas, or if you just want to learn more about it, please check out the library’s LibGuide on Open Pedagogy. Or simply contact me at sara.tabaei@touro.edu.
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