Dr. Shira Segal describes what MIT OpenCourseWare learned from collaborating with open educators at community colleges.
MIT OpenCourseWare has been one of the pioneers of open education, leading the way by offering free materials from MIT courses as early as 2001, when no other institutions were pursuing comparably ambitious initiatives. But in subsequent years, there’s been an explosion of activity in open education, led by faculty members, instructional designers, and librarians at institutions throughout the United States and worldwide. In this episode, we hear from senior manager of MIT Open Education collaborations, Dr. Shira Segal, who talks about MIT’s efforts to team up with and learn from open education practitioners at the Maricopa County Community College District in Arizona, whose energetic promotion of open educational resources has saved students over $270 million in textbook costs, and College of the Canyons in California, a leader in the Zero Textbook Cost movement. We also hear excerpts from interviews with four instructors from those colleges, who talk about the potential benefits and unexpected challenges of using open educational resources in general, and about what they learned from their experiences in adapting OCW materials for use in their own classes.
Relevant Resources:
More on MIT OpenCourseWare’s collaboration with community colleges
Maricopa County Community College District
Maricopa Community Colleges Save Students $270M in Textbooks
OER and Zero Textbook Cost at College of the Canyons
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions
BRETT PACI: Hi, and welcome to Chalk Radio. I'm co-producer Brett Paci. And I'm filling in on this intro just to let you know that the episode you're about to hear is a little out of the ordinary for Chalk Radio. In this episode, our host, Sarah Hansen, sits down with our collaborations and engagement manager, Shira Segal. We think you'll enjoy this behind the scenes look at some of the community building work that goes on at OCW, as well as their reflections on how educators out in the world are using OCW and other open educational resources to better the world. We hope you enjoy it.
SARAH HANSEN: Can you introduce yourself, sharing your name and your role at MIT?
SHIRA SEGAL: My name is Shira Segal. And I am-- what am I?
SARAH HANSEN: Yeah, this is how it goes.
SHIRA SEGAL: That didn't take long.
SARAH HANSEN: Yeah, yeah.
SHIRA SEGAL: Yeah, what am I?
SARAH HANSEN: Today on Chalk Radio, we're talking collaborations.
SHIRA SEGAL: It wasn't actually about putting OCW in the hands of community college faculty. Instead, it ended up being listening and learning to community college faculty about their priorities, and their needs, and where they were in their own curriculum design or objectives that they had for a particular class or a particular course topic, and then to see, is there anything within the world of Open, including OpenCourseWare, that could fit that.
SARAH HANSEN: I'm Sarah Hansen. My guest today is Dr. Shira Segal, the MIT OpenCourseWare collaborations and engagement manager. She'll tell us about her role at MIT OpenCourseWare and an exciting collaboration with community colleges. You'll also hear interview excerpts from community college faculty that participated with us in this collaboration. Well, thank you for being here today. I get to see you most days. But this is like a super special podcast episode because I get to interview you.
SHIRA SEGAL: Yay.
SARAH HANSEN: So we were so happy when you joined MIT OpenCourseWare because you come with such an interesting and rich background. You were faculty. You enjoy teaching. And you also are really interested in the arts. So could you tell our listeners just a little bit about you and how you found your way to MIT OCW?
SHIRA SEGAL: Sure.
SARAH HANSEN: That's so nice.
SHIRA SEGAL: Yeah, I well, I was really attracted to coming to OpenCourseWare because open education is so inspiring to me. And open culture at large is so inspiring to me. So I'm a former faculty in the humanities. I taught film studies. My background is in cultural memory, communication studies, American studies. I think one thing that drives all of my interests is the ways that we relate to one another. So looking at film, for instance, not just as a mechanism for telling a story, but as a mode of expression.
SARAH HANSEN: So you're saying that film is not just an object, but it's a lens through which we understand each other and express to each other how we are in the world?
SHIRA SEGAL: Yeah, yeah. It's a form of expression. It's a way of understanding ourselves and one another. But it's also this visual art form and a medium. The things that excite me are the ways that it changes my interior being so that then I can relate to others in a better, more holistic, grounded way with an eye on the things that inspire us.
SARAH HANSEN: That's so interesting. What threads do you tug on in your work in Collaborations? Like, how do you bring those insights that you've gained through film directly into the work that you do at OpenCourseWare?
SHIRA SEGAL: I think the way that I approached my students, when I was teaching, was I really wanted them to learn about the material, obviously. But I wanted them to learn about themselves. And I wanted them to learn about one another. Something that it often comes back to for me is the way to come to one another as full selves. And it's very aspirational and a little esoteric. But how do we really bring our full selves into a conversation or into a community or into a debate?
So I'm always interested in learning about people, and seeing where they're coming from, and finding ways to connect. I think, at OpenCourseWare, we all share the value of sharing. And that feels utterly optimistic, right? There's an utmost optimism to what we do at OpenCourseWare, which is sharing things with others. And that is such a human, lovely thing to do that I feel really excited to get to be part of.
SARAH HANSEN: So we work together at MIT OpenCourseWare. We run the Collaborations program. I really enjoy working with you. Maybe you can tell us, when you walk into the office, what is that like for you? Who do you see? What is surprising? What is it like to be here?
SHIRA SEGAL: I think what I really love about working at MIT OpenCourseWare is how much dedication and passion goes into the work and into the course publications. It takes a lot of time, actually, and a lot of effort. And a lot of people are involved in bringing forth the MIT-taught materials and putting them online and making them freely and openly available to anybody.
So I think one of the things that I notice when I work here is an enormous appreciation for the team. It's not a lot of people working really hard to produce what is now an archive of over 2,500 courses online. Our YouTube channel alone can garner over 5 million hours of watch time in just one year. So I think I'm always astounded by how much we do and how hard our team works.
I'm also really excited about the wide range of materials that we publish on MIT OpenCourseWare. It's not just the sciences. It's also the social sciences. It's the humanities. It's dealing with education, the environment, how we relate to the communities that we're in. So there's a lot of richness to the material as well.
SARAH HANSEN: Yeah.
SHIRA SEGAL: A lot of this, for me, points back to the labor that it takes to create open educational materials. So something that you and I often say is that open is not free.
SARAH HANSEN: Right.
SHIRA SEGAL: It takes a lot of people working really hard to make that available to people in order for them to reuse and remix as they see fit.
SARAH HANSEN: Right, totally. Tell us a little bit about the work you do in Collaborations. What does a day in the life of a collaborations and engagement manager look like?
SHIRA SEGAL: Oh, well, every day is a bit different. And I feel like we're working on 10 different things all at the same time.
SARAH HANSEN: Yeah, we are.
SHIRA SEGAL: Sometimes, I will provide open educational resource guidance and curation for people who are trying to make use of OpenCourseWare, or I'm orienting them to OpenCourseWare as a resource. Recently, we're trying to respond to the rapidly changing landscape of education and technology and finding ways to build communities of practice around that changing landscape.
I attend conferences. We work with nonprofits to secure the funding and the resources needed to help make this work available. And I think a question that we're always asking is, how can we do what we're doing better?
SARAH HANSEN: Yeah.
SHIRA SEGAL: MIT OpenCourseWare has a really long history. From 2001 on, we've been providing these materials online for free. So a question that comes up in my work is, how well are we doing what we're doing? And where do we need to grow? How can we learn? And what do we need to change going forward?
SARAH HANSEN: Yeah, and one thing I've learned from you is just how important listening is in figuring out that pathway. And so you put a lot of energy on listening to the stakeholders out in the open ecosystem.
SHIRA SEGAL: And also just-- thank you. But also just learning who those stakeholders are.
SARAH HANSEN: Right.
SHIRA SEGAL: Who are we actually serving? We serve a lot of independent learners around the world who are not affiliated with any institution. And we also work with faculty and people who support faculty-- librarians, instructional designers, other open access repositories or publication arms. So there's a lot of people involved in the open education community at large.
Something else that really excites and inspires me is how much open education is just one element in so many elements of open culture at large. So we have open source. We have open science. We have open access publications. So how do those things all work together? I feel like we are just one piece of a bigger puzzle.
SARAH HANSEN: We recently had an opportunity to collaborate with community colleges on an open endeavor. And I was wondering if you could share the contours of what that collaboration was all about.
SHIRA SEGAL: Yeah, thanks. This was a really exciting project for us. It was funded by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation. And we were given the opportunity to support 11 faculty across two community college systems and across a range of disciplines in order to help them find and adapt materials from MIT OpenCourseWare and beyond.
And what we did was, over the course of a year, we provided a lot of infrastructure for our work together. We first aligned potential faculty with our course materials to see if we had enough of the types of topics that they were teaching in. We provided a course on open educational resources and an orientation towards what that is.
I met with faculty numerous times for a guided discovery and curation of the types of sources that we have and how they might use them, or not use them, or be inspired by them. And there were other elements of infrastructure that we embedded in this process, like reflective practice interviews that you had with those faculty, an in-person event, and finally them aligning or not aligning their final course adaptations into their own teaching.
SARAH HANSEN: Yeah, there's so much to unpack there. I think the locations are important. So one set of community colleges was in Arizona, the Maricopa County Community College District.
SHIRA SEGAL: Yes.
SARAH HANSEN: And the other was College of the Canyons, located just outside of LA in California. And both of those institutions brought tremendous open infrastructure, which I think helped us be successful. College of the Canyons, they developed the course we were able to share with faculty participants. And they had the expertise to do that, and to leverage it, and put it on a platform that was accessible to everyone, which was incredible.
And I know, in interviewing faculty throughout the process, they all felt super supported by their home institutions. Every single one, when I said, do you feel like you have support for the open work that you're doing, without any exceptions, they're like, yes, which I found just so incredible. And I know we spent a lot of time talking about how the strengths of these cross-sector institutions were really complementary. And that was part of what helped us be successful. What were some of the strengths that you found that helped this all work across the institutions?
SHIRA SEGAL: I think you're right that one of the reasons that we could work so well together was because of this strong sense of infrastructure that each of these community college systems were bringing to the table. And some of that, in part, has to do with their scale.
So Maricopa Community Colleges is one of the largest community college districts in the United States. They were the first higher education institution to enable students to search its course catalog specifically for no cost or low cost courses. And they have saved students over $[270] million on textbook costs since 2013.
SARAH HANSEN: That's amazing.
SHIRA SEGAL: Yeah, so they are already this kind of engine of Open and supporting their faculty, their librarians, their instructional designers, all in the service of students not having to spend a lot of money. Similarly, College of the Canyons is part of the California Community College System. And they are the largest system of higher education in the United States. And they've long played a role in advancing open education efforts across California, including zero textbook cost degree programs. They represent over 115 community colleges.
So I think, when we were looking at who to collaborate with, it was so easy to say, yes, we want to work with these two college systems because they were already providing these models for what happens when faculty adapt, or use, or create, or rely on open educational resources. So for us, I felt like we were really looking to them as the leaders in that space.
SARAH HANSEN: I think so, too. And one thing we were hoping to learn is what happens when we put OpenCourseWare materials into the hands of faculty. What are the powerful things they will do in the context of this open infrastructure? But it wasn't a clear path for us. We learned a lot of interesting and surprising things along the way. Do you want to share some of the things that came up for you?
SHIRA SEGAL: Sure. I think, first of all, I had to really dismantle what our objectives were, right? It wasn't actually about putting OCW in the hands of community college faculty. Instead, it ended up being listening and learning to community college faculty about their priorities, and their needs, and where they were in their own curriculum design or objectives that they had for a particular class or a particular course topic, and then to see is there anything within the world of Open, including OpenCourseWare that could fit that.
But one big lesson was it's not plug-and-play. Everything in the process of adaptation can take a lot of time. One of my favorite examples comes from Tricia from the College of Canyons. She's a mechanical engineering professor. And she found these incredible, complex graphs on OpenCourseWare that were being used in some of our engineering courses. And it took some time to adapt those graphs or those diagrams to the needs of her teaching and to the persona and the level of her students as well.
PATRICIA FOLEY: As I'm adapting them, one of the things that I'm realizing is that MIT material has very few numbers in it. Usually, the problems have-- here's the structure, this thing is this L long and the force is P big. Tell me the force that this member is experiencing expressed in the notation of these different variables.
So when the students from MIT are solving those problems, they're getting an expression that is dependent on L and P. And eventually, they could plug in those numbers and solve for a real number, if they were given numbers. But they're just not. The problems just don't have numbers in them at all.
And in my context, one of the things that we're trying to do, at least I'm trying to do here at COC is really build students' numerical intuition. So I want them to be able to solve for a force. And I want them to look at the number that they solved for and say, oh, this force seems wrong because it should be way bigger than this or way smaller than this. Or I want them to build that numerical literacy, especially because we're dealing with a lot of things that-- we're dealing with newtons that they potentially haven't used that much in their lives. We're dealing with moments, which are expressed in newton meters, or newton centimeters, or pound feet. So they've potentially never seen those units before. And so they don't have an intuition about them.
SHIRA SEGAL: Right. What I learned from Tricia is that it takes a lot of work to adapt any one open educational resource or piece of material. So how do you take a complex diagram and translate it into the needs of her teaching and her priorities?
So it's not enough just to have this incredible, rich graph and diagram that presents a problem for students to solve. If it didn't actually help them develop numerical intuition. Do these numbers even make sense? This was a skill that she wanted them to develop through providing real examples, and then creating an alt text of describing that diagram in a really thorough way, so that someone could actually get the point of this complex graph without actually having seen it.
SARAH HANSEN: Yeah, one thing that stood out for me was a lesson that John taught us. He teaches finance and investments also at College of the Canyons. And he really looked to OpenCourseWare as an opportunity to bring in multiple instructional perspectives and voices.
JOHN FRANCIS: As a professor, I have my own opinion and what I personally would do. And my students, I try to give them all the tools to develop theirs. A lot of people have different views and sometimes contrary views on how to invest or what different procedures. And I think it's always helpful to hear different types. I would say a lot of my students are very probably newer to investments.
But I do have students who are day traders, but using OER to get those different ideas and different ideals and just to be more representative of different types of people, and different backgrounds, and different races, and genders, and lifestyles, I think, is really important. So if they had one more voice in that, or one more perspective, or one more record of success that they can follow, I think they can only benefit from that as they start investing after the course.
SHIRA SEGAL: On those lines, Fernando at Chandler-Gilbert Community College in Arizona also spoke about this, where he was looking at open educational material as what he called high impact practices.
SARAH HANSEN: Right, I remember this.
SHIRA SEGAL: Because for him, he felt like it could really increase his autonomy as an instructor.
FERNANDO ROMERO: It's also efficient in the sense that I, as a faculty member, have more autonomy on the materials, in the sense that I can tailor them to meet the needs of my students. And I can update them. I can apply them exactly how I want in the order that I want. And so it just it gives me more freedom.
SARAH HANSEN: Yes, the ability to adapt curriculum to meet your students' needs, to make choices outside of a commercial textbook. That was a very powerful interview with him.
SHIRA SEGAL: And he felt like it was more efficient, actually, to have access to all that, and then to get to make those decisions. So for me, I feel like the flow of information, it's not one direction. It's a community of educators in a field all together deciding what is important, and then having many voices to select from that to highlight in their teaching.
SARAH HANSEN: But you're pointing to something really interesting. And that's this contradiction. Yes, Open allows for incredible professional autonomy, and imagination, and meeting students' needs on the one side. And then on the other side, it takes an incredible amount of time and work. And it's not efficient all the time. So we have to hold those two in tension.
And I think the faculty at both institutions, when we came together for an in-person event, actually pointed to a potential solution there, because one thing they said is that working in Open is not a solitary practice. It actually goes better when there's a team of people committed to creating and continually updating the open educational resources. In fact, one faculty member at that in-person event said that he is unlikely to take on an open project as an individual, that it really takes a community to sustain open educational practices and the materials themselves.
SHIRA SEGAL: And that actually really points us to what our work can be in the field of open education at large. What is our role at MIT OpenCourseWare? What's our role when we do collaborations? How can we-- for me, it really pointed to the need of creating spaces where people can come together and be part of a community where they can get feedback, get ideas, talk about what they're doing. What does it mean to make things in a community of practice? And what would that look like? And how can we support that?
It really points to the iterative nature of teaching in general. You're never one and done anyway. When I was teaching, how many times did I teach that one intro course? But every semester, I would embellish, or change, or swap something out, or try to adapt it to the current moment that we were in, or the current students that I had.
So I feel like, for some of the faculty that we were working with, they were coming in very advanced in the development of their curriculum. For example, we had a couple of history professors who were teaching US survey courses. We had this critical thinking and critical reading at the college level. We had communications, and positive psychology, and investing in finance.
And there was a course on logic, and reasoning, and philosophy. So it was really exciting for me to get to work with community college faculty across a wide range of topics and to see how things work or maybe don't work so well. Even when we had an abundance of material, it did not mean that they were necessarily going to find the thing that they were looking for for content. And this was actually a big learning.
One of our favorite examples, actually, is from Bobby, who teaches at Rio Salado College in Arizona. And he is a historian. He's a history professor. He's doing these US survey courses. And we had so much material that we thought could easily map or telegraph into his curriculum. And we kind of stumbled a little bit because-- and it took him by surprise, too. He thought, oh, for sure, I'm going to be able to find something.
SARAH HANSEN: So Bobby's journey was interesting because, although he did find materials for his course, there was a big shift in that he began to look beyond the primary sources, beyond the discussion questions, beyond the PDFs of OER, if you will. And he began to look at pedagogy more holistically, as it was shared on MIT OpenCourseWare and other related MIT websites.
ROBERT BERGMAN: Well, I initially started wanting to implement OpenCourseWare OER into my early American history class, which is History 103. And I got to a point where I was stuck. I was stuck in my head that I needed to utilize some type of course content, whether that was actually content material or assessments from MIT. So backing off of that, with Shira's help, I took more of a holistic approach in terms of looking at what I could utilize.
And I've always been very student-centered, very pro-student. And it hit me, well, why don't I expand on that? And I had looked into-- it wasn't even a history course. I don't even remember what it was. It was one of those 2:00 AM searches. And I came across some of the material from your writing center, your First Year Success. And I looked at all of this, and I'm like, we have all of this. But it's not in one specific area.
And specifically in my classes, it isn't in the actual lesson itself. So for a student to have to click more and more and more, they're probably less apt to go ahead and do that. So when I found all of this, the next time I met with Shira, I said, I don't think that this is going to be OK. What do you think? And she's like, well, of course it'll work. So instead of focusing on content in those assessments, we ended up focusing more on student success.
SHIRA SEGAL: Even though it seemed at first that we would find a lot of things, and then we struggled to find things, we ended up finding an abundance of other types of things, which also ties into this nature of iteration, that teaching is. What you think is important on day 1 isn't necessarily going to be the thing that you think is important on the last day. It speaks to the importance of process over product and what does it mean to prioritize people, and relationships, and have shifting goals, and being adaptable as opposed to a deliverable.
SARAH HANSEN: Yeah.
SHIRA SEGAL: So for us in collaborations, when we get to work with incredible thought leaders and implementers of open education, like Lisa Young at Maricopa County Community College District, or James Glapa-Grossklag at College of the Canyons, these are people that understand what it means to prioritize people and processes. And they're achieving enormous things through structural support for their faculty. But all that is with this understanding that what is the most important thing at the end of the day are the conversations that we're having and the relationships that we're building, because that actually is at the heart of what it means to teach.
SARAH HANSEN: Yeah, and it's also more sustainable because our environments can change, our circumstances can change, but the people remain and the relationships remain. And how do we support students through those networks when our circumstances are changing? I think that was a key learning in this whole process, is that we cannot do anything alone. We require a community of people working together.
SHIRA SEGAL: And we only worked together for a year. But we are still trying to maintain that community and touching in with those faculty to see how they're using Open in their work. For some instructors, it, on the surface, might not have looked like it produced a lot. But every little piece of Open is actually a really big deal because it takes time, and effort, and thought, and time.
SARAH HANSEN: And more time.
SHIRA SEGAL: Right. So for example, I was pleased with one of our community college faculty who decided to create his own open educational assignments. And he published them on Canvas Commons and figured out which CC, which Creative Commons, license he wanted to use so that other faculty, not just in his Institute, but across Canvas entirely, any institute that uses that learning management platform, can have access to an assignment he created for his class.
So the ways, I think warming, people up to what Open is-- one of the things that really helped us was the team at College of the Canyons, Joy Shoemate and her team developed a course on orienting people towards what Open even is and what open educational resources are-- how to use them, how to think about them.
And it also had connections to open pedagogy, like non-disposable assignments, assignments that you can use iteratively across multiple semesters or ways to have students become more or less peer mentors to one another across semesters over time. So this open OER Canvas course that Joy and her team developed was instrumental for setting the foundation for community college faculty to dive in, to look at MIT OpenCourseWare and beyond, and to create their own open educational materials as well.
SARAH HANSEN: So, Shira, what's next? I feel like our thinking has just exploded around what is possible and future directions. So what are you thinking? Where are we going to go next?
SHIRA SEGAL: Oh my God, there's so much we want to do. We want to keep working with and learning from community colleges, in particular. The work that they're doing, those thought leaders and implementers of Open to teach us a lot about what that actually looks like. And that can really shape and influence the way that we go about our own open publications. So definitely continuing, in some way, shape, or form with community colleges. They're such a source of inspiration for us and learning. We want to support faculty and those who support faculty, especially librarians.
SARAH HANSEN: Yes.
SHIRA SEGAL: We want to learn more about our mirror site affiliates who make MIT OpenCourseWare available to their communities in areas of low internet connectivity. This happens through physical hard drives that we send them and that they set up. And there are currently over 400 MIT OpenCourseWare hard drives already in use. So one thing we want to do is learn more about their stories and the needs of their communities.
This is connected a little bit to too the Open Learners podcast. We want to learn about how people are using open educational materials, the role it plays in their life or in their moments of transition in their life. How does Open help people transform their lives, or what they think is possible, or what they can do?
There's so many open learners around the world that are using Open to change their lives for the better, to help their communities, to solve really pressing, dire problems that they're facing in their communities or on a localized context. So this is something that I think we just want to learn more about in hearing those stories so that we know not just the impact of what we do, but what is missing from our archive of publications. What do we need to publish on next? And how can we get MIT faculty to join us in those endeavors?
SARAH HANSEN: Yeah. And for me, it points to the fact that I really don't think Open powers people. I think people power Open. And so I think our mission should be to support people who are going to do powerful things with Open. And I think you're just the perfect person to support people.
SHIRA SEGAL: Oh.
SARAH HANSEN: You're such a natural connector and supporter and listener that I'm just really excited for the world to get to know you even better. And for those of you out there who get a chance to work with Shira on open education, you're really lucky. So thank you for sitting down with me today. It was great to carve out time in our day to really talk about this project that was so meaningful to both of us.
SHIRA SEGAL: Thank you so much. I do have to say, the reason I'm able to do my job is because I am supported by you and by our team. I feel like, on an everyday level, there is an immense amount of care that we put into our work. It's one reason I love working at MIT OpenCourseWare. There's no one on the team that is flippant about what we're doing or why we're doing it. And it's invigorating and exciting to get to be part of this project.
SARAH HANSEN: Yeah, and I want to share that with everyone. I want everyone to feel that.
SHIRA SEGAL: Yeah.
SARAH HANSEN: And if we could bring some of that energy to already wonderful projects and people, people doing the projects out there-- see, it's hard to shift. It's hard to shift because everyone's so focused on deliverables and product that you have to make an intentional shift to focus on people first. And then good things will grow from that.
SHIRA SEGAL: Definitely.
SARAH HANSEN: Yeah, so I look forward to working with all the people out there doing powerful things with Open.
SHIRA SEGAL: Nice.
SARAH HANSEN: That was Dr. Shira Segal. You can follow her work by subscribing to the MIT OpenCourseWare newsletter. We'll put that link in the show notes below. You can help others find this podcast by subscribing and leaving us a rating and review. Thank you so much for listening.
Until next time, signing off from Cambridge, Massachusetts, I'm your host, Sarah Hansen from MIT OpenCourseWare. MIT Chalk Radio's producers include myself, Brett Paci, and Dave Lishansky. The show notes for this episode were written by Peter Chipman. Jason Player created our cassette tape animation on YouTube. We're funded by MIT Open Learning and supporters like you.