Open Education 2015

Imagine your university was going to close for a week in the 1st month of the semester because the UCI Road World Championships was overtaking your city. Residential students could stay in their residence halls, but classrooms were to be closed and traveling to campus would be extremely difficult for non-residential students. Next, imagine you are charged with considering how you might turn that situation into one or more learning experience. The open Web to the rescue, #amiright?

The Great VCU Bike Race Book (#vcubrb) was borne of this opportunity. The Great #vcubrb is a unique Connected Learning experience at Virginia Commonwealth University that will take place during the Fall 2015 semester. There are three purposes for the #vcubrb. 1) To provide a purposeful, enjoyable learning experience during the Bike Race week, especially for residential students who would otherwise not have any academic work to occupy them. 2) To give students an opportunity to participate in an innovative online course that aligns with the VCU Quality Enhancement Plan's goals of integrative learning by means of digital fluency. 3) To provide a unique faculty development experience that will advance VCU faculty's involvement in distinctive online learning.

In Spring, 2015, faculty members from across the university proposed "tracks" that focus on areas of inquiry that are organized around disciplinary or cross-disciplinary themes. Ultimately, 25 faculty members proposed tracks involving topics ranging from archaeology to kinesiology. Each track is a 1-credit section of a course that students can register for at a massively reduced rate. Given the nature of the course, each track could accommodate many students, perhaps as many as 100 or more per track depending on the activities and design.

During the week of the race, students will produce various kinds of work related to the bike race, e.g., blogs, tweets, photographs, audio, video (YouTube, Vine, Instagram, etc.). Also during the race, these products, categorized by tracks and identified by tags, will be aggregated in more-or-less real time onto a learning engagement "dashboard" page created and maintained by VCU's ALT Lab. In short, during the race week, VCU students will be creators, researchers, and "citizen journalists," making the academic vitality, creativity, and diversity of our students visible to the world in an exciting, innovative way.

In the weeks following the race, faculty and their student teams will work with ALT Lab to curate the best works into a "Great VCU Bike Race Book" that would live on the open Web. "Book," then, is a metaphor suggesting a collection that is organized and curated. The aggregated materials during the bike race week will be an initial instance of the "book." Materials selected as the "best of the race" will make up the next instance of the "book."

At this session, you'll hear retrospective reflections from the key members of the Great VCU Bike Race Book team. Gear up!