Last Winter I participated in a fellowship related to Open Education, Open Pedagogy, and Open Education resources. The fellowship was eye opening as it expanding my views around how to utilize open source practices in a classroom setting and tie it to student-led educational practices. As part of the fellowship, I have been workshopping various ideas about bringing student-led projects into my classes.

As the UX program at Kingsborough is new, there is a dearth of resources available for student learning. One project that I am eager to develop therefore is an open educational tool that will help students give back and teach future students. I noticed that during the course of the semester in the Spring in Art 26, I was frequently referencing past student projects from our inaugural Fall semester. By reviewing past projects, students can get a sense of what shaping up a capstone project can look like.

I decided this spring to set up an explicit plan to allow the students to volunteer their work to be used in a student showcase on this very website. In order to plan for this, I needed the students permission to display work publicly. During the semester, I gave a lesson on the creative commons and we had a couple of class discussions around copyright and creative commons.

Here is a link to the presentation on the discussion.

I also showed this helpful explainer video:

Students have assigned licenses to their designs and I will spend the time prepping for the Fall semester gathering up the student work into a similar format to what I did for the Spring KAM gallery show.

As we go through future iterations of this course, we can collect the projects from each semester which should become the learning tools for future students. It’s a great way for students to participate in and contribute to the learning process of future students.