Hey everyone! Starting a new thing here where I’m blogging instead of sending long emails that only one person reads. Hopefully more people find this useful.

One of the goals of Payment for Placements organizers is removing the cost of field education software. While many schools use some combination of spreadsheets, forms, poorly-formatted Microsoft Word documents and yes, paper…many schools rely on third-party software tools like Tevera. That’s the one that my school uses, and it’s the one that Payments for Placements at University of Georgia highlighted in their campaign. So, that’s the one I’ll analyze here. I imagine that most field education tracking software companies will be similar to Tevera, though a more rigorous study is required.

The reason I ask is that the issue of student data privacy comes up a lot in open education when textbook platforms try to get faculty to mandate 3rd party homework//learning platforms that are not approved by university IT… and so the companies who run 3rd party platforms can and do monetize student data. See Billy Meinke’s article which inspired mine.

This is an end-around of university IT departments’ controls on student data privacy, and it is one way that dominant education companies like textbook publishers and other vendors are pivoting to a digital-first business model. I wasn’t sure whether there were similar issues in these platforms, but I wanted to take a look. While field educators have well-established protocols they follow when choosing software vendors, sometimes those vendors can find ways to shortcut necessary review.

Tevera’s privacy policy seems anodyne, and it describes very clearly the limitations on data sharing. I’m curious about whether storing user data on AWS is FERPA-compliant, but I’m sure lots of ed tech companies do that. None of their privacy documents explicitly mention FERPA. Below is an excerpt from Tevera’s Terms of Service. Would you be comfortable if the software you used to create schoolwork required you to…

You hereby grant to Tevera and its affiliates, contractors, and suppliers a nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, world-wide, royalty-free, assignable and sublicensable (through multiple tiers), license to reproduce, copy, use, host, store, sublicense, reproduce, create derivative works from, modify, publish, edit, translate, distribute, perform and display, including digitally or electronically, your submitted User Content and your name, voice and likeness (to the extent they are part of the User Content), (i) in connection with the Services, as specified under Third Party Licenses and/or for the interoperation of any third party products, (ii) if required by applicable law, where necessary to enforce these Terms of Use and/or to protect any of Tevera’s or other parties’ legal rights, (iii) in an aggregated form which does not include your identifying information, and (iv) as permitted by Tevera’s Privacy Notice.

Section 8 of Tevera’s Terms of Service

Billy’s post helpfully points to the United States Department of Education report Protecting Student Privacy While Using Online Educational Services: Model Terms of Service

	GOOD! This is a Best Practice	WARNING! Provisions That Cannot or Should Not Be Included in TOS
10 Rights and License in and to Data Maintaining ownership of data to which the provider may have access allows schools/districts to retain control over the use and maintenance of FERPA￾protected student information. The “GOOD!” provision will also protect against a provider selling information.	“Parties agree that all rights, including all intellectual property rights, shall remain the exclusive property of the [School/District], and Provider has a limited, nonexclusive license solely for the purpose of performing its obligations as outlined in the Agreement. This Agreement does not give Provider any rights, implied or otherwise, to Data, content, or intellectual property, except as expressly stated in the Agreement. This includes the right to sell or trade Data.”	“Providing Data or user content grants Provider an irrevocable right to license, distribute, transmit, or publicly display Data or user content.”

From my reading, it appears Tevera’s language is nearly identical to the all-caps warning from the DoE. Moving down to the next section in Tevera’s Terms of Service, it also appears that students themselves are responsible for determining whether Tevera meets their needs.

Without limiting the foregoing, you understand the risks associated with the access to and use of the Services and any User Content and other data, content and materials made available through the Services, and acknowledge that you are using the Services and such other data, content, and materials at your own risk and that you are personally responsible for verifying their suitability for your needs through your own investigation.

Section 9 of Tevera’s Terms of Service

While this clause by Tevera is entirely understandable from a legal perspective, universities know school employees are actually selecting software that students must purchase. This is one reason students are not permitted to choose their field software. The other is that software companies do not design their platforms to be interoperable because it is incompatible with their business model for students to move their field education data to a better provider if one comes along.

Students are not free to decline Tevera’s terms of service and continue in their social work program. Yet, they must agree that they are entirely in charge of consenting to the terms of service and are therefore providing voluntary consent. Seems fishy…ethically…for the university to manufacture that truth.

Essentially, students are forced to purchase software that requires them to give the software company unlimited rights to use, analyze, republish, and basically have carte blanche with the educational records students enter into the platform–in perpetuity. And students are forced to say this deal was entirely their choosing, and that they entered into the agreement voluntarily.

Cool. Cool.

This panel presentation is a re-recording of our presentation live at the Council on Social Work Education’s Annual Program Meeting in November of 2021. Panelists include Matt DeCarlo, Whitney Payne, Rebecca Mauldin, and Susan Tyler.

Slideshow: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1fCxPkBGHQvPBMCUXB2jGv0xMgPGilK2twSQd0cDSJsk/edit?usp=sharing

Abstract

Open textbooks are free, editable, and shareable alternatives to commercial textbooks. Our four panelists will detail their experiences creating and publishing open textbooks for social work, implementing them in their courses, and assessing their impact on student learning and teaching practices.

Background/Rationale

Open textbooks are unique. They are free to access, and they enable anyone to read, edit, and share educational content across the internet. Informed by faculty passion for their subject area as well as concern for social equity, open textbooks represent unique contributions to the community of social work education.

Open textbooks are, in part, a response to the broken textbook market. The price of textbooks has skyrocketed over 800% percent over the past forty years, outpacing the inflation of tuition, housing, and healthcare (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2016; Kight, 2018). It is unsurprising that after tuition, course materials are the greatest source of stress for students (National Association of College Stores, 2019). A study of Virginia social work students found that because of high textbook costs, over half of students delayed purchasing textbooks, sought out additional work, or took on more student loans (DeCarlo & Vandergrift, 2019). A quarter of students in the multi-site sample engaged in piracy, skipped meals, and did not visit family over academic breaks because of textbook costs. The inequitable impacts of textbook costs such as earning lower grades, dropping and withdrawing from classes, and leaving school affect historically underserved groups like non-White, Pell-eligible, and part-time students the most (Colvard et al., 2017).

Adopting and creating open textbooks is a way for social work faculty to provide access to all of the materials needed for student success on the first day of class, regardless of ability to pay. Moreover, the open licenses attached to these books are a persistent invitation for collaboration across academia. This panel presentation will discuss the open textbook projects of four authors, how they built from existing materials, and what impacts it had on their classroom and educational practice. In particular, the presentation will focus on the spirit of OER–meeting students where they are by making the textbook more affordable and engaging to read. Insights from this presentation should be useful to any faculty member seeking to make their course more accessible and authentic.

Objectives

This panel will define open educational resources (OER), describe their use in social work education, and review OER outcomes in a variety of settings. It will present the experiences of four social work faculty who created and adopted OER, with an emphasis on practical guidance for others wishing to develop or use OER in their classroom. Panelists will discuss the importance of institutional support for OER, challenges incorporating open textbooks into tenure and promotion guidelines as well as ensuring they would teach the course again in the future, and lessons learned. We will also discuss student experiences and evaluations of the OER, which include academic and personal benefits. For example, students found the open textbooks to be “more human” and “like a real person wrote them”(DeCarlo et al., 2019a) and reported using them more than commercial textbooks in other courses (DeCarlo et al., 2020). Students also reported that open textbooks alleviated the stress and workload associated with mitigating textbook costs and appreciated faculty eliminating this barrier to academic success.

Implications

Open textbooks are an immense time commitment, but represent a revolutionary new approach to course preparation. Not only do open textbook authors produce free materials customized to their course objectives, they publish and invite other scholars to use and build on their scholarship as a community of practice. These contributions would benefit from greater assistance and credibility from national and state social work organizations.

Video recording

Finding open opportunities in a closed curriculum: Strategies for junior and contingent faculty was a presentation delivered at the OpenEd21 conference by Matt DeCarlo on 10/21/21.

Slideshow: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Vl58Qx5qKhjmBBeFVKVjHPY8ieb0XiotbNJx_5OYZl0/edit?usp=sharing

Abstract

Because universities predominantly employ contingent faculty—adjunct, part-time, or student teachers—it is important for the open education community to explore how to experiment with open pedagogy when the instructor’s power to change the syllabus, readings, and assignments is limited or nonexistent. By norm and policy, the power to determine instructional content largely rests with tenured faculty members who require contingent and junior faculty members to teach to a predetermined syllabus. This open space is dedicated to sharing the insights of teachers who find ways to integrate open pedagogy in disempowering environments. 

I would prefer to host this open space on a forum that allows for multiple methods of storytelling (video, audio, text) as well as commenting. I prefer to use Google Slides, but I would be happy to redesign it for Discord, Padlet, Flipgrid, or other platforms based on suggestions from reviewers or conference organizers. 

I will submit two examples to the platform. The first example uses Wiley and Hilton’s OER-enabled pedagogy framework to redesign a quiz into a collaborative book of case studies. Quizzes are one example of assignments for which contingent instructors likely have some flexibility—deciding topics, format, and platform—and this example will review how to find open opportunities in a closed syllabus. 

For assignments on a syllabus with detailed prompts and rubrics that standardize implementation, faculty may consider completing assignments themselves in collaboration with students. Faculty projects are unconstrained by the syllabus and can be redesigned to use open pedagogy. The second open pedagogy example applies Bali, Cronin, and Jhangiani’s open educational practices framework to a faculty-student advocacy project fighting unpaid student labor in human service agencies. 

The closed curriculum is a persistent message that the ideas of junior and contingent faculty (as well as students!) are not valuable and not welcome. By celebrating stories of clandestine experimentation, this space will help teachers recognize hidden opportunities and freedoms within prefabricated courses to introduce open pedagogy. Of course, open pedagogy is not a panacea. It is simply one way for faculty to engage students within an often moribund and exclusionary curriculum through experimentation, self-determination, and collaboration. 

Video recording

Here’s our presentation for CSWE APM 2020:

Social work knowledge is ruthlessly privatized. The overwhelming majority of educational resources created by faculty and disseminated to students reuses content that is commercially copyrighted. That is, the content is behind a paywall and the copyright holder does not allow for people to reuse the content in transformative ways. For example, slideshows or activities that instructors adapt from commercial journal articles or textbooks cannot be publicly archived or published. These derivative resources must remain with the professor—at most, shared informally with colleagues—because commercial “copyright prohibits unauthorized copying or modification of particular instances of expression” (Nelson et al., 2014, p. 2). In this way, commercial copyright alienates educators from the product of their labor and atomizes them by limiting the emergence of a community based on sharing derivative and adapted resources.

The price, use, and reuse of educational content is controlled by a small oligopoly of academic publishers of textbooks and academic journals. It is a very profitable business, borne out of the broken markets for journals and textbooks. Student and faculty movements to lower textbook costs discuss their deleterious impact on food insecurity, housing, student debt, and employment (DeCarlo & Vandergrift, 2019; Senack & Donoghue, 2016). Although textbook prices have increased nearly 200% since 1998 (Kight, 2018), student spending on textbook has declined (National Association of College Stores, 2019). As student cost-cutting measures drive prices lower, publishers have attempted to lock down content by integrating rental platforms—which eliminate the used textbook market—and wraparound courseware using access codes and automatically billing from student accounts (i.e., inclusive access) (Senack et al., 2016). Similarly, while library budgets are strained, resulting in drastic cutbacks to journals, publishers sustain record profits from “big deal” agreements with ever-increasing fees (Shu et al., 2018).

The shift in textbook and journal publication from print-first to digital-first highlights the structuring impact of the platforms used to disseminate knowledge. If faculty create content using the tools in a proprietary learning management system (LMS), they will not be able to share those resources with colleagues at another university or transfer them to another LMS should they change jobs. Indeed, many universities claim ownership of faculty products under intellectual property policies (Nelson et al., 2017). Universities who contract with private companies to create resources or manage online programs may agree to intellectual property licenses that deny faculty ownership and prohibit redistribution (Hall & Dudley, 2019). 

In the emerging privatized knowledge ecosystem, access, ownership, and equity are under threat (Bali & Caines, 2018). Faculty are digital sharecroppers, tending the intellectual gardens of publishers who can aggregate and enclose their work for profit (Carr, 2006). This workshop will review open educational practices (OEP) and situate them as a commons-based alternative to privatized and commercialized scholarly publication. Guided by the facilitator, participants will explore how to use open platforms and apply open pedagogy to their everyday work—creating educational resources for their classes and disseminating research products. The workshop will conclude with a discussion how OEP can support networked learning and communities of practice (Hendricks, 2017).

Open educational practices can be defined as (a) the use of open educational resources (OER) and co-creation of curricular materials with students and (b) “the open sharing of teaching practices with a goal of improving education and training at the institutional, professional, and individual level” (BCCampus, n.d., para. 1). Cronin (2017) elaborates that OEP involves the “open sharing of teaching practices… as well as pedagogical practices employing participatory technologies and social networks for interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation, and empowerment of learners” (p. 16-18). In this view, sharing one’s faculty products openly contributes those resources to a common pool of faculty development resources from which best practices, stewardship, and critique emerge. Faculty engaging in OEP offer a persistent invitation to the community to build from their resources and expand social work scholarship—improving it, decolonizing it, interrogating it, and localizing it—while ensuring free access to anyone with an internet connection.

References:

Bali, M., & Caines, A. (2018). A call for promoting ownership, equity, and agency in faculty development via connected learning. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 15(1), 46.

BCCampus (n.d.). What is open pedagogy? https://open.bccampus.ca/what-is-open-education/what-is-open-pedagogy/

Carr, R. (2006). Digital sharecropping. http://www.roughtype.com/?p=634

Cronin, C. (2017). Openness and praxis: Exploring the use of open educational practices in higher education. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning: IRRODL, 18(5), 15-34. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v18i5.3096

DeCarlo, M. P., & Vandergrift, K. F. (2019, December 29). Textbook cost burden and social work students. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/5q239

Kight, S. W. (2018, September 1). College students are skipping meals to pay for textbooks.

Axios. https://www.axios.com/college-textbooks-expensive-overpriced-students-poll-469a89fc-f80f-4595-98cb-2a33170ba235.html

Hall, S. & Dudley, T. (2019, September 12). Dear colleges: Take control of your online courses. The Century Foundation. https://tcf.org/content/report/dear-colleges-take-control-online-courses/?agreed=1

Hendricks, C. (2017). Open pedagogy; open educational practices. http://blogs.ubc.ca/chendricks/2017/10/14/open-pedagogy-open-educational-practices/

National Association of College Stores (2019). Student watch: Attitudes and behaviors toward

course materials, 2018-2019. Oberlin, OH.

Nelson, C. R., Barnett, G., Gorman, R. A., Reichman, H., Zurbriggen, E., & Nisenson, A. M. (2014). Defending the freedom to innovate: Faculty intellectual property rights after Stanford v. Roche. Academe, 100(4), 38.

Senack, E. & Donoghue, R. (2016, February). Covering the cost: Why we can no longer afford

to ignore high textbook prices. Student Public Interest Research Groups. https://studentpirgs.org/assets/uploads/archive/sites/student/files/reports/National%20-%20COVERING%20THE%20COST.pdf

Senack, E., Donoghue, R., Grant, K. O., & Steen, K. (2016, September). Access denied: The new

face of the textbook monopoly. Student Public Interest Research Groups. https://studentpirgs.org/assets/uploads/archive/sites/student/files/reports/Access%20Denied%20-%20Final%20Report.pdf

Shu, F., Mongeon, P., Haustein, S., Siler, K., Alperin, J. P., & Larivière, V. (2018). Is it such a big deal? On the cost of journal use in the digital era. College & research libraries, 79(6), 785.