July Office Hours: Sprinting to Publication
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Audio Transcript
Speakers:
- Barbara Rühling
- Billy Meinke-Lau
- Anita R. Walz
- Karen Lauritsen
- Zoe Wake Hyde
- Rajiv Jhangiani
Zoe: Hi, everyone and welcome toJuly Office Hours. And welcome back, after we took a month off last month. Ihope you have all been having a good summer and all things considered, thatthings are going well for you. It's really, really great to see you all here,lots of familiar faces. It's wonderful to have you join us. We have a greattopic today. This is one I think we've been kicking around as an idea for awhile.
And it's come together with a prettyextraordinary panel with a heap of experience. So, we're going to be talkingabout sprints, as applied to OER and what's great is we're talking both abouttextbook sprints and also test bank sprints. I think I got that right. So,talking about the different ways that we can apply this sprint model to creatingcontent and moving the needle on that very quickly.
So, very excited to hear from all of our guests.Great to have you join us, and I will now hand over to my co-host, Karen, whois here now for the first time, I get to say, representing the Open EducationNetwork. And I believe she has a little bit to share about the work they'vebeen doing there before we get started. Thank you, Karen.
Karen: Thanks, Zoe. And thanks,everyone at the Rebus Community and team. Indeed, we are changing our name thissummer from Open Textbook Network to Open Education Network. It is a rollingprocess, so you will see it start popping up here and there and hopefully OpenEducation Network will just be saturating the entire environment before theFall begins. But you'll probably see both of our names popping around for awhile.
So, we're always happy to co-host Office Hourswith Rebus, these are monthly sessions. If it's your first time, this is aninformal conversation. Our three guests will share about five minutes of theirexperience with today's topic, textbook sprints. And then, we will turn thingsover to you, to drive the conversation with your questions, experiences andthoughts. So, speaking of driving the conversation, I'm just going to drop alink in the chat for future topics.
You are welcome to stick future topic ideas inthe chat, email us, or use this handy dandy form, whichever you prefer. But weare very interested in knowing what it is you would like to talk about. Andalso, feel free to nominate yourself or someone else to be a guest. We reallyappreciate crowdsourcing ideas and we want to have as many voices as possiblein these conversations. So, it's really helpful to receive suggestions fromyou.
So, without further ado, I am going to introduceour three guests and then turn things over to them. We are joined today byBilly Meinke-Lau, who is open educational resources technologist at theUniversity of Hawai’i at Mānoa. We are also joinedby Barbara Rühling, who is CEO of Book Sprints Limited.
And also, we are joined by AnitaWalz, Anita is associate professor, assistant director for open education andscholarly communication librarian at Virginia Tech. We are first going to hearfrom Billy, so I'm going to turn things over to you now, Billy.
Billy:All right, thanks, Karen. Aloha and good morning, everybody, my name is BillyMeinke-Lau. And I'm the OER technologist for the University of Hawai’i atMānoa. It's great to be here, this is a nice wonderful panel of folks that areall interested and working on sprint methodologies, now towards OER. So, at theUniversity of Hawai’i, we first began working on or looking at what sprintswould look like for our OER program about two years ago.
And then, last year, we actuallyworked with Book Sprints and with Barbara, who you'll hear from in a moment, toconduct two fairly extensive book sprints across three days apiece. And I willpost a link into the chat right now, so you can get a little more info aboutthe outputs of that sprint and the process, just so you have some background.Sprints are awesome, when I explain what sprints are to faculty, I usuallydescribe it as a hackathon like you would do for code, like software, but forcontent.
And obviously, not everythingtranslates over, but we do what we can to use these accelerated methods andthese really highly focused methods to pull out the best information, the bestcontent from our faculty and curate it and then package it into a book. Now,like I said, we've done a couple of different OER textbook sprints. One was anoriginal creation, so a book just over 100 pages, an English language writingmanual.
And then, the other textbooksprint was a remix of OpenStax microeconomics. And so, as you can imagine,writing a book from scratch, we had full choice over how we did that, what kindof content we were using. And with the microeconomics book, we already had awhole corpus of content to work with. So, there are very different approaches,but we fit each of them into a three-day period.
Flashing forward last Fall, we didtwo sprints for ancillary materials. So, not for a book, because in each ofthose courses we were working with, they already had a book, but they neededthe instructor support materials. So, in one case, we tackled a quiz bank formicroeconomics and localized it, replaced names, made it more relevant for ourstudents, and came up with I think around 1,100 questions which are availableto anybody that requests them.
Obviously, we want you to be aninstructor to be requesting them. And then, the other was for world history1500 to present. That project ended up being more of a design sprint, weweren't actually able to pull out tangible ancillary materials like you mightthink of. But we took a lot of notes, and we did a lot of listening to figurewhat we could do in our next sprint. And I guess just to wrap up, sprints areawesome, but they are very intensive.
And as you'll hear later it's alot of work poured into a very small amount of time. It's not a great fit foreverybody, you need to have faculty instructors and students or whoever youwant to be participating be very focused, be very committed to the outcome,committed to the process. Because there are points when it's like wow, my headis wrecked, I have writer's block. I can't do anything more.
And then, we just take a break, wereset, trust in the process and we go through. But I'm seeing OER sprints as analternative to a traditionally slower paced month by month or semester bysemester approach to OER content creation, which is nice. And that works,definitely, but we need something more just in time, where looking at OERsprint approaches, and so yeah, that's the gist of it.
And I'm looking forward to hearingfrom Anita and Barbara about their experiences and then taking some questions.
Karen:Thanks, Billy. Over to you, Barbara.
Barbara:Yeah, hello, everybody. Thank you for the invitation, it's great to talk toeverybody here. My name is Barbara Rühling, I'm the CEO of Book Sprints, whichis a tiny little company coming out of New Zealand. Our founder, Adam Hyde,came up with this idea for Book Sprints more than 10 years ago in the world ofopen source software. So, it was the same kind of approach of how can you get asoftware manual done very collaboratively and in a short amount of time?
And since then, it has expandedfrom open source software to any other topic and then also in the last years toopen textbooks, which is a field that we really love, and we think it's areally good fit. So, the services that we offer are mostly the facilitation ofbook sprints, which typically take three to five days. And then, also rapidbook production services. So, we facilitate a group of experts usually tosprint a book from scratch, like we did with the one book that Billy mentioned,
And now, we're also experimentingwith other content formats so for example, updating the OER textbook which wasthe second book that we did with Billy for economy. And we're also doing nowsometimes sprints for more interactive online courses, different types ofcontent containers. Yeah, we think the sprint format is a really good fit foropen textbooks because it goes with our spirit of openness that we love.
But also, because it makes a lotof sense to write these very collaboratively, covering a very big, broad fieldand bringing in different perspectives and we've done some textbooks that arefor example for completely new masters' programs that haven't existed beforeand that come together from very many disciplines. And there isn't really theone person who could write the textbook for it but bringing in people fromdifferent disciplines and then getting it done quickly seems to be a very goodfit.
Like Billy said, they are intense,they are not necessarily less work, they are just a lot of work in a shortamount of time. So, what we can do as facilitators is making sure that all ofthe barriers that we all know from group meetings, interpersonal dynamics,circular conversations, all of that, as facilitators we can get the most ofthat out of the way and make sure that everybody can be as constructive and as productiveas they can be.
And then, having a team in thebackground doing copyediting, illustrations, book design, all of thatsimultaneously going on during the same five days. So, the writers in the roomcan constantly check, is this actually what we want? Or do we want somethingelse? So, we take a lot of the load off the writers' shoulders, the experts canreally then focus on the content. We did the first OER textbook with BCcampus,a geography book that was written from scratch.
Then, with Billy we did two lastyear. We've been doing some textbooks in Germany, some unfortunately less open,some more open, some interactive online courses. And we actually had a lot ofsprints planned for this year. Now, with the travel restrictions, some arebeing postponed, some we now switch to remote facilitation, which is ourbiggest new adventure and it's definitely something we're very interested inand we hope to do more in this field.
Karen:Thank you, Barbara. All right, Anita, over to you.
Anita:Great, thank you. So, my name is Anita Walz, I'm the assistant director foropen education and scholarly communication librarian at Virginia Tech. And I'mtrained as a librarian, I'm not trained as a meeting manager, as a large eventmanager, or as an instructor who writes questions. So, I'm going to talk you alittle bit about the sprint that I led in 2019 for a test bank.
I view the sprints, having doneone, as both a hackathon and as a covert professional development opportunity.I'll talk more about that later. But in 2016, I worked with a faculty member tocreate an adaptation of an open textbook that has been really successful. Andas a result, we've had hundreds of thousands of downloads. And we get manyemails from people saying, "Are there slide decks? Can we customize? Isthere LMS integration?"
I'm reading from an actual email."Is there a quiz bank? Are there lecture notes? Are there recommended inclass activities?" And initially, I was really annoyed, I was like,"You have a textbook, it has an open license, it doesn't cost youanything. Please, build it yourself." And then, I started thinking well,you're well situated, I'm well situated, I could actually make a big impact ifI chose to move forward and to create something.
So, the big problem in my mind wasI have no idea how to do this. Could I do this? Is it possible? So, I knew thatRajiv Jhangiani, who's on this call, had done this before. And so, I reachedout and I said, "Can you tell me a little bit about your experience? Whatdid it cost? How did it work? How did you do this? How long did it take?"And he said, "Well, I can mentor you."
I about cried. So, thanks to Rajivfor really the model that we tweaked to implement the test bank. So, I’msharing some links in the chat, just for various things that I'm talking about.What I'm talking about today is based on a presentation that I gave lastsummer. And in this I talked a bit more about what the process looked like. So,some of the things that this work required were a lot of goal setting, a bit ofmoney.
We spent around $7,000 to bring inI'm thinking 12 or 13 people, it required support from my colleagues. There wasa lot of work in assessing who are we inviting? What are their areas ofexpertise? Where could they work? This is an 18-chapter book, what topics arethey most comfortable in? Where are they comfortable enough? So, there was alot of planning before the sprint.
During the sprint we had everyonebroken up into groups of three or four to both write and peer review questions.So, lots of little sprints inside a larger sprint, each for about an hour. Andpeople worked on their chapter to write questions that were factual or applied.They also levelled the questions, so there was a level of difficulty. And then,they switched after an hour or so.
So, there was some pre-readingthey did, there was a lot of framing, why are we doing this? What's the valueof this? And bringing in outside speakers to talk, Rajiv came in for a fewminutes and was actually on call the whole time. And a few other people came inas guest speakers. The professor who had adapted the book came in and talkedabout why he adapted the book and his rationale behind that.
So, it was really fun, when I lookat 2019 even looking at the whole year, I said, "This is the most funthing that I did all year." It was motivational, it was intense, it wasexhausting, but mine was a day and a half, not five days, maybe that makes adifference. But it was a lot of fun, and I am really interested in this modelfor development and covert professional development.
I had adjuncts tell me, "Inever get invited to anything, thank you for inviting me." We gave everyonea small stipend, we put them up in a nice hotel, we fed them, we had a nicedinner together one of the nights. And I think it was a really wonderful way tosay, "Your work is valuable, thank you. And here, meet some of yourpeers." So, people really loved the opportunity to talk to theircounterparts at other institutions, whether they be two or four year, or they'dbe in a different state.
One person even came in on an iPadthe whole time because he has little kids at home. So, it was a really wonderfulopportunity to involve a really diverse group of people, institutionallydiverse, diverse in lots of other ways. As a result, we have had I'm nottalking about the post sprint, maybe I should. But several of you on this callwere involved in giving me feedback on building a system, so that we would notaccidentally give the test bank to students outside of an exam.
And several of you also looked atthe questions and did some copyediting and told me where all of the missingwords were and that sort of thing. So, there was quite a lot of work thathappened afterwards, that I honestly did not anticipate. But we have 37 schoolsat least using the test bank, that reflects over 5,000 students per semester.
And the feedback that I receivedfrom the team who was involved in doing the sprint, which included both facultyand some librarians from other Virginia institutions in an effort to give themthe opportunity to be exposed to the method and learn and also have theopportunity to see if this is something that they wanted to do. Those folks Ithink were really interested in this, but the feedback was really good, peoplesaid, "I want to do the half day first."
Or, "The first day. The wholeday first, and then a half day." So, a small group of us got together fora second sprint to start developing an instructor guide. And we spent most ofour time figuring out what's going to be in this thing. And then, startedbuilding it, we did not finish, I'm not quite sure how that's going tomaterialize at this point. But people are really interested in working togetherand then continuing.
So, we'll see what kind ofcreative solutions we can come up with in this time of remote everything, Ithink there are possibilities it becomes different. But I think there are goodpossibilities, so I look forward to hearing your questions. Perhaps there aresome in the chat already.
Karen:Thanks, Anita. And thanks to our three official guests for sharing theirexperience. I'd now like to invite Rajiv, since we've heard about his role withAnita's sprint to share some more information about his experience.
Rajiv:Sure, thank you. It's nice to see everybody and hear about these stories. So,I'm not going to re-tread much ground. I think in our experience at KPU, we'vefacilitated sprints in a couple of different areas with faculty, but of coursealso done a similar thing with students. So, maybe just to augment what Anitajust covered as well. I'd say a few things that are maybe not entirely obviouswhen you're planning sprints like this with faculty for OER are the nuggetsthat I'll share.
I think Anita touched on thepreparation, I think there is of course a huge difference between havingcontent expertise in a particular area, and knowing how to write effective testitems. Huge difference, right? So, there's training and preparation that'srequired in general for faculty to learn how to write effective let's saymultiple-choice questions, if that's what you're trying to do.
So, there's a lot of prep ahead.But during the sprint itself, I'd say if I had to give anybody advice, I wouldsay making it fun and Anita touched on this. It's one of the most importantthings. We did our sprints in a similar way as well, it was really a socialaspect that brought a lot of people together, almost a retreat style event. Butaside from the fun activities and the team building, I think very deliberatelymaking sure that bringing in sometimes people from outside to make sure thatthe sprinters understand the impact and the value of their work.
And I'm saying this becauseusually I think in my experience, the people who are willing to participate inthese bite-sized contributions, they're not committing to a year-long writingproject. It's a few days. They are not necessarily deeply invested in OER.They're not necessarily open textbook authors, for example. So, they don'tnecessarily even understand what OER is all about.
So, for them to get a glimpse ofhold on, this is not just something that our students are going to use at ourinstitution, but I'm hearing from people in Ontario, in Virginia, in Hawai'iabout how this work is going to impact them. Faculty who are thanking them,testifying that yes, once you have this, we will adopt it, we will adopt thebook. I think giving people a sense of the big picture and the purpose wasvery, very encouraging.
So, those are some of my I thinktop tips. And then, I think the last two things I'll mention quickly ispragmatically, I think we saw this back in 2014 when we did a sprint inpsychology for a test bank that I think Anita put the link for above. Whenfolks, especially those folks again, who don't necessarily know a lot about OERcontribute, so their own labor, their own sweat is in it.
We found that of the 20 or sofaculty who participated in that sprint, 16, 17 of them ended up adopting thebook in the year following the sprint. These were not people who were doing OERbefore. But it's very interesting to see how the perception of quality and ofcourse when you have your skin in the game yourself, how that translatespragmatically into an adoption pathway.
So, small participation, whetherit's peer reviewing open textbooks or in this case sprinting was veryeffective. And then, the last thing I'll mention, I think Anita touched on thisas well is unfortunately, this project had to necessarily be put on hold for alittle while because of everything else in the world going on fire. But I'mhoping to pick this up now. We are more than midway through the development ofa guide to planning and facilitating sprints for developing open ancillaryresources.
And that's specifically where Ihave a lot more experience than textbooks. And that profiles a bunch of casestudies as well. So, I know Anita's contributed to that, folks from BCcampus aswell. And that of course will be published with a CC BY in Pressbooks. So,you'll hear more about that in the months to come.
Karen:Thank you, Rajiv. And thanks again to our guests. This is the time when we turnit over to all of you for your questions and comments and thoughts andscenarios. There's already been some activity in the chat. So, I’m going tokick us off with the first question. Both Billy and Anita, you talked aboutquiz banks and alluded to or mentioned the reality that you need to limitaccess to quiz banks to instructors. Can you talk a little bit more about howyou do that and what kind of overhead is involved?
Billy:Sure, so the quiz bank that we developed for OpenStax microeconomics, ourremixed version of it, we've only had a few requests, and they've been internalfrom our own institution. And so, in terms of overhead, it's been quite low.But I think Anita can speak more to this. We've looked at different ways tomoderate the flow or the release of these quiz banks. I know if you need todownload any kind of instructor-focused materials from OpenStax you know, asidethe book, you have to submit a request.
And they verify that you're aninstructor, you have a .edu email address, that kind of thing. We've looked atthat sort of thing, we've also looked at our institutional repository andfiguring out how to moderate. Can we have password-based options that aren'tavailable to everybody? Or how do to that. So, fortunately for our books,they're available to everybody, we haven't needed to moderate that.
But for the more sensitive itemsas ancillaries, we haven't had too many requests and so we haven't had to dealwith that. But I'm sure Anita can speak to that a little bit more.
Anita:Sure. So, we wanted to make the test bank available to instructors and facultywho would hold on to it for students to use in exams. We know at some point itwill be compromised and that it will just be out there, because somebody willlet go of it. But for now, as long as we can, we're trying to restrict accessjust to instructors. So, we have a verification process where requestors arerequired to indicate which files they want from our D space repository.
Fill out a Google form and send mea copy of their syllabus (laughs). So, we're not trying to make it annoying,but I really do want to make sure that I’m not sending a test bank out tostudents. Because for many test banks they're already out there, whether or notfaculty or students know. But if instructors are under the impression that theyare not, or they're not checking, or we haven't told them, "By the way, thishas been compromised, please tweak your questions and randomize thembetter."
It's just really an integrityissue. It does take a little bit of time to build that method. You can see thelink that I put in at what time? This last one, I'll put this in again. This isthe link to the actual interface where you would read about the test bank. Youwould see the four steps for requesting access. So, what happens is I get anemail requesting files, then I get a syllabus then I get a notification thatsomebody completed the Google form.
Yeah, it's a lot, the systemsaren't integrated, but it sort of works, it's the best that we can do rightnow. (Laughs)
Karen:Thank you, both. Barbara, you've been talking in the chat about moving thesprint process to the virtual environment. Can you say more about how you'reworking on that and how to make things fun when they're online?
Barbara:Yes, that's been our main concern this year. We used to always say itabsolutely has to happen in person. And now, we just jumped into the coldwater, and surprise, it actually does work. We lower the intensity, so in anon-site sprint a day may easily be 12 hours long. So, now we make much shorterblocks. We extended, it may for example be instead of five days, five plus fivedays.
Or five plus two days, somethinglike that. There's a lot more structure. And we love a facilitation stylethat's pretty organic, but now in the remote facilitation there is morestructure, more handholding in a way. We make sure there's long breaks and thatthere's diversity of format, so you're not in a Zoom meeting for three hoursstraight, but there's switching of tasks and environments regularly.
We start the day with mindfulnessexercises, which really helps to bring people into the space. We have socialchat channels to have enough photos of pets and kids and everything. We alsomake sure I think somebody also asked in the chat we make sure that it's a veryinclusive environment and we make it clear from the beginning that everyone'sworking from home and it's totally okay that your kids and your dogs and catsare running in and out and that's fine.
We make a big point of celebratingsmall and big achievements. Even more so than we would do in an on-site sprint.And there's lots of little games and so on that you can play. But what we seeis that people get so motivated, I think a lot of you talked about it. Rajiv,you also mentioned it. It's actually very motivating having such a bigachievement in such a short amount of time.
Whereas most of us are used toworking on a project for years and we never really see the end result. So,oftentimes you also just have to get out of the way and let people do the work.So, also don't try to add too many games to it, or too much play, when peopleactually really, really enjoy this intense exchange with their colleagues andgetting deep into the topics that they really care about.
And having enough time to go intothose conversations and working on the content. So, it's a little bit of abalance of those two, giving enough structure, but then also letting go enoughso the experts can really work on their topics. And yeah, it's been working, ithas been a surprise to us, but it seems like that's a model that is going tostay.
Karen:Thanks, Barbara, and related to that, how do book sprints or any kind ofintensive workshop model adapt to the reality of the pandemic and workingremotely? Thinking specifically about somebody who may have childcareresponsibilities or other responsibilities. I think you spoke to this a littlebit, but if you could say maybe there are some examples from the virtualworkshops you've held so far? How can we think about to help people with theseresponsibilities are still able to participate?
Barbara:Yeah, it's a real challenge. On the one hand, it's easier to schedule these,because people are working from home, so in many ways it's easier to find thetime. At the same time, it is a challenge and we can't get around that. We havethe additional issue of time zones. We often have people actually travelingfrom different parts of the world. And we've had one of the virtual booksprints now with participants from California, all across the US, to centralEurope, to Finland, which is even an hour off.
So, we had to agree on time blockswhere not all of the time blocks everybody had to be there, there were alsotimes when people could work individually but have enough time as a group. So,those were crazy hours for both of the extreme ends. So, again, I think theonly thing that we can really do is make it as accommodating as possible andsaying it's fine that you have to take care of your kids and that's just goingto be a reality.
Making the breaks long enough,trying to discuss as much as possible beforehand what people's availabilitiesare and where they can already see where it's going to be challenging. But it'sso important in these sprints to have everybody together. You really need thedynamic, there's so much exchange going on. People depend so much on each otherin the writing and in the peer reviewing.
But often, we find that peopleactually get more and more committed, the more they get into it. So, in thebeginning, there may be more people being careful about how much they cancommit and how much time they can free up. And then, as they get into it, theyget so motivated by this big goal, that somehow they can make it work. But forsure, it's something, even for us as facilitators, it's not something that youcan do every week or not even every month.
It's like Anita said, it's likethe most fun thing you do in a year. So, maybe it's one of a kind experiencesand then you try to find the time for it.
Karen:Thanks Barbara, I think we're all very interested in how to try and translatethe sprints experience into our new environment. There's been a few more followup questions in the chat, and of course, anyone's invited to contribute theirideas or weigh in or brainstorm. But Rajiv is wondering about virtual sprintsthat allow for a combination of synchronous and asynchronous sessions.
So, how to keep that importanttogetherness time, yet like you said, Barbara, not having a three-hour Zoomsession, where everyone starts wilting. And then, Anita has a question aboutmanaging communication during a virtual sprint and how that's done betweensmall groups, large groups and people individually.
Barbara:Yeah, sure. So, the synchronous and asynchronous times is something that we tryto mix up. In the beginning it's very important to have synchronous times andto really get everybody on board and make sure everybody shares the same visionand works towards the same goal. And then, from then on, you can have moreasynchronous time blocks and make sure you have enough check-in times where thegroup comes back together.
But that can be half an hour orsomething like that, and then people can adjust when they work according totheir time zone. The communication, we work with I think five different toolsduring a sprint, which is not ideal but it's what's happening right now. So, weusually use Zoom for example and break out rooms. Sometimes we work with GoogleMeet, which has the advantage that you can open many rooms at the same time.
So, actually participants canswitch rooms on their own, they don't need the host to allow them to switch.So, depending on what kind of sprint it is you may want that control, or youwant to give up that control to the participants. So, you can actually also bein two rooms at the same time. We use Mattermost or Slack so there's also achat going on at the same time. Then, some kind of online writing tool wherepeople write collaboratively.
So, they can also leave commentsin the text directly. We use Miro or MURAL for the brainstorming sessions andthen we also have a record of decisions that were taken and visualized there.Did I leave anything out? I'm sure there's even more. I'm sure there's also theone or the other email that creeps in. (Laughs) But yeah, we try to make surefor example in Slack or in Mattermost, which is just an open source version ofSlack if you have different parts of the book.
So, for example, for each chapteryou have one channel, you have one Google Meet room or one room and one forexample Google Doc or some kind of writing tool. And then, make sure the linksare all somewhere, so when one person's looking for somebody else, they canchoose like, okay, I want to go and find this group. And then, we have settimes where everybody comes back together in the plenary group to discusstogether. And then there's also times of course when people can workindividually.
Karen:Thanks, that's a lot of tools to wrangle. But I can see how they each enable avery specific scene. Billy, you mentioned that your follow up andpost-production work is done virtually and mostly asynchronously. Can you tellus a little bit more about that?
Billy:Sure. So, for both of the full-scale book projects, we had three-day intensiveperiods, working from 9:00AM to 9:00PM and by the end of the day, everyone waslike wow, okay I'm definitely done. I can't do anymore. And even at the end ofthe three days, folks weren't able to do much more. And so, we set twodeadlines. One was an initial one-week period, where everyone gets todecompress, do something else for a while, come back to it.
And then, we all metsynchronously, to share notes and take feedback. And then, we had one moredate, it was two or three weeks out, again, working asynchronously to makefinal revisions and edits and suggestions that we all got together and metsynchronously to decide on which things were going to make it into the firstversion of the book.
And so, even though we had threedays in person, there was probably not the same number of hours committed foreach person, but a fair amount of work afterwards that folks had independently.We had folks for the English book I think it was folks from seven differentcampuses. So, this is a UH system-side project and these folks only two ofthem, I think, were at the same campus, they teach at different campuses.
But basically, these folks had notworked together before, and they weren't going to work together againimmediately afterwards. And so, the idea of doing things virtually or at adistance was not a big deal, it really came down to having a shared agreementon when we were going to meet and what was going to be done by then and thosesmall details obviously mean a lot.
The other thing I was going tomention is that requiring everyone to be in the room for three days solid, backto back to back that eliminated some folks who had prior obligations, or theywere teaching. They couldn't do it. And so, the traditional sprint method weused last year eliminated some folks, but moving to a virtual sprint, which weare exploring right now, actually opens the door for more folks.
While at the same time, presentssome more technical challenges, which may make it a little more difficult forcertain folks to be involved. So, as things shift, we definitely want to keepdoing sprints. But doing it virtually, the things that Barbara mentioned aresuper key. And Book Sprints have done a really good working through how thatmight work, because having the outside facilitation we found versus ourinternally done sprints it was a different sort of approach.
It's hard to describe but havingaccountability to an outside party was different than having accountabilityinternally. And this is something we should explore some more, but there aredifferent models and I'm really eager to hear some more questions and find outhow folks think this could work virtually wherever they are.
Karen:Likewise. Thanks, Billy. So, this is a great time to brainstorm, Sheryl'strying to think about if there is a way to have a sprint and still maintainsocial distancing, particularly for groups of people who don't have get on aplane. And related to whether it's virtual or in person, I am interested inhearing about the kick-off, you're getting a group of people in a room, whetherit's a Zoom room or a conference room.
What are some of the firstactivities? Does this group of people know each other? How is the trust builtamongst the group? Is another thing let's talk about.
Barbara: Ican start. Yeah, I think the kick-off is crucial, and even more so in thevirtual sprints I think than on-site because there's a little bit more time toget to know each other and read each other's body language and so on. There's alittle bit more natural trust established. For us, even more important thansome ice breaker game and introducing each other and so on, is creating thesense of shared ownership and we achieve that by giving everybody theopportunity to really speak out about what matters for them.
Like why are they part of this?And what do they try to get out of it? So, it's a lot more than saying,"You're here because you're an expert on X, Y and Z. And here is your taskand you should be writing this chapter." And then, it becomes like a topdown structure, and then people get into the mode of a 9:00 to 5:00 job. Butwhen you make sure that everybody gets to speak out and create this visiontogether and also allowing yourself to be surprised about what may come up.
The people who are actuallyworking with the students and on the ground may have actually differentchallenges than the organizer has envisioned. And there may be some incredibleinsights coming up and incredible new ideas. That gets everybody so motivated,then coming up with that shared vision, and then deciding okay, this is what weactually need to focus on. And this is what the scope of the work should be.That can all be done in the first two hours or so. And yeah, I think that forus is the most important kick-off point.
Anita: Iwould agree that that's critical to the success of the project is that peopletrust each other, and they feel like they can contribute from their area ofstrength and that they're welcome there. I made that very clear, I know thatwhen you work so closely together with people you will have professionaldisagreements. You may have personal disagreements. You may really not likesomeone.
And so, I know Billy said thatBarbara helped develop a code of conduct. But I told people, "If there isa conflict that you cannot resolve, I want to know about it." And it'sreally important that this is a place of respect for one another. So, weweren't really detailed in that, but I think setting the tone for you arewelcome here, we're happy and excited you're here. This is a place where youcan bring the things that you care about. So, I think this is a really importantway of starting any kind of group activity.
Karen:Okay. There has also been some discussion in the chat about numbers,particularly what participants are paid. So, it sounds like Anita, the stipendfor your program was $250 plus an experience really of hotel and travel andeating and that that appealed to people and turned out to be like you said, acovert professional development experience.
Thinking now about the test bankexperience and doing the sprint for an ancillary material like that is theresort of a feedback method that you have in place for receiving feedback on testbanks from those who've adopted them?
Anita:That's a really good question. I have all their contact information, there isnot a feedback mechanism right now. There is for our books, but that issomething that I do want to ask for. I've asked internally, and in a veryinformal method what's your experience been? Have you used questions from it?What have you done with them? Have you modified them? Do you feel like they areassessing well the things that you need assessed?
These are multiple-choicequestions, they should not be the only assessment in your course. I don't havecontrol over that. But are they helpful? Do they get you a step closer to beingable to adopt something that doesn't cost your students anything that you couldcustomize? So, that's a good question, I'll have to get back with you once I dosomething about that. (Laughs)
Karen:Thanks, Anita. Regina has a question in the chat. So, thinking about who'sparticipating in these sprints, how do you identify and select participants?How do you center diversity in your choice of participants, for example,intentionally asking people of color, faculty to participate, adjuncts ornon-tenure track faculty?
Anita: Ican address that. We had a list of people who had enquired about the book. Westarted there, with people that we knew might be interested. We were reallygeographically limited, because we could not pay for people to fly in. And wewere only paying up to a certain amount of money for transportation. We justfelt like it was not a good use of money to bring in somebody from really faraway that would cost three times the amount of local people that might be ableto come and might form a network that continues.
So, it was important of me toinclude people from two-year institutions. I'm at an R1, and sometimes R1s arenot the most friendly to community college instructors. But I think communitycollege instructors are committed to learning and it's critical to includetwo-year instructors, to include adjuncts, to include people who are coming outof a professional background and into higher ed.
They bring such a diversity of howto ask, what to ask, how to approach things, how to deal with people, they'renot as embedded in the academic structures as we have. As far as race, gender,honestly, it was trying to identify who's teaching this, who could come. Weinvited lots and lots of people. We had some people of color come, which I wasthrilled about. We talked a lot about names in the questions.
Are you including names thatrepresent your group of students? Are you including names in your questionsthat represent people who are underrepresented? Please include these studentsin the questions that you're writing. Is it perfect? No. Could we do more? Yes.We were lucky to get the people that we got on the notice that we had. It's abig ask to even ask people can you come for two and a half or three days?
We did this is in January, rightbefore school started. That's a crunch time. There's no really good time to dothis. (Laughs) But just getting people there I think generally was a challenge.The recruiting was a lot of work to get people there who were qualified and whowere interested and who could make the drive. Some people drove eight hours tobe there, other people drove five. Some people were local. It's a big ask intime.
I'd love suggestions on how to dothat better. I'd like to do that better, I'd love more suggestions, if you havethem.
Karen:Thanks, Anita for describing your recruitment experience. Billy, Barbara, anythoughts on ensuring a diverse group of participants?
Billy:I'll just mention that for our two book sprints, the constraints that we wereworking within, nine to nine, three days straight, on its own eliminatedparticipation from a number of folks, and that was unfortunate. And then, whenyou get down to the way stipends and travel is handled at each campus thateliminated some folks, too because their department or their unit wasn't ableto process things fast enough.
Hawai'i is a fairly diverse state.We love to see representation across all folks. But at the same time, thereality of who was actually able to make it for the in-person sprints reducedthe larger group that we might have had to a much smaller group, which remaineddiverse, but it wasn't maybe as diverse as it could have been. That said, it'ssomething that we definitely need to be intentional about.
And now that we're looking atdoing these things remotely, by all means we definitely should be doing thatand making sure that more groups are represented and it's not just the samefolks over and over again. The other thing to mention is that most of the folksthat participated were non-tenure track instructors. And so, we didn't actuallyhave as much interest from tenure-seeking faculty.
When you're putting together yourdossier, you're trying to build the case for gaining tenure, and not alldepartments and folks recognize this kind of work as being as impactful asgetting a big grant or publishing in a high-impact journal or your manuscriptor whatever that may be. And so, that on its own whittled down the folks thatmight be interested into who can actually commit the time when they have theseother things they need to spend their time on?
Karen:Thanks, Billy.
Barbara:Yeah, I think Billy, you actually did a phenomenal job with putting together agreat group of writers and quite a diverse one. I can't tell you in how manycompanies we make book sprints and we have 15 white male WASPs sitting in thegroup, happens all the time. We always advise people who organize a sprint toget of course, you are limited also by the people who are in the area ofexpertise, who can actually make it.
But a more diverse group isactually usually a better group, there's very good reasons apart from ethicalreasons why you want to go that way. We also always advise bringing in people,not just from the highest-ranking levels, but having people who work more onthe ground, so to speak. And commitment goes over achievements, we would say.So, somebody who's committed and who's maybe more at the start of their careermay be a great participant.
We even encourage having what wecall the target readers represented. So, a student or maybe somebody who justfinished a master's or is a PhD candidate or something like that. So, whoeveryou imagine who is going to be consuming what you're producing. That can bereally great having somebody at least one or two people on the team who can askall the right questions, make sure there is no jargon.
And we like to give them a lot ofpower, actually, in the room. So, yeah, diversity is a big topic, and it'sstill something to be worked on a lot, we think.
Zoe:Sorry, go ahead, Rajiv.
Rajiv:Sorry. I was only going to chime in with one other thought. It's such adelicate balance, I think, especially when so much of work in open educationmore generally and sprints certainly is no exception is undercompensated. Thereis so much invisible labor, and again, if you're talking about riskier academicwork that is less likely to be recognized when it comes to tenure and promotionand those kinds of things.
You're often with the intention ofseeking to be more equitable and be more inclusive, asking folks who are mostmarginalized to take on the most professional risk in participating in theseinitiatives. So, I think there is a number of structural things that arehelpful including having that balance of tenured folks in the room, making surethere is some effort to make sure there is recognition of the work that's beensecured, that will follow, to acknowledge that work in people's portfoliosperhaps after.
And perhaps even, I would suggest,looking at a model of compensation, if you're talking about stipends orhonoraria which is calibrated. So, for example if you are talking about adjunctfaculty, any kind of professional development is something that if they'reengaging on it, is on their time, on their dime. So, I would suggest thatcalibrating up the stipends for adjunct faculty, for early career faculty is avery sensible option.
Particularly when those who aremore privileged have the privilege of being able to forgo income fromcommercial enterprises that they are choosing not to engage in. So, a couple ofthoughts.
Karen: Thanks.Zoe, did you want to chime in?
Zoe: Iwas just going to echo and highlight the comment from Anita in the chat aboutwhere virtual events can at least address some of the structural barriers thatare faced. Those with more care duties, so the scheduling can be a littledifferent. I think it's interesting that there is some space there to make thatwork in favor of ensuring that these events are more inclusive and have morediverse representation in how they go.
We're approaching time, but I hopethat that's something that we can really move forward here and be explicit aswe are starting to think through and create new guides and create new modelsfor how to do this with a different approach. And what's necessary right nowthat we can also really explicitly embed that in there, recognize thechallenges that have already been found with the in-person events and find waysto be really deliberate about addressing them, as much as is possible.
But I really, really echo whatRajiv said there, there's a lot more to it than just scheduling. There's a lotmore to think through and a lot of intersecting structures that are creatingthese challenges.
Karen:Okay, well, as Zoe mentioned, we are quickly approaching time within seconds.Thank you everybody for a rich conversation, exploring sprints both in theworld we used to know, in person, and in our current world, virtually. I thinkthere's a lot more here we can explore, we didn't even talk very much aboutstudents involved in the process, which would be a really fun conversation.
So, if you are thinking abouthosting a virtual sprint, let people know in the chat before we end this callor in the Rebus Community or in the OTN community. And we can support oneanother as we try to figure out how to support this process virtually. So,please join me in thanking our guests, Billy, Barbara and Anita. And thankingone another, all of you for contributing your questions and reflections andthoughts in this conversation. As always, it's a pleasure, and look forward toseeing you all again next month.
Zoe:Thank you all so much.
Billy:Thanks, everyone, aloha.
Anita:Thank you.
Chat Transcript
00:13:17 Apurva Ashok: You can get in touch at contact@rebus.community to remove anything from the recording, transcript, or chat conversation.
00:14:51 Apurva Ashok: Congrats to the Open Education Network! Excited for the rollout. :)
00:15:09 Karen Lauritsen: Future topics form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScaGr1NCvVnk1C6uKiwkfYWvJcK0QDfwJIZJJV-ckmGK19Wpg/viewform
00:17:00 Billy Meinke-Lau: http://oer.hawaii.edu/september-2019-oer-sprint-releases-english-composition-and-uh-microeconomics/
00:19:20 Amy Hofer: Billy, what is your overhead on checking that quiz bank request-ers are instructors?
00:20:32 Anita Walz: https://www.booksprints.net
00:23:57 Anita Walz: https://open.bccampus.ca/2014/07/03/book-sprint/
00:25:02 Anita Walz: Fundamentals of Business (CC BY NC SA)
2016: http://hdl.handle.net/10919/70961
2018: http://hdl.handle.net/10919/84848
2018: https://otn.pressbooks.pub/fundamentalsofbusiness
00:26:04 Anita Walz: https://thatpsychprof.com/the-great-psychology-testbank-sprint
00:26:20 Rajiv Jhangiani: <3
00:26:30 Anita Walz: http://hdl.handle.net/10919/91377
00:30:54 Dawn Cannon-Rech: that is awesome!
00:31:21 Judith Sebesta: Perhaps you plan to address this, but do you think sprints can effectively be done virtually (during this pandemic)?
00:32:00 Dawn Cannon-Rech: THank you, Judith. I am wanting to address the same thing
00:32:22 Judith Sebesta: My pleasure, Dawn!
00:32:39 Anita Walz: Here is the URL to the testbank-request environment: https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/handle/10919/93404
00:32:43 Barbara Ruehling: We just recently transitioned to virtual sprints and have done some with a lot of success. They have their pros and cons, it’s not for everybody
00:33:22 Barbara Ruehling: https://www.booksprints.net/2020/05/13/we-now-do-virtual-book-sprints/
00:33:27 Anita Walz: It was REALLY fun!
00:33:41 Dawn Cannon-Rech: would love to hear more, Barbara. Especially making it fun without being face to face.
00:34:22 Barbara Ruehling: That’s a challenge!
00:34:26 Apurva Ashok: Related question from a colleague, Leigh who couldn’t be here today: How does book sprints or any kind of intensive workshop model adapt to the reality of the pandemic? I'm thinking specifically from the perspective of someone with childcare responsibilities. How can we make sure that people with care responsibilities are able to participate?
00:35:49 Judith Sebesta: Thanks, Barbara!
00:35:56 Dawn Cannon-Rech: Awesome!
00:36:19 Laura Heinz: Anita - you mentioned after an hour participants "switched" - is this to a different chapter?
00:36:30 Dawn Cannon-Rech: I think many of us are concerned with virtual sprints
00:39:28 Anita Walz: http://hdl.handle.net/10919/91377
00:39:46 Amy Hofer: Thank you all! This is a great session and I have to go - will catch up with the recording later :)
00:39:55 Apurva Ashok: Thanks Amy!
00:40:01 Zoe Wake Hyde: Thanks for joining us, Amy!
00:40:29 Rajiv Jhangiani: Our test bank control is handled by BCcampus, who kindly verify that the requester is actually a faculty member.
00:40:52 Anita Walz: Hi Laura, Yes, people worked in a small group on a single chapter, then switched to a different (preassigned) chapter with a different mix of people.
00:41:45 Rajiv Jhangiani: Interleaving topics is important for such intensive work
00:42:09 Anita Walz: (Laura, continued: There were I think 9 different 60-minute sessions focused on writing and peer review)
00:42:40 Laura Heinz: thanks!
00:43:07 Anita Walz: Laura, more info at: http://hdl.handle.net/10919/91377
00:43:12 Rajiv Jhangiani: One fun tactic was a challenge to embed one another’s names in some of the questions. For a psychology test bank this becomes especially amusing.
00:44:18 Rajiv Jhangiani: Wondering about virtual sprints that allow for a combination of synchronous and asynchronous sessions.
00:45:33 Anita Walz: How do you manage communication during a virtual sprint?
00:45:52 Anita Walz: (enable communication between individuals, small groups, large group)
00:47:17 Rajiv Jhangiani: Time zone buddies?
00:47:37 Billy Meinke-Lau: Our follow-up and post-production work was done entirely virtually, and largely asynchronously
00:49:38 Apurva Ashok: Some of the tools Barbara mentioned: Mural (https://www.mural.co/), Mattermost (https://mattermost.com/)
00:49:47 Anita Walz: That's quite an impressive mix of tools to enable communication. Thank you for sharing.
00:50:02 Barbara Ruehling: Yes time zone buddies are great! Especially if it works out with the individuals’ expertises
00:51:13 Sheryl Shook: Have there been any discussions about sprints with social distancing (a very large room, I know!), so everyone could still physically be together, be motivated by that type of synergy, be taken care of in terms of food & beverages being provided, having a dedicated space to work (not at home with distractions), people taking a walk together (again 2 meters apart), etc.? I understand this would be with authors who do not require flying to attend and the guides would be remote to protect them from flying.
00:51:22 Regina Gong: @Anita, how much did you pay as stipends to the faculty who participated in the sprint? Thanks.
00:52:32 Barbara Ruehling: @Sheryl, we did one socially distancing sprint, we were lucky that almost all participants were in the same place. One person couldn’t travel and joined remotely
00:53:04 Anita Walz: Regina - the stipend was $250 and also took really good care of them (covered hotel, travel up to a cap, food, etc.) Several would not have been able to attend had we not covered these expenses as their institution did not provide any funding here.
00:53:41 Rajiv Jhangiani: Q: I have been thinking about the ongoing improvement of the test bank as an even larger, collaborative marathon (with the adopters of the text) vs. the initial sprint to build the resource. Are others putting into place processes to receive feedback on test banks from adopters?
00:53:42 Billy Meinke-Lau: Barbara and our team helped us build a code of conduct before each sprint, nothing heavy or over bearing, but useful when working through differing ideas and opinions about the book
00:53:46 Billy Meinke-Lau: *her
00:54:26 Regina Gong: Thanks a lot Anita. I'm thinking this is one way I can use up some of my OER funds. We pay our MSU faculty $350 for reviewing an OTN book this spring semester.
00:54:53 Billy Meinke-Lau: One of the awesome, unexpected benefits was hearing how different instructors teach towards the same outcomes, using different activities or methods
00:55:29 Carol Hasegawa: Mahalo! Such a good discussion. Off to chat & ref shift. Keep safe!
00:55:44 Apurva Ashok: You too - thank you Carol!
00:57:34 Regina Gong: How do you center diversity in your choice of participants? For example, intentionally asking POC faculty to participate? Adjuncts or non-tenure track faculty?
01:03:32 Anita Walz: Agree: Having a more diverse group *may* be easier if events are online.
01:05:05 Billy Meinke-Lau: There is also the option of sending your sprinted book or ancillary out for review by indigenous groups or other EID-focused units at your institution.
01:06:09 Sheryl Shook: If there is no diverse representation in the writers, it would be important to allocate funds to bring a person of color in, someone who could bring the experience and intellectual foundation, to meet the writers where they are and to directly address anti-racism and diversity and how to weave that into the creation of resources.
01:07:14 Ali Versluis (she/her): Gotta run but this has been awesome! Thanks all. You’re all shining stars in the open education universe!
01:08:30 Billy Meinke-Lau: I would hesitate to recommend anyone plan a sprint using entirely volunteer effort. So much OER work is done off the sides of folx desks, they should be compensated for their work.
01:09:02 Rajiv Jhangiani: +1 Billy
01:09:14 Dawn Cannon-Rech: Awesome conversation. Thank you all!!
01:09:15 Anita Walz: +1 Billy here too!
01:09:18 Denise Cote: Thank you. This was great.
01:09:25 Regina Gong: Thanks everyone . Take care
01:09:29 Anita Walz: One of our attendees came in via Ipad/Duo Robot.. I was glad that we had that option.
01:09:29 Josie Gray (she/her): Thank you everyone!
01:09:30 Regina Beard: thanks--
01:09:31 Jonathan Poritz: thank you very much!
01:09:35 Arianna Cheveldave (BCcampus): Thank you!
01:09:36 Scott T.: Thank you all
01:09:39 Bryan McGeary: Thank you!
01:09:39 Apurva Ashok: Thank you everyone. Take care.
01:09:39 Janet Swatscheno: Thanks to all!
01:09:39 Rajiv Jhangiani: Thank you all! Stay safe.
01:09:41 Luria Namba: Thank you!
01:09:41 Anita Walz: Thanks so much!
01:09:43 Barb Thees (she/her): Thanks for joining us, everyone!
01:09:43 Mary Jo Orzech: Great info… thank you all !
Thanks to Mei Lin for preparing the audio transcript and video captions!
Have comments or feedback about these transcripts? Let us know in the Rebus Community platform.
